Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Evaluation

Action Against Hunger (ACF-USA) has successfully worked through partnerships in responding to recent large-scale emergencies in Kenya and Pakistan. In addition to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the humanitarian response, working in partnership facilitated a harmonised approach, with agreed programmatic responses, common needs assessments and tailored response analyses. Evaluations have shown that this approach improved coordination and information-sharing among agencies, catalysed debates around different approaches and how to harmonise them and enabled the exchange of technical expertise and lessons learned, not only among partnership members but across the wider humanitarian community. The partnership approach also enabled individual partners to…

In recent decades the drylands of the Horn of Africa have become one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world. Drought in particular affects more people, more frequently than any other disaster. Drought periods were not always so disastrous but, combined with the region’s underlying economic, social and environmental vulnerability, the impacts upon dryland inhabitants are extreme. Despite calls for greater investment in preparedness, early response and long-term resiliencebuilding, the 2011 drought crisis in the region illustrates how this has not yet been translated into reality. It is an intuitive belief that investment in early response and resilience-building in…

Core to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s approach to assistance is sending international staff into foreign contexts to work with, and usually direct, locally recruited national staff. Outsiders bring experience, leadership and technical skills, and are in a better position to ‘witness’ intolerable situations and speak out about them. International staff are also better able to resist local pressures for resource diversion, giving MSF greater confidence that donor money is being spent appropriately. For many within and outside MSF, this model is the only responsible option because the compromises assumed to be inherent in a remotely managed programme are unacceptable. MSF-Operational…

Over the last decade, there has been an increased focus on corruption in emergency assistance. In recent studies, food aid has been identified as one of the most vulnerable sectors, along with cash programming and post-disaster reconstruction.[1] In the 2011 drought response in Kenya, Transparency International Kenya (TI Kenya) launched a study examining the integrity, transparency and accountability of food assistance.[2] The main question explored was the extent to which different types of food assistance instruments (in-kind aid, cash and vouchers) posed different risks, and the standards different assistance actors applied to ensure the integrity of these mechanisms, including the…

This article summarises the findings of a recent monitoring report on an emergency cash-based intervention in South Central Somalia. In what is thought to be the largest cash programme to be implemented by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 14 NGOs (six international and eight local partners) distributed $50.6 million-worth of cash and commodity vouchers to 136,673 households affected by the famine of 2011. Approximately half the beneficiaries were located in parts of the country controlled by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and half were in areas controlled by the Islamist group Al Shabaab (AS). The monitoring exercise was undertaken by the Somalia…

The challenges of responding to the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 were huge and varied, prompting agencies to think and act creatively. Christian Aid’s partners distributed cash to people affected by the disaster two weeks after the earthquake struck. Some Christian Aid partners chose to respond with cash, rather than with goods in-kind, as they recognised the diverse needs of those affected, the flexibility of cash to meet those needs, the importance of preserving people’s dignity by transferring choice to them and the need to support local markets. The cash response Initial assessments highlighted the enormous range of…

This article reports on the key conclusions and outcomes of the Cash and Risk conference held in Copenhagen in December 2011. The aim of the conference was to take stock of the rapidly changing debate around cash-based responses in emergencies, address outstanding questions and further the discussion on areas of controversy.[1] As the largest gathering of policy and practice experts on cash transfer programming to date it was an important meeting, bringing together individuals from a broad range of perspectives, from practitioners to donors and independent researchers. The state of cash transfer programming While global statistics are not available on…

The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was the most destructive ever to hit the island. Over 215,000 people were killed and more than 1.3 million displaced from their homes. With the destruction of the seaport, the immediate focus of the international aid response was the Toussaint Louverture International Airport (MTPP) in the centre of the capital, Port au Prince. The world responded immediately with a massive airlift. US Air Force Special Tactics Team members from the 1st Special Operations Wing re-established tower control services a mere 18 minutes after arriving at the airport, and immediately began receiving humanitarian…

The scale and scope of the humanitarian crisis in South Central Somalia challenges the humanitarian system’s capacity to deliver assistance. More than two decades of conflict, combined with cyclical, slow- and fast-onset disasters, have displaced millions of Somalis. In the absence of a central government, the few basic services available are mostly provided by humanitarian aid organisations (mainly through local staff and partners) and food crises are recurrent. Many of the lessons from this crisis can also be applied to other complex emergencies where the humanitarian response capacity has been overstretched, and where security and access constraints make it difficult…

Why is the response to drought almost always too little too late? Evaluations find the same failures and make the same recommendations again and again, and the response to the Horn crisis is no exception. The draft Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) evaluation classified it as ‘a qualified success’, and highlights the general failure of preventive action from late 2010. Much the same was said in evaluations from the Sahel in 2005 and 2010, and in Kenya in 2005/6 and 2008/9. Whilst humanitarian response is improving in many areas, drought is not one of them. Paradoxically, we are better at responding…