Two Statements on the Upcoming World Humanitarian Aid Summit

The first World Humanitarian Aid Summit to be held in Istanbul next week, comes at a crucial time. War and natural disaster has ripped apart families and displaced communities at levels unseen since World War II.

The topics to be covered at the Summit are daunting: how to stop assaults on human rights and human rights workers workers, and improve protection for people in need. Yet, those convening include governments guilty of serious rights violations, including hindering access to aid.

Also, the humanitarian system itself suffers from a ‘top-down’ structure. Those at the ‘top’ – donors and international organizations – make the rules, not the people or communities in crisis.

Doctors without Borders has pulled out of the Summit and a group of national NGOs has circulated a paper calling for ‘a more equitable and dignified humanitarian system’.

Stop, collaborate and listen, an excerpt via the Start Network

By Alice Hawkes and Kerry Ann Akers, Protection in Practice

“How do we know they will do the right thing?” this was the question on the lips of humanitarians at a recent Start Network sponsored Oxfam Protection Peer Group meeting. At the meeting my colleagues and I were faced with some challenging realisations following discussions on two seemingly unrelated topics: cash programming, that is, giving people cash in an emergency so they can spend it on what they think they need, rather than giving people the things we think they need, and partnerships, that is, working with national NGOs. Both topics raised the question of whether international organisations are truly ready to relinquish control and enable decision making to take place as close to the front line as possible, giving national actors and the communities we work with the power to define their own needs.

The principle of equality underpins the entire ethos of humanitarian aid, yet deconstructing international organisations’ relationships with national NGOs forces us to consider the more negative discourse surrounding the existing model of humanitarian aid, that of neo-colonialism. Humanitarian capacity is largely measured by western donors and INGOs through the currency of material resource rather than contextual knowledge. If the measures of power were reversed, local NGOs would find themselves at the top of the hierarchy.

To ensure accountability to the communities we work with, moving away from competition and towards true partnerships, it is time that international and local actors recognised the combined strength they would have working together. For example, in South Sudan, whilst INGOs were able to mobilise material resources quickly in an emergency, it was the national NGOs which remained on the ground in the emergency when INGO staff were evacuated and it was national NGOs who advised on the implementation of large-scale projects such as provision of food aid to ensure that local tensions were not exacerbated.

The Start Network Protection in Practice project aims to re-evaluate the nature of partnerships between national and international NGOs to enhance protection for the communities we work with. Building the capacity of disaster affected communities, enabling them to protect themselves is central to the protection work undertaken by Oxfam. However, time again we see INGOs undermining local capacity in order to fulfil specific objectives in a particular location, even if this includes the objective of ‘building local capacity’. At the field level this often means INGOs enter a location, offer better salaries than any national actor on the ground, including governments, and hire a community’s most skilled individuals.

In practice we see schools depleted of teachers and national NGO capacity diminished every time an INGO starts a new project, especially in remote locations. Although local NGO’s staff may not require the services INGOs provide, they are a part of the wider communities we serve and their place within that community should be recognised and accountability to affected communities should include accountability for the actions we take which build or deplete local NGO capacity.

During the consultations for the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit national NGOs circulated a paper on ‘a more equitable and dignified humanitarian system’, urging INGOs to pledge their support for increased assistance for national and local NGOs through capacitating, direct funding and partnerships.

Doctors without Borders (MSF) to Pull out of World Humanitarian Summit

A Statement by Doctors without Borders, May 6, 2016

Last year, 75 hospitals managed or supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) were bombed. This was in violation of the most fundamental rules of war which gives protected status to medical facilities and its patients, regardless if the patients are civilians or wounded combatants. Beyond the hospitals, civilians are being wounded and killed by indiscriminate warfare in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  At the same time, the treatment of refugees and migrants in Europe and beyond has shown a shocking lack of humanity.

A humanitarian summit, at which states, UN agencies and non-governmental organisations come together to discuss these urgent issues, has never been more needed. So the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) this month could have been a perfect opportunity.

MSF has been significantly engaged in the WHS process over the past 18 months, including preparing briefing notes on various themes – a sign of our willingness to be involved. The WHS has done an admirable job in opening up the humanitarian sector to a much wider group of actors, and leading an inclusive process.

However, with regret, we have come to the decision to pull out of the summit. We no longer have any hope that the WHS will address the weaknesses in humanitarian action and emergency response, particularly in conflict areas or epidemic situations. Instead, the WHS’s focus would seem to be an incorporation of humanitarian assistance into a broader development and resilience agenda. Further, the summit neglects to reinforce the obligations of states to uphold and implement the humanitarian and refugee laws which they have signed up to.

As shocking violations of international humanitarian law and refugee rights continue on a daily basis, WHS participants will be pressed to a consensus on non-specific, good intentions to ‘uphold norms’ and ‘end needs’. The summit has become a fig-leaf of good intentions, allowing these systematic violations, by states above all, to be ignored.

Summit participants, whether states or UN agencies or non-governmental organisations, will be asked to declare new and ambitious “commitments”. But putting states on the same level as non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, which have no such powers or obligations, the Summit will minimise the responsibility of states. In addition, the non-binding nature of the commitments means that very few actors will sign up to any commitments they haven’t previously committed to.

We hoped that the WHS would advance these vital access and protection issues, reinforcing the role for independent and impartial humanitarian aid, and putting particular attention on the need to improve emergency response. Unfortunately it has failed to do so, instead focusing on its ambitions to “do aid differently” and “end need”, fine-sounding words which threaten to dissolve humanitarian assistance into wider development, peace-building and political agendas.

We can no longer see how the WHS will help the humanitarian sector to address the massive needs caused by continuing violence against patients and medical staff in Syria, Yemen and South Sudan; by civilians intent on fleeing being blocked at borders in Jordan, Turkey and Macedonia; by the inhumane treatment of refugees and migrants desperately trying to find safe haven in Greece and Australia; by the serious gaps we faced during the response to the Ebola epidemic, repeated again, albeit on a smaller scale, in the yellow fever epidemic in Angola today; by the serious restrictions placed by some states on humanitarian access, denying people basic services; and by the continuing lack of effective mobilisation to address recurring disease outbreaks in Democratic Republic of Congo. In all of these situations, the responsibilities of states in their making, and the diminished capacity of the humanitarian system to respond causing yet more suffering and death, will go unaddressed.

For these reasons, and with considerable disappointment, MSF has decided to pull out of the World Humanitarian Summit.