POVERTY: SOMALIA: Al-Shabab ban on agencies threatens aid

NAIROBI, 28 November 2011 (IRIN) -
The main Islamist insurgent group in Somalia, which is still in the throes of a major food crisis classified as famine in some regions, has banned 16 aid agencies, including several UN bodies, from operating in areas under its control, accusing them of "illicit activities and misconduct".
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) are some of the UN agencies banned. The Norwegian Refugee Council, Danish Refugee Council, Concern, Norwegian Church Aid and Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI) are among the international NGOs banned by Al-Shabab.
UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told IRIN that men came to the office in Baidao, 240km southwest of the capital, Mogadishu, and told the staff to leave and that the office was no longer UNICEF's.
"Our staff are safe and we are assessing the impact the closure will have on our humanitarian activities in southern Somalia," Murthy said.
The prospect of permanent closure faced by the agencies could lead to the deaths of thousands of vulnerable people, a civil society member in Mogadishu said. "This is truly bad news for tens of thousands that depend on these agencies."
He said it was not clear what prompted Al-Shabab's action but suspected that it was "because of the military pressure they have been under lately, maybe they are seeing enemies everywhere".
On October 16, Kenya began a military incursion into neighbouring Somalia, using terrestrial, aerial and naval assets, with the aim of neutralizing Al-Shabab, which Nairobi says threatens its security and economy.
Murthy said: "UNICEF is extremely concerned about any disruption of its humanitarian work and the feeding of 160,000 severely malnourished children. Any disruption could result in the death of those children."
He said the agency had not received anything in writing from the group.
In a statement issued on 28 November, Al-Shabab accused the agencies of "financing, aiding and abetting subversive groups seeking to destroy the basic tenets of Islamic penal system", adding that the agencies were "persistently galvanizing the local population against the full establishment of Islamic Sharia system".
The group said the aid agencies lacked "political detachment and neutrality with regard to the conflicting parties in Somalia, thereby intensifying the instability and insecurity gripping the nation as a whole".
In addition, the agencies were accused of misappropriating funds and using corruption and bribery in their operations.

"From bad to worse"
The civil society source said if the ban stands, "it could make the humanitarian situation in the country go from bad to worse. I just hope it will be a temporary thing."
The UN has reclassified the regions of Bay, Bakool and Lower Shabelle in southern Somalia to "humanitarian emergency" from "famine/humanitarian catastrophe".
According to the UN, humanitarian needs persist, with 250,000 out of a former 750,000 Somalis "still at risk of starvation".
Here is the full list of the agencies banned by Al-Shabab: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, World Health Organisation, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Population Fund, United Nations Office for Project Services, Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, Norwegian Refugee Council, Danish Refugee Council, Concern, Norwegian Church Aid, Cooperazione Internazionale, Swedish African Welfare Alliance, German Agency For Technical Cooperation, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarity and Saacid.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94321

POVERTY: AID POLICY: Fragile states – the most needy, but the most difficult

LONDON, 1 July 2011 (IRIN)
Photo: UNMAS: Putting it back together again is the hard part

 “When we call a state fragile, we have to think of it as a metaphor,” says Dan Smith, Secretary-General of International Alert. “It means handle with care, it’s easy to break. Pour a whole lot of money on the problem, and you could do as much harm as good.”
Smith is just one of the community of aid professionals, academics and politicians still trying to tease out the implications of Britain’s aid policy review, which declared that the government would keep its promise to protect international humanitarian aid from budget cuts, but that it would be refocused. By 2014, a planned 30 percent of aid will go to war-torn and unstable states.
This policy has cross-party support. At a public meeting in the House of Commons on 28 June, politicians endorsed the decision, each from their own, distinct perspective.
The Conservative MP Mark Pritchard put the practical case for a focus on conflict-affected states, reflecting the fear that these states generated refugees and were a breeding ground for terrorism. “What happens over there affects us over here. We have seen the consequences of fragile states becoming broken states.” Instability is also bad for business, Pritchard pointed out, citing Kenya, where tourism had dropped by 23 percent in the past year: “We need to focus on post-conflict resolution because the private sector is wary of going in.”
Labour’s Jack McConnell, who chairs his party’s Conflict and Development Task Force, pointed out that a third of people living below the poverty line and half the children who die before the age of five are in fragile and conflict-affected states. “We should be doing more,” he said. “It’s important for global security, but it’s also crucial for global justice.”

Legitimacy
McConnell warned that simply giving these governments money did not necessarily mean they rose to the challenge. “I think this assumption that budget support would, with a bit of encouragement, lead to the creation of mechanisms for the management of public finance… has been shown in the majority of a cases to be not true,” he said. “While it is more sexy for politicians to allocate money to major health programmes or major educational programmes… and that can create good headlines… I think that the major donors have to start insisting, as a prerequisite for budget support, that money is spent on the creation of proper public finance management systems, proper revenue raising systems, transparent finance and civil service systems and so on.”
Joanna Wheeler, of the Institute of Development Studies, argued that there was too much focus on state building and institutions, and not enough on strengthening the kind of citizen engagement that can create legitimacy. Without the state institutions capable of distributing aid effectively, she said, “there is a real risk that you are just going to endorse corruption. And that’s precisely why we have to look at the ability of citizens to hold those states to account, because that’s going to be the antidote to the corruption in those countries.”
Smith agreed: “We looked at countries which had been able to haul themselves out of deep instability… and the thing they had in common was that they had managed to build legitimate institutions, and the way of building these legitimate institutions is primarily through participation.”
He talked about the problem of lack of trust in governments, illustrated by a story of villagers in Mozambique who refused to believe official flood warnings because the ants that traditionally warned of flooding had not started to move. “The point is that when they were given the choice between trusting the government and trusting the ants, they chose the insects. All that we ask, and all that we are working for, is that people have governments they trust more than the insects.”
Added McConnell: “There [are] going to be politicians in developing countries who get it wrong, not just for corruption reasons, but sometimes they just get it wrong… So I think we need to find a way of communicating the complexity of that, and have an awareness that people are not going to get it right all the time. But that shouldn’t stop us trying to help.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93122

POVERTY: Weaning countries off aidAid dependency

Jonathan Glennie  28 June 2011


Weaning countries off aidAid dependency can only be reduced if financial resources are found elsewhere. Uganda, for example, is using aid to improve tax collection so it will rely less on funding from outside donors



 A truck offloads freshly picked coffee berries at a processing factory in Mbarara, western Uganda. Tax revenue in the country has increased as a proportion of government expenditure from 55.2% in 2005 to 67.9% in 2010. Photograph: Trevor Snapp/Getty Images

It is a positive sign that major western NGOs are beginning to talk about the problem of aid dependence and the need for exit strategies from aid. They are doing no more than responding to the concerns expressed for some years by their developing world partners and diaspora in the west.
But as they seek to engage the public at a slightly deeper level than just "aid is good", they need to be careful that their message is not commandeered by a simplistic, often rightwing, but now fairly populist agenda that seeks only to reduce the amount of money rich countries spend on global issues.
Reducing aid dependence is not the same thing as reducing aid. Aid dependence can be reduced without reducing aid (if other sources of money increase). And reducing aid doesn't mean reducing aid dependence – it might well mean the opposite. It is the dependence not the aid that is the problem.
Dependency on aid can only be reduced if the equivalent financial resources (and more) are found elsewhere. That requires action at the international level on issues such as trade policy, illegal capital flight and commodity pricing. And at the national level it requires a coherent set of policies to gradually increase resource mobilisation from untapped areas of the economy.
Allen Kagina, commissioner general at the Uganda Revenue Authority, came to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) this month to give a presentation on the need to transform tax collection to, in her words, "wean Uganda off aid". Her message was clear: we need to use aid to support processes of improved tax collection, rather than allow it to substitute for the mobilising of domestic resources.
As an economy grows, as Uganda's is, a country will gradually rely less on aid as a proportion of gross national income. But that doesn't necessarily mean the government sector will reduce its dependency on aid. Some countries receive little aid as a proportion of GNI, but maintain heavy reliance on aid inputs in social and other sectors because tough political decisions on tax are not made.
The challenges in Uganda (and elsewhere) are many, and include, in Kagina's analysis: the difficulty of taxing the informal sector; the limited capacity of fiscal administrations; the slow pace of adoption of better IT; a low tax base coupled with tax evasion and fraud; the disproportional representation of some stakeholders in the tax base through the use of incentives; and a low savings ratio relative to investment requirements. So there are no easy answers.
Nevertheless, according to Kagina (who says she would welcome independent research to verify this, if anyone is interested), tax revenue has increased as a proportion of government expenditure from 55.2% in 2005 to 67.9% in 2010. Some successful reforms have included the introduction of one-stop border posts that harmonise immigration procedures, reduce transaction costs and duplication of efforts, enhance border security and increase revenue.
Kagina argues that domestic resource mobilisation is "potentially the biggest source of long-term financing for sustainable development and it is the lifeblood of all state governance, such as the provision of public goods and services". Aid still fills a gap, so rather than calling for an abrupt end to it, she asks: Is foreign aid to Africa promoting the strengthening of tax administration or simply having a substitution effect?
Crucially, she notes that there has been limited support from donors on tax matters, but where it has existed, it has helped. Since 1990, 15 African countries have formed revenue authorities with support from the IMF and the World Bank, including Uganda, which set up its revenue authority with the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) support in 1991.
Kagina wants to persuade donors to reorient their efforts towards always having an endgame in mind. In her view, this means spending aid on revenue reform and the productive sectors of the economy. While there is always a place for trying to influence donor decisions, we have learned the hard way how difficult that can be – domestic considerations weigh heavier in donor minds than developmental priorities.
Ultimately, Kagina's success will depend on how well she is able to manage the complex political maze she is navigating in Uganda, distinguishing the possible from the optimal, and managing change in a difficult environment. The slogan she has given her department is: "One team, one dream".
Regardless of specific countries reducing their dependence on aid, which is the objective all countries should be striving for, spending on global public goods by rich countries – and eventually by all countries – should continue to rise as a proportion of our national income, as an evolving world order needs money to run effectively, safely, and sustainably. So this is no appeasement of the rightwing critics of foreign spending. It is progressive development theory fit for the 21st century.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/28/weaning-countries-off-aid

POVERTY: AID POLICY: Classifications questioned in protracted crises

MEDFORD, USA, 8 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Marion Doss/Flickr
More creativity needed in responding to crises

Classifying aid as "relief", "early recovery" or "development" does little to help countries that have been troubled for years.
This was the key message from the Second World Humanitarian Studies Conference this month during a discussion on food security response in protracted crises such as Somalia.
The UK's Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reckons there are at least 22 countries in protracted crises, by which it means countries where a large population is vulnerable to disease, death and disruption of livelihoods over a long period, with the state having limited capacity to help those affected.
"Food insecurity is the most common manifestation of protracted crises," according to Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of Agriculture Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Luca Alinovi, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative for Somalia. About 20 percent of the world's undernourished people (or more than a third of the global total if China and India are excluded) - 166 million - live in countries in protracted crises.
The problems of engagement in such countries are linked to the way "development" is perceived and how aid is used to respond, said Alinovi.
In the aid world, "development is viewed as a gradual improvement in the quality of life. Disasters or acute emergencies briefly interrupt this trend, but the expectation is that there will be a return to normality, hence the use of terms such as 'disaster', 'recovery' and 'sustainable development'," he said.
Aid responses even in protracted crises tend to be short term. "We cannot work with funding that is reviewed every year as at times there are breaks in funding, which does not help projects which have long-term development objectives," said Alinovi. "If we want to help the country emerge from the crisis we have to make a long-term commitment with no interruption in spending."

"Wrong" emphasis
Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations set out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put too much emphasis on building state institutions, said Daniel Maxwell, a food security expert at Tufts University and one of the authors of a joint FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) report on food insecurity in protracted crises.
Most developed countries and major aid donors are among OECD's 34 members. The OECD should better focus on efforts to strengthen livelihoods and local institutions that support livelihoods, he said.
"We have to become more creative in how we seek to respond to a crisis - and not with the traditional humanitarian mindset," said Maxwell.
ODI researcher Sarah Bailey in a forthcoming paper on the Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in a protracted crisis, says: "Aid architecture is divided into humanitarian and development compartments. The choice to use aid mechanisms is a political decision related to how donor governments want to engage with the state, and there is a lack of programming strategies for shifting between shorter-term and longer-term assistance approaches.
"As addressing state fragility has become an important international concern, so too has the focus widened from linking relief and development to integrating aid and security.
"Many policies and interventions now seek to `stabilize' fragile and conflict-affected settings through assistance and security responses. 'Early recovery', meaning laying foundations for recovery at the earliest opportunities, has also emerged as a framework in recent years. "
But rather than coming up with frameworks such as "early recovery" intended to plug a theoretical distinction between relief and development, the aid community should try to understand the opportunities and limitations offered by existing approaches, she says.

Flexibility key
In perhaps the most protracted crisis of all, FAO and other agencies have had to be creative in trying to help communities in Somalia. Humanitarian agencies there engage with whichever local authority holds sway, and many dispatch funds through "hawala" money transfer systems, global networks of trusted brokers, with some success, says Alinovi.
Francois Daniel Grunewald, chair of Groupe URD, a research centre, said another reason why FAO had made inroads is "because it responds to a crisis in agro-ecological zones, so it can set up those relationships in a decentralized way - which is the way to respond for aid agencies and donors even in countries like Afghanistan - and not have to spend vital time engaging with an ineffective central government". Grunewald worked in Somalia for some years when he ran the agriculture rehabilitation unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
ODI's Bailey suggested that donors, rather than responding to the needs of a crisis from one year to the next, should consider aid money pledged over a period of time in totality and then decide how best to spend it.
Donors and the aid community perhaps needed to better understand the impact of their assistance in terms of helping communities back on their feet. Instead of asking the question, "How can humanitarian action support recovery?" Bailey suggested they ask: "What is the most appropriate assistance given the needs, context and capacities? How can it have the greatest impact?"
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=92928

POVERTY: Sphere Handbook 2011 edition

 (Photo: David Ohana/AVMU)
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos receives a copy of the Sphere Handbook 2011 edition from Sphere Board member Gillian Dunn.

 “The Sphere Standards have become the gold standard for humanitarian assistance,” said the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos at the launch of the Sphere Handbook 2011 edition in New York City. The English version of the Handbook was released in about a dozen countries on 14 April.
From the United States to India to South Africa to Pakistan, and from Australia to Kenya to Switzerland the Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response was launched in nearly 30 venues worldwide.
“We need to better demonstrate our accountability to affected populations and donors alike,” said Amos. “If we champion the rights of those in need, then our work needs to be able to withstand close scrutiny. [The Sphere] standards provide a minimum benchmark we should all strive to uphold”, she added.
“With this updated edition, Sphere remains at the forefront of thinking on accountability,” said Matthias Schmale, Under Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies at the Handbook launch in Geneva.
Schmale stressed the value of the Sphere minimum standards as “key input for dialogue with new actors in humanitarian response who are not necessarily driven by the humanitarian imperative, such as the military and the private sector”. “We are committed to applying them as best as we can, and urge all other humanitarian actors to do likewise for the benefit of vulnerable people in need of support,” he added.
Ton van Zutphen, Chair of the Sphere Project Board and Emergency Response Director at World Vision International, told participants at the Geneva launch about his recent experience in Haiti, where in the aftermath of the earthquake tens of thousands of people were engaged to do humanitarian work.
“I have just come back from Haiti, where I have been involved with a number of training sessions on Sphere standards,” said van Zutphen. “It was a real pleasure to see how eager these men and women were to be informed” about how to undertake humanitarian response “in a more accountable and transparent way, and also to achieve better quality.”
Van Zutphen highlighted the fact that the revision of the Sphere Handbook was a wide collaborative and consultative process. “I remain confident that with this new edition, we are providing an important service to a growing group of practitioners who wish to improve the quality of their work in emergency responses,” he affirmed.
“The revision of the Handbook is timely as the humanitarian landscape is changing fast,” said in Jorge Nuño Mayer, Secretary General of Caritas Europa. Speaking in Brussels, Nuño Mayer pointed out that “humanitarian aid and its underlying principles of independence, non-discrimination and impartiality – as stipulated in the Sphere Humanitarian Charter – are more and more threatened and undermined by comprehensive political and security approaches to crisis and disasters.”
“Sphere is normative for Caritas and the humanitarian community and marks a dramatic improvement in the standard of humanitarian responses over the last 10-15 years,” Nuño Mayer said. “From now on, the challenge will be to make active use of the learning which has been so widely shared in the sector and incorporated into this Handbook and to stay firm on the humanitarian principles, which guide and underpin our approach,” he added.

Additional language versions to follow
The launch of the Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian and German versions of the Handbook is scheduled for 23 June 2011 or the following week. A tentative list of launch events can be consulted here. Please contact the Sphere secretariat if your organization is interested in hosting a launch event in your country.
Agreements to have the Sphere Handbook translated into other languages are being worked out. It is foreseen that it will be available in Portuguese, Hindi and Bahasa among other languages.

What's new in the 2011 edition?
The Sphere Handbook establishes shared principles and a set of universally acknowledged minimum standards in four life-saving areas of humanitarian response: water and sanitation, food, shelter and healthcare.
The cornerstone of the Handbook is the Humanitarian Charter, which describes core principles that govern humanitarian action and asserts the right of populations to life with dignity, protection and assistance. The minimum standards are a compilation of best practice in this sector and a practical expression of these core principles.
In the 2011 edition, the Humanitarian Charter has been completely re-written, while chapters on minimum standards have been significantly restructured.
This edition incorporates a new chapter on the protection and safety of affected populations. It considers emerging issues like climate change, disaster risk reduction, disasters in urban settings, and education as well as early recovery of services, livelihoods and governance capacity of affected communities. Understanding and supporting local responses to disaster is a priority reflected in the whole Handbook, as is reinforcing the capacity of local actors.
The extensive revision that led to the 2011 edition involved more than 650 experts from over 300 organizations from the humanitarian sector, including several United Nations agencies.
The Sphere Handbook was created by a group of humanitarian non-governmental organizations and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Since its first trial edition in 1998, it has been translated into more than 20 languages, becoming the most widely known and internationally recognized set of standards for humanitarian response.
http://www.sphereproject.org/content/view/698/32/lang,english/

POVERTY: Core principles for aid providers

Mark Tran 14 April 2011 : guardian.co.uk


The latest blueprint for aid work outlines four basic principles that aid organisations should focus on in their work

 Photograph: Ahmed Jallanzo/EPA : Ivorian refugees wait for medical treatment at a Médicenes sans Frontièrs (MSF) clinic in a refugee camp. New standards for the humanitarian sector to improve its response to armed conflict and disasters were unveiled on Thursday.
In his review of how Britain responds to humanitarian disasters, Lord Ashdown highlighted a familiar failing among aid agencies: how they sometimes seem to be trying to advance their own agendas rather than concentrating on the needs of the people they are trying to help.
Others have accused aid agencies of "jostling for position" and putting their own interests above those of the victims, as the Lancet said in a caustic editorial on the humanitarian response to the Haiti earthquake. Nicholas van Praag, writing on the Poverty Matters blog, chided relief groups for running aid programmes without gauging how beneficiaries feel about them, ignoring the simplest test of client satisfaction. So it is timely that Thursday sees the launch of new standards for the humanitarian sector to improve its response to armed conflict and disasters.
The latest Sphere handbook, considered the blueprint for aid work, includes a fresh chapter on "protection principles" that urges organisations to consider the wider impact of their actions.
The first principle is: avoid exposing people to further harm as a result of your actions. Dr Unni Krishnan, disaster response policy co-ordinator for Plan International, and a member of the Sphere board, cites the example of the floods in Bihar in 2008 that affected more than 1.4 million people. The floods were not the result of monsoon rains but of a breach in embankments that had been built by the government to protect people.
"This disaster demonstrates that 'good intention' alone is not good enough," said Krishnan. "Participation and ownership of communities, especially the most vulnerable, like children, are key in development and humanitarian response."
Or as the handbook asks: "What might be the unintended negative consequences of our activities for people's security, and how can we avoid or minimise these consequences?"
The second principle is: ensure people's access to impartial assistance – in proportion to need and without discrimination. It's a fine principle, but sometimes hard to uphold in a situation of armed conflict, as a member of the Sphere board noted.
"In Ivory Coast, the UN has appeared to take sides in the conflict," said Ed Schenkenberg van Mierop, executive director of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA). "Local NGOs that were supposed to distribute aid to areas held by Gbagbo's forces on behalf of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, were forced to return the aid to the organisation. Now too few impartial and independent humanitarian agencies are present on the ground in Ivory Coast."
The third principle is: protect people from physical and psychological harm arising from violence and coercion. This is even more problematical as humanitarian agencies are simply not equipped for this role and have to rely on the authorities. But as the recent case of mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo underlines, those authorities – the UN in this case – can be found wanting.
The fourth principle is: assist people to claim their rights, access available remedies and recover from the effects of abuse. There are some useful tips such as organising group activities for children in schools, something that is being done in Liberia for Ivorian refugees.
There will be many practical difficulties in implementing these four core protection principles, but they provide a useful reminder for humanitarian agencies to focus on what is important and on the people they are trying to help – and to do so in an appropriate way.
"People in disasters have basic needs like food and water, but aid work is not as simple as service delivery," said Marie Staunton, chief executive of Plan UK. "Humanitarian workers also have a wider responsibility for the human rights of the people they are meant to be helping – such as their right to freedom of movement and their right to a healthy environment. These rights could be limited or violated by the relief they receive, if it is delivered in an inappropriate way."
Or as Krishnan put it: "Relief and rights should go hand in hand. They complement each other."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/apr/14/core-principles-aid-providers-relief-rights

MALNUTRITION: USA brings fungus-resistant wheat seed to Afghanistan

Fungus-resistant wheat seed will be delivered throughout the country for the fall 2011 planting season (file photo): Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN

KABUL, 4 November 2010 (IRIN) - The US Agriculture Department has shipped 150 tons of UG99 fungus-resistant wheat seed from Egypt to Afghanistan “to protect future crops, improve the livelihoods of thousands of Afghan farmers, and improve food security”, the US embassy said.
“This seed will be multiplied this year, and by next year [when it is distributed to farmers] it should be adequate to cover approximately 5 percent or more of wheat production area in Afghanistan,” Mireille L. Zieseniss, assistant press attaché at the US embassy in Kabul, told IRIN.
The expected multiplication, however, will be highly dependent upon favourable weather conditions. The country is prone to drought and floods among other natural disasters.
Millions of Afghans are chronically food insecure and the country struggles to produce enough cereals to meet domestic demand even in a good year, experts say.

Theme (s):
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=90968