One of America’s largest non-profit relief organizations is warning
that the practice of shoveling mountains of money at major humanitarian
emergencies like Syria is being overwhelmed by the scale of disasters
the world faces, and that rich countries need to try something
drastically new—starting with less reliance on bureaucracy-bound United
Nations relief agencies.
“Our humanitarian communities are maxed out,” warns Andrea Koppel,
vice-president of global engagement and strategy for Mercy Corps, a
Portland, Oregon-based disaster relief agency that operates in more than
40 countries, often alongside such agencies as UNICEF and the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees. “There has to be recognition from all donor
governments that the status quo is not working. We are using
humanitarian assistance as a band aid.”
Her warning came two days after the Obama Administration announced it
would sent $419 million more in aid for Syria, which has been engulfed
in civil war for nearly five years.
“We are really at a crossroads with the traditional aid system,”
Koppel added. The relatively small group of countries that put up the
bulk of relief funding “are now waking up to the fact that the status
quo is not cutting it.”
Instead, Mercy Corps is calling for a “new normal” in international
disaster relief that bypasses U.N. agencies as necessary, especially as
international relief coordinators, and puts more authority in the hands
of private relief agencies.
“The existing humanitarian system is too centralized, top down and
U.N. focused,” Mercy says in a 58-page analysis that takes stock of the
current global crisis environment. “In fragile states in particular, the
existing system is unsustainable—both overstretched and underfunded.”
“We need a system that is more cost-effective, less bureaucratic and
more nimble if the challenges of the new normal are to be met.”
If not, the mega-disasters that now are sending refugees across Europe’s borders are only likely to multiply and grow.
Mercy Corps’ analysis underlines a grim reality that wealthier
nations acknowledge but have not fully confronted. Some of the world’s
worst humanitarian disasters, such as civil wars, now last for years if
not decades, often involve local governments as aggressors or passive
actors—which adds to U.N. ineffectiveness--are made worse by other
natural disasters like drought, and collectively involve human
displacement on a scale not seen since World War II.
They also are often centered in some of the world’s poorest
countries, where “fragile state” status is increasingly endemic,
internal and external refugee movements are massive, and the black hole
of under-funding looms largest.
The under-funding and over-stretching are getting harder and harder
to ignore. Last week’s State Department announcement of $419 million in
aid for Syria and surrounding countries came only three months after a
previous $360 million aid bump—and brought the U.S. total to some $1.6
billion just in fiscal 2016.
All told, the U.S. has given more than $4.5 billion in relief to
Syria and surrounding countries since the start of the Assad onslaught
against Syrian rebels began in late 2010, making the U.S. far and away
the largest single aid donor to the Syrian emergency.
Yet despite that largesse, the overall $8.4 billion United Nations
appeal for the regional crisis this year—the U.N. remains the overall
aid coordinator—is only 40 percent funded. As millions of refugees have
spilled over into neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq—and now
Europe itself—Koppel noted “the human needs have been growing
exponentially. There are not enough dollars to meet them.”
“We have never had to operate on so many fronts before,” said a
senior official of an international relief organization, who requested
anonymity. “The disasters are more complex, more numerous, and place
extreme stress on human resources.” And “they are definitely not going
to get better.”
The problem is not only the magnitude of challenges in Syria, the
surrounding Middle East, and long-festering disasters like the
Democratic Republic of Congo, , the Mercy report says. The difficult
also lies with the origins of “international aid architecture” in the
development of the U.N. itself.
The analysis cites among other things a numbing array of U.N.
bureaucratic institutions—“the humanitarian coordinator system, the
Inter-Agency Standing Committee, interagency needs assessments, the
consolidated appeals process”-- that were created in 1991 and have only
updated slightly since. These were “not designed for the challenges of
the modern 21
st-Century world,” the report says. Subsequent U.N. attempts to jerry-rig improvements “remain unrealized.”
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The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old
institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater
reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil
society groups and different levels of government. This, the report
says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to
support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster
and more easily with local communities when national governments are
virtually non-existent.
It would also help move relief efforts more quickly toward blending
longer-term—and cheaper—solutions with short term aid that can merely
leave refugees as a dependent community in place, and reduce some of
the underlying accelerators of violence, or at least make it easier for
refugees to return when violence or other calamities abate.
Not surprisingly, Mercy’s argument is based on some of its own
achievements—which the relief organization, founded in 1979, also feels
deserve more attention.
In Syria, for example, Mercy, along with other private-sector
organizations, has for several years been doing what U.N. agencies were
unable to do—operate in areas outside Assad government control to bring
food, medical supplies and emergency relief to millions of Syrians
under assault by their Russian-backed government.
The decision to go where the vast majority of Syrians were suffering
first involved creation of a separate relief organization on Syria’s
borders while Mercy still operated another relief arm under Assad
supervision, then a decision to break with the Assad government
entirely. Funding continued to come from USAID, British government
agencies and the European Commission.
With the cooperation of thousands of Syrian volunteers, community
organizations and aid workers Mercy is still bringing those supplies
across neighboring borders to some 500,000 Syrians per month, in one of
the most dangerous civil war zones in the world, including besieged
communities under ferocious assault by Assad with chlorine bombs and
other weapons of mass devastation.
That situation has been further compounded by the aggressive savagery
of the Islamic Front, which has pushed even more Syrians and
neighboring Iraqis into flight. There, the risks are so great, Koppel
says, that “we made a decision a year or two ago not to operate in areas
where the Islamic State is also operating.”
U.N. agencies, on the other hand, were largely constrained for years by their ties with the Assad regime and were
largely blocked
from sending aid to areas not under Assad’s control, even after a 2014
U.N. Security Council resolution—nearly four years after the ugly
conflict began—finally allowed the U.N. to start up similar cross-border
relief.
“When it came to the massive needs in the rest of the country,” says a
senior official with an international relief agency, “ the
international side”—the U.N.—“was completely paralyzed.”
In the vacuum, however, non-government organizations such as Mercy
learned that they too could provide relief services at U.N.-scale.
The question is whether major donor nations will agree.
For its part, the U.S. government says it is not tilting one way or
the other, even though more than half of its latest $419 million
infusion of Syria aid--$236.5 million—goes to unspecified NGOs, with the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees getting less than a third
of that amount.
A senior State Department official told Fox News that the disparity
had more to do with State Department funding cycles than with a tilt
toward non-government relief agencies.
“That’s why we have so many different organizations to support,” the official said. “they each have different strengths.”
The issue of how best to rebuild the world humanitarian order will get a U.N.-sponsored look in May 2016, at a first-ever
World Humanitarian Summit slated to take place in Istanbul.
In customary U.N. fashion, a year-long series of regional U.N.
summit meetings on the humanitarian topic began in June 2014 and ground
on through July 2015. They will be followed by an Internet-based
“Global Consultation” in Geneva in October.
One thing the U.N. has already made clear, however, is that the
“fundamental principles” enshrined in its 1991 reworking of the ungainly
international relief system, will “guide our work,” even as the U.N.
explores “how to create a more global, inclusive and effective
humanitarian system.”