Kashmiri earthquake survivor carries tin sheet in the snow in devastated village of Pieer Chanasi. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini
Jack Campbell, from ActionAid's Emergencies and Conflict team, says the new U.N. "cluster" approach to disasters isn't working, if experience after October's Kashmir quake is anything to go by.Imagine disaster strikes in a corner of France. Casualties are high, chaos is total. An international relief effort rolls in, and proceeds to carry out all meetings and briefings in English, with not a French translator in sight. It just wouldn't happen.
But in Pakistan, ActionAid found that the United Nations failed to provide Urdu translators in coordination meetings in the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake.
This was just one of the shortcomings of the U.N.'s new "cluster" approach to humanitarian relief coordination - piloted in Pakistan - that, in many ways, ignored or excluded local organisations and groups responding to the crisis.
Clustering was first mooted in late 2004. It was triggered by the failures of the international response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, and the U.N. launched a "Humanitarian Response Review" to look at improving its record.
The cluster approach is an attempt to increase international readiness to respond to major disasters in a coordinated way.
It seeks to plug the gaps that currently emerge time after time when an emergency happens - in shelter, or water and sanitation - by prior identification of lead agencies to coordinate specific clusters of work around key issues.
Yet despite the good intentions, ActionAid found that the Pakistan pilot was shambolic. The numbers of clusters spiralled out of control and became impossible to track for many organisations busy working on the relief effort. Attendance was hit-and-miss, with no overall strategy to maximise local involvement.
Even more fundamental was the inherent bias of the system towards English speaking foreign relief workers. Consequently, local knowledge and views often went unnoticed, and local government structures were by-passed.
When a local Kashmiri non-governmental organisation, tried to influence the cluster responsible for shelter, the Kashmiri representative drew a blank,
"We warned that tents would not stand up to the winter snowfall but the shelter cluster lead did not take this into consideration, with the result that the tents collapsed after the first snowfall. If the winter had not been so mild, there could have been disastrous consequences," he said.
It is important to recognise that Kashmir was a pilot, and when the earthquake hit, the approach had not been fully developed at a global level.
But the Kashmir experience does not bode well for the U.N. as it seeks to finalise its guidelines on how to roll out clustering in Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Liberia and Somalia.
In the past few years, disasters on a scale rarely witnessed before have shone an unforgiving light on the inability of the humanitarian community to work with local organisations in times of emergency.
It is vital that the U.N. thinks through how clusters can include local organisations and leave behind stronger local democratic structures. Otherwise next time, the winter may not be so mild, and ignoring local expertise and learning needs on the ground, will inevitably cost lives.
Click here to download a copy of ActionAid's report: "The Evolving U.N. Cluster Approach in the Pakistan Earthquake: An NGO Perspective"
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