The Great Debate UK

from Africa News blog:

Is Africa drought a chance to enact new UK policy?

New ways of managing aid are being debated in Britain as global concerns mount over a hunger crisis devastating the drought-affected Horn of Africa.

Randolph Kent, director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College in London, says the crisis provides a perfect opportunity for the British government to test its recent promise to reform how it responds to humanitarian emergencies.

The severe drought, caused by the driest weather since 1995 in East Africa, has affected an estimated 10 million people and is expected to continue to worsen into early 2012, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

While Kent acknowledges the importance of a $145 million (90.2 million pound) injection of humanitarian aid from the British government, he says the money will not help prevent the next Horn of Africa drought and that the government needs to become more "anticipatory".

"This disaster has to teach us that the ways we've approached such crises in the past is not good enough," Kent said in a statement. "If we don't want to be consistently on a back foot when disasters happen, then we need evidence of strategic planning taking place at an international and regional level now."

The British government's Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), released in June, recognises that as a result of the increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters - a trend expected to grow with climate change and population growth - preparedness must be a key goal.

Following the aid money with Linda Polman

As political leaders wrangle over how best to deal with warring factions in hot spots around the world, enclaves of humanitarian aid workers grapple with how best to help innocent victims of violence.

Author and journalist Linda Polman proposes in “War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times” that since the end of the Cold War, there is much more at stake than the simple distribution of billions of dollars in aid money each year to fix crisis situations. Aid agencies relegated in the past to the peripheries of war zones and refugee camps now play a very different role.

An estimated 37,000 international non-governmental organisations follow the flow of aid money and compete with each other for billions of dollars, Polman writes, reporting that Organisation of Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) donor countries contribute $120 billion (84 billion pounds) a year for developmental cooperation and an estimated $11.2 billion for emergency humanitarian relief. Some $6 billion a year is channeled into humanitarian aid out of the combined tax revenues of the world’s richest countries, she says.

Warring factions use money and supplies intended for humanitarian purposes for their own gain.

“In some wars aid capital is decisive,” Polman writes. “Under certain circumstances trading in aid supplies may be the most important economic activity around, and money and goods from NGOs are weapons in military strategies, including those of our own armies.”

Between 2001 and 2008, more than 60 governments allocated more than $15 billion to aid for Afghanistan but “where the money ended up is unclear. Neither the donors nor their INGOs dare to visit the projects they finance. The result is an unfathomable channelling of aid billions that is highly susceptible to fraud.”

“The majority of western INGOs never venture outside Kabul,” says Polman. “Instead they subcontract local and other international NGOs to implement their projects, who in turn engage further subcontractors.”

from Tales from the Trail:

Helping Haiti: the nightmare scenario

About the only thing that has gone right in the Haitian earthquake is the weather.

The dry, warm nights have been kind to the multitudes of homeless, injured and terrified Haitians sleeping out in streets, parks and pavements all over the nation. Not to mention the ever-growing legion of foreign rescuers, aid-workers and journalists who -- like the locals -- fear sleeping indoors because of still-rumbling aftershocks.

Apart from that, it has been a sheer nightmare for millions of Haitians, and for aid-groups wanting to help them, after the worst disaster on record in the Western hemisphere's poorest nation. No one knows the death-toll, and many bodies still lie untouched in the street, but clearly thousands, or tens of thousands, have perished. The Red Cross here estimates 45-50,000 dead, and 3 million injured and homeless.

It could not have happened to a more vulnerable nation.

Battered by storms in recent years, and still suffering from a long history of political turmoil, Haiti has struggled in the past to cope with far lesser disasters. Its government has precious few resources and the collapsed roof of the white presidential palace in downtown Port-au-Prince symbolizes its impotence. And of course many officials and policemen are too busy hunting for friends and relatives of their own, and picking through the rubble of their own homes, to turn their attention to any sort of nationwide rescue effort.

Local aid groups are decimated too. Many organizations -- including the United Nations, which has 9,000 peacekeepers here -- have suffered damage to their buildings and lost personnel, equipment and supplies. That makes it far harder for the many foreign groups piling into Haiti with lots of enthusiasm to help, but no one to work with.

U.N. staff look as stunned as the Haitians. I spoke to a group of Chilean soldiers who arrived for their tour of duty just a few days before the earthquake struck. "How unlucky was that?" one of them said, sitting on a tractor in front of a mound of rocks he was supposed to move.