Global vs local, can you have your cake and eat it?

According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance report (2015), UN appeals last year were underfunded by 7.5 billion -about a third of what was requested. This was despite more money being spent on humanitarian appeals than ever before.The year before they were a third underfunded as well.

No matter how big the cake gets (and I’ve written about growing it, here and here), it seems like there is never enough. Some of this is due to unprecedented levels of demand in places like Syria. However the shortfall is sharpening discussions about if the money is being spent in the right way by the right kind of organization.

Putting local people and organizations in charge of their own humanitarian response is non-negotiable – the challenge is how to get there.

Going back to the Asian Tsunami in 2004, there have been strong calls to “localise” aid. To give more to local organizations that are closest to action, that have the lowest operating costs and the local knowledge and relationships needed to run good programmes.

Since that time momentum has grown and in the run up the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 there is a strong movement in the sector to promote localisation. This is an idea whose time has come. On a political and aspirational level it makes perfect sense that disaster affected countries should build their own capacity, funding and systems to handle their own disasters. In my work on humanitarian financing with the UN, other NGOs and various think tanks there are growing calls to make the system work better for front line actors, particularly local NGOs.

Putting local people and organizations in charge of their own humanitarian response is non-negotiable – the challenge is how to get there.  

For some this is becoming a discussion about which is more desirable for the future, local or international NGOs?

As if they are in competition and the success of one will be at the expense of the other.  When financing is tight, as it is now, discussion can be polarised as organisations worry about funding for their humanitarian programmes.

However, from the perspective of performance on the ground, things are more nuanced. During nearly 20 years in the sector, I have had the privilege of working in a wide variety of front line humanitarian operations in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe. I have seen that you need a diverse range of civil society organizations and NGOs to work together to achieve the best possible results for disaster affected populations.

Each operation I have been involved in has required a different range of skills and organisational capabilities. For example, when responding to an Earthquake in India in 2001, rapid scale up of staffing, spending and supplies were the big challenges.

In conflict situations, the need to maintain impartiality, manage relations with difficult stakeholders and secure funding through complicated financial grant mechanisms were more critical.  When managing these challenges, it was really valuable to combine local relationships and capacity with global experience and support.  This was challenging within a single organisation like World Vision, but partnering between different types of organisations is the future. 

In chronic or predictable humanitarian situations local organisations should be supported to take a leading role. However, in contested settings or where there are sudden large peaks in demand (e.g., after a major Earthquake or Tsunami) international organisations may have a critical role to play supporting work at the national level.

We should work together to strengthen an ecosystem of different types of NGOs that can pool their strengths to adapt to a wide range of challenging contexts.  This will involve bringing together the right mix of indigenous local NGOs, national affiliates of international NGO federations and global humanitarian actors.

As we work towards a future where humanitarian response is locally or nationally owned, what should be the way forward in the short term? I believe that we should press forward on two goals simultaneously. On a political and social level we should push for local and national organisations to take charge of their humanitarian response. When it comes to financing, the humanitarian sector should ensure that reforms to funding mechanisms efficiently channel resources to those who are best placed respond in that context.

This will be organisations that have a long term commitment to the local situation, a strong network of local relationships and the ability to implement good operations. At this moment in time, a diversity of organisations can meet this brief, including the national affiliates of large INGOs. 

The challenge for the sector is to develop new ways of working that can efficiently build and maintain national and local capacity so that it’s ready when an emergency strikes.

We need to have an open discussion about the merits of different types of national organisations in different situations, as these demand different things of humanitarian organisations (I’m going to address this in my next blog). The challenge for the sector is to develop new ways of working that can efficiently build and maintain national and local capacity so that it’s ready when an emergency strikes. Funding a response is hard enough, we know that funding long-term work is even more difficult (pdf).  But, when we do this, the goal of national ownership of humanitarian response will be a step closer to becoming the norm.

Julian Srodecki is World Vision's Technical Director of Humanitarian Grants.

LEARN MORE:

• Read my recent blogs on humanitarian financing: Two ideas to transform humanitarian financing and Is closing the humanitarian funding gap as simple as saying yes (to new sources of funds)?

• Follow the discussion around the future of humanitarian financing and the World Humanitarian Summit by following @wv_humanitarian and #ReShapeAid on twitter.