* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Last year Medecins Sans Frontieres challenged the humanitarian sector with the question: where is everybody? Thereby raising a red flag that too many international humanitarian organisations are clustered in capitals and not out and about where they are needed the most.
This year, in the build up to the World Humanitarian Summit, an answer is emerging, and the answer is: everywhere. It is just that they are not white doctors, but national humanitarian organisations, and in these organisations rests the best hope for responding to current and future crises.
The compelling case for a new focus on national organisations is based on recent experience in responding to crises ranging from war in the Middle East to floods in Southern Africa. National humanitarian organisations are reaching communities that international ones cannot: either because these countries are too dangerous, or because disasters are too small and localised to generate international support.
These related issues of access and local presence are crucial considerations when planning for future humanitarian responses. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Mali – the list goes on, present the world with some of its greatest humanitarian challenges located in some of the world’s most inaccessible environments. None of these conflicts are close to resolution and none of them welcoming to western based humanitarian aid organisations. An emphasis on local organisations may be the only option for reaching people in need.
Likewise, as climate change is expected to trigger more frequent droughts and floods, it will be increasingly hard to mobilise international support each time, especially for the small ones, which cumulatively, affect and impoverish the greatest number of people. So again, the burden of response must fall on national capacity.
There are however well known limitations to over reliance on national humanitarian action. In conflict situations it is hard for national organisations to be accepted by both sides. A Kiev based organisation for example may not be trusted in east Donetsk. In epidemics, national governments and local organisations may well lack technical skills and essential equipment, as we have seen in West Africa. Major, natural disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Nepal, will disrupt and overwhelm national capacity. In all these situations the case for international support is clear.
The point though is not that investing in national humanitarian action should be the only strategy to prepare for future crises, but rather that it should be the main thrust of any strategy, as it has the best chance of reaching the most people in need in the most sustainable ways.
Take for example Syria. Security constraints and government restrictions place huge limitations on international organisations, so the Syrian Arab Red Crescent has scaled up to deliver the majority of aid flowing into the country, paying the high price of seeing 60 of its volunteers killed in the process. In Afghanistan, the Afghan Red Crescent clinics have continued to function across the country while other agencies have had to recede into safer havens. As tensions rise across the northern borders of Kenya, it is often only Kenya Red Cross that is allowed in to provide assistance to displaced and affected communities. Conversely, the absence of strong national partners in for example South Sudan or Yemen, has seriously constrained access to people in need.
DFID has taken one step in the direction of recognising this though a £20 million investment into national humanitarian leadership training. The flaw in this otherwise good investment is that these new national humanitarian leaders currently have nowhere to go but international humanitarian organisations. So we are not really seeing a transition to local ownership and responsibility.
To make matters worse, aid money is often very debilitating to national ownership. Local organisations are expected to be accountable to people from distant countries, to comply with a foreign HQ’s technical standards, to operate and report in foreign languages and to ignore the varied demands of local communities and focus on whatever thematic direction has been determined by foreign donors.
This builds dependency, or a deliberate “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude, but it doesn’t build independent institutions. What evidence there is suggests that institutions are built not through charity or projects but through investment - in systems, leadership and domestic financing, and that these institutions often have to resist the good will of foreign partners in order to go their own way and stand on their own two feet.
The new government in the UK should consider how to reconcile this with the current emphasis on funding multilateral, international organisations. A status quo of well-funded, international humanitarian organisations and weak, dependent national humanitarian organisations will not prepare us for the crises of the future.
