Humanitarian Effectiveness (2)

My previous post on this topic prompted a slight twitter buzz, with Patricia McIlreavy astutely pointing out that the aid ‘oligarchy’ isn’t just the big INGOs, but donors and the UN as well.  Dead right on that one.  They all employ wield effectiveness in an exercise of power.

Effectiveness seems to be part of a powerplay within the oligarchy as well. By way of broad generalization, the question of effectiveness functions as a spotlight, used by people in desk chairs to examine the work of people with mud on their boots.  Sounds good, right?  What about the reverse?  When can Mud-on-Boots cast the same light on the work of Deskchair? More importantly, why doesn’t the functioning of the aid system drive Deskchairs to cast the same scrutiny on the mountain of Deskchair work in the system?

It should. The aid system comprises immense resources and people – energy and ‘action’ – at the level above the field project.  Having just sat through one, how do we assess the effectiveness of a conference on effectiveness? Better yet, what has been the collective effectiveness of years of debates, research, publications, workshops, tools, guidelines and previous conferences on effectiveness?  In other words, why don’t those of us thinking about effectiveness shine the light on our own work?

At great effort and cost, the aid system produces a spectacular amount of material designed to improve the effectiveness of aid. How does that translate into lives saved, or suffering alleviated? Might it even work as an impediment? I remember a medical coordinator in MSF telling me that in the span of six months in South Sudan she received over 600 recommendations from headquarters.  No doubt lots of good advice, but what is the combined impact on stressed out and under-resourced field teams? Trying to regulate or rationalize this onslaught of advice leads to discord at HQ, with staff feeling disenfranchised from the operational mission. Put differently, each and every one of those 600+ recommendations represented the aspiration and drive of somebody at HQ seeking their ‘fix’ of field involvement, their dose of ‘making a difference’.  That’s not speculation. That was my fix too.

[Spoiler alert. This post should end right here. The next bit is a real downer. I blame the start of a cold, wet final weekend to England’s so-called summer.]

Shining the spotlight of effectiveness on this work can be disconcerting. Much of my considerable HQ product seems rather obviously designed to have allowed me to be part of the crisis response based on a blind faith in its actual impact.  This is a faith requiring permanent contortion, to avoid noticing the ten degrees of removal between my efforts in London and saving a life in the field.

It looks like this:

Start with a new / improved [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc].

  1. Did overworked field teams even read it?
  2. If they read it, did it change practice?
  3. If it changed practice, was it in a positive direction? Was the new thing better than the old thing? No shortage of examples where idealized efforts at improvement collided with reality on the ground.
  4. If it changed in a positive direction, by how much? In other words, did the impact actually save lives and alleviate suffering more effectively? Remember, much of aid work is pretty damned good from a technical perspective – improvement runs into the law of diminishing returns.
  5. If it had a positive impact, did that outweigh the cost/effort/resources that went into producing the improvement? How many meetings and emails!
  6. If it had a positive impact, did it last? Or: did it calcify into a tick-box exercise? Or: did new teams = old ways?

That, believe it or not, is only the first level of analysis.  If it stopped there, the verdict on effectiveness might often come out OK.  The key here is # 5. Here is what the process does not look like: a couple of smart Deskchairs put their heads together, come up with a new [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc], show it to their boss, make a few changes and ship it out to the field.

It looks more like this: a couple of smart Deskchairs put their heads together, come up with a new [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc] dealing with X, which then unleashes a frenzy of effort to take the good thing and make it very good.  Within the various branches of the organization, there will be ten, maybe twenty or maybe a hundred who have made a heavy investment in X.  Each will need to comment on the new thing. Many comments will replicate each other, others will contradict. Skirmishes will ensue – “communities” vs. “people” in paragraph 7, roll out in August (rain season!) vs November (too late!!!!), and so many more. Complaints will move up the food chain – Why weren’t we involved sooner? You need our approval! Meetings will be held and hair will turn gray. The thing will launch. Now start at Step 1.

And on it goes.  I have been involved in many of these processes. Even the ones avoiding the quicksand of organizational politics involved multiple, duplicative commitments of effort.  More to the point, they involved faith that improvements – objectives phrased more clearly, the addition of a resource annex, newer research included – actually mattered in some way. How could they matter? How could a rephrased set of objectives save lives and alleviate suffering? Faith is beautiful that way.  Proof is not required. A collective investment in the possibility that what we do matters.  The spotlight of effectiveness is unwanted here.  And so is it rarely shined.

7 thoughts on “Humanitarian Effectiveness (2)”

  1. “I remember a medical coordinator in MSF telling me that in the span of six months in South Sudan she received over 600 recommendations from headquarters.”

    I am stunned. More than 3 directives a day. Nonsense.

    Until I read this, I thought NGO HQs were servant leaders. South Sudan has a problem or needs resources; HQ solves the problem and allocates scarce resources. HQ also is a cheerleader (err … morale booster), raises money/gets resources and, maybe, helps teams communicate with each other so that the teams feel part of an important whole and there’s an off chance that a solution applicable to South Sudan might have an application NW Myanmar. Other than that, let the highly-trained teams get on with their mission.

    >3 directives/day means HQ is bloated and over-staffed.

    1. Thanks for the comment. Quite right. Two things I would say here. One is that some of the 600+ directives are quite small and technical, so an adviser from HQ might visit the field and send a report with 25 or so recommendations, but only ten will require much time.

      Second, the blog is meant to examine the work of HQ in terms of supporting the field. I actually think much of the effort at HQ does deliver value to the organization — raising funds, reviewing technology or ‘bureaucratic’ exercises like annual plans. What I was trying to get at are the underlying drivers of HQ work, in this case the need for staff to feel involved with field support and the lack of scrutiny as to its effectiveness.

      BTW, here’s another take on the ridiculous proliferation of tools: gu.com/p/4cckf/stw

  2. From dim memory NRC moved their headquarters from Kampala to Gulu for their work in northern Uganda. Evaluations found it made them much more effective but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it.

    More generally, I’ve always thought that agencies need to devolve much more power and responsibility to field staff – allowing them to be flexible and adaptable. That means getting away from donor logframes etc so MSF with it’s core and flexible funding should be well placed to do it.

    Part of the HQ bloat is that older, more experienced aid workers have their fill of war zones. So part of the challenge is to find ways to harness experience and learning through supportive mentoring rather than bombarding field staff with toolkits and guidelines. I like the idea of mentors and helpdesks – so rather than here’s a set of tools – you’d have someone you could email to say can you help with this proposal or give me some advice about how to approach this meeting. Again from dim memory someone (Start?) is already doing some of this.

    1. Thx for the comments Paul. It would be interesting to study the effects of moving HQ in mission contexts out of capital cities to project locations close to the action. I recall MSF struggling with this in some places, because of the need for heavyweight decision-makers in the capital for representation/lobbying purposes. I’m thinking of our heads of mission out in Darfur, while a representational head sat in Khartoum, which did not seem effective. Goma vs Kinshasa?

      As for help desks, what is the experience? Certainly, they can work better than tools, but I saw two trends warranting attention. First, and I was personally part of this, is that our HQ support on advocacy/witnessing in MSF-Holland soon morphed into an expectation that we would be contacted/involved and then a seeming expectation that we had a say over it (read: power struggle and ‘turf’ issues). Second, aren’t help desk and HQ support teams often clogged up with questions that people get ‘lazy’ about? How many times did I simply send an email rather than look for myself in the help guide, protocol and tool? Lastly, I think that the change in comms technology has led to much decision-making and field thinking migrating to capitals and HQs, bloating them with the need to be able to process it all, and removing the habit of decision-making in the field. How do we avoid ‘experts’ in HQ running field missions full of inexperienced staff in the field — because you’re right about people getting older and moving to more settled lives?

    2. “Part of the HQ bloat is that older, more experienced aid workers have their fill of war zones. So part of the challenge is to find ways to harness experience and learning through supportive mentoring rather than bombarding field staff with toolkits and guidelines.”

      As a fairly young humanitarian aid worker in CAR, I just want to say your suggestions for mentoring and ‘help desks’– which I interpret as experienced people whom you can call/email to work out knotty problems and bounce ideas off– would be (and, at times when I had access to an experienced someone, were) a whole lot more helpful then just pages and pages of written work evaluating former projects in other contexts. I have a background in research & love a good study project, but in the time it takes to review & evaluate literature in an emergency, you are much too late.

      If the good (read: experienced in multiple complex emergencies) staff don’t want to come to places like rural CAR, or the organizations don’t want to commit skilled people & the resources they demand to go to these places, than HQ better come up with better means to support the staff who are there: national and younger international staff figuring out aid operations in extremely difficult circumstances.

      NRC just released a report on aid effectiveness in CAR [http://www.nrc.no/?did=9205477]. A major conclusion which won’t surprise folks reading this post: two major barriers to aid effectiveness are simple logistical limits to physically reaching people & difficulty fully staffing posts with quality, experienced people. These are not challenges that require new tools and HQ study. Instead they require long-term HQ commitment to the work on the ground.

  3. Very good post about effectiveness, Marc. On the issue of the relationship between HQ and the field, something I understood years ago is that there is often (if not always) at least one HQ within the field. The example Paul mentions about Uganda reminds me the experience of establishing Abéché as humanitarian hub in Chad. N’Djamena finally regained control of the humanitarian operations despite what many “field people” thought.

    The managerial culture is so ingrained in how we think and work that we end up replicating “HQ-field dynamics” between country offices and field offices, not to mention between them and the euphemistically called “local counterparts”. My experience is that HQs (London, Geneva, NY, etc.) are not always the more distant from those with mud on their boots. No matter how far you travel to the field, you will always find a guy behind a desk saying “I don’t care, that’s the procedure”.

    1. Thx Fernando. Interesting your experience about N’Djamena and Abeche. Maybe that is part of the same process noted by Paul, above, that experienced staff want to live in the bigger, more settled places, whether it is a capital city like N’Djamena or an HQ city like London? Or what I mentioned, that states make it very hard to manage a program without constant negotiation at the capital level, and that requires the head of mission.

      Agree that sometimes, London or NY can be closer than places in the field because it is easier to create links. Isn’t that the experience of some organizations that have regional offices — that they needed HQ to help coordinate between the regions, so the regions created another layer?

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