Ms Salima Namusobya

Can't Africans be Humanitarians too?
Building Local Capacity to Co-ordinate and Manage Humanitarian Responses in Africa

Presentation to 3rd ICVA Conference; 'Essential Humanitarian Reforms' - Geneva, Friday 1 February 2008

Introduction
Africa is often the scene for emergencies requiring humanitarian assistance, but the resultant humanitarian response often falls short of incorporating national organizations and staff. Can't Africans be humanitarians too? Local staff are in many cases contracted to carry out non-professional tasks like food distribution and interpretation, and have little role in planning and decision-making. This certainly reflects assumptions that there is a lack of sufficient competent humanitarian personnel in the affected countries but possibly also, and more disturbingly, may indicate perceptions that Africans don't have humanitarian values. The over-reliance on international organizations and professionals is inevitably associated with capacity shortfalls that would otherwise be remedied by drawing on and building local capacity.

Problem analysis
Many of the problems with humanitarian aid are a reflection of the biases in their human resources practices.

Knowledge and Skills Gaps in International Staff
Existing humanitarian efforts, most of which are "foreign-driven", tend to take a "top-down" approach and aid is often administered without sufficient needs assessment. The absence of local staff in decision making positions virtually guarantees misinformed and/or inadequate responses. International organizations are rarely on the ground at the start of an emergency, and they design responses on the basis of reports by other organizations and the media which often pick out a few issues from the bigger picture, depending on what is of interest to funders at that given moment. Language barriers and ineffective communication between the international humanitarian professionals and the communities they serve also create challenges, including a lack of ownership of the system by the locals that serves to cripple sustainability of programmes.

Further complications arise from fundamental divergences between the individualistic cultures from which the majority of humanitarian workers stem, and the more collective ones from which many of their supposed beneficiaries come. By seeking to individualise their beneficiaries, the humanitarians effectively break down the beneficiaries' existing inter-dependent relationships and render them more and more dependent on the humanitarian effort. This sometimes also plays itself out in the form of failures to recognize and operate within frameworks developed by local governments, ostensibly because such local governments are staffed by nationals who are assumed not to have the requisite humanitarian expertise. Inevitably this leads to tensions between humanitarians and local governments which can be a serious obstacle to effective humanitarian assistance.

Humanitarian assistance is thus often reduced to food aid and distribution of a few other Non-Food Items with hardly any efforts to empower people to take charge of their lives. More complex questions of psychosocial support, human rights, gender and local cultures are often by-passed. Such approaches create dependency as opposed to supporting the communities to better manage themselves and cope with their situation, through for example building infrastructure, technical skills and offering psychosocial support.

In the case of Northern Uganda for example, people who have ventured to leave the camps and return to their homes have found themselves back in the camps because there is no infrastructure and means of livelihood in their villages. Humanitarian efforts have been focused on rural camp-based IDPs while leaving out a big number of urban IDPs who are in equal need of assistance because most of the available reports left out the urban angle. This often results in duplication of efforts, with many organizations assisting the same groups of people and having less impact on the community as a whole. Donors also tend to concentrate resources on "popular issues" such that funding for other equally important issues is hard to come by.

Inefficiencies in Deployment of Staff in Emergencies
Further problems arise from the practices of flying in "experts" from abroad and "making decisions from headquarters", both of which escalate emergencies that could otherwise have been contained in the initial stages, had suitably trained local staff been in place. Local Field staff often have no decision making powers or are not allowed to speak on any matter and are obliged to refer to international staff colleagues or to headquarters for answers. Local capacity building in various humanitarian agencies and reducing bureaucracy would therefore go along way in enabling timely interventions and facilitating early warning systems.

Recruitment Practices as a Symptom of Non-Accountability by Humanitarian Organisations In essence, the questions of who gets recruited, for what period, secondment, staff rotation and contracts all reflect a lack of accountability on the part of international humanitarian organizations, and this clearly impacts negatively on humanitarian response in Africa. The lack of accountability seems to remain unchecked as there are no known effective systems to ensure equal opportunity.

One important and under-discussed result is a poor working relationship between national and international staff, as the former look at the latter as oppressors and sometimes refer to them as "so-called experts", implying that they are not experts in any true sense of the word. There have also been complaints by national staff of "teaching" the international "experts" how to carry out their roles, but being paid only a fraction of the latters' hefty salaries while engaged in this somehow perverse skills transfer.

The treatment of national staff in many humanitarian organizations further cripples professional development in these organizations. HURIFO, a local human rights NGO, report that national staff in international organizations working in northern Uganda have begun to talk of the need for a National Staff Organization to ensure respect for human rights in such organizations. There was talk of local government getting involved, as national staff fear to speak out within their organizations for fear of retribution, intimidation, and unfair dismissals. Those proposing such a body believed that it would "free them from the oppression of the foreign staff" and "bring liberty to the national staff". A working environment which prompts such remarks is clearly not a conducive learning environment for national staff, nor is it likely to be supportive of calls for more training opportunities for national staff.

Organisational policies, particularly regarding short contracts for international staff do not leave room for national staff to benefit or receive training from their international counterparts as it is impossible to build personal or even professional relations with them. In fact, as reported by HURIFO about organizations working in Northern Uganda, "the difficulty of dealing with international staff on short-term contracts has meant that national staff still face a constant struggle to gain respect and good working conditions."

It is my considered opinion therefore that building local capacity to take on management of humanitarian responses is a necessary humanitarian reform, and that national staff should be trained to take on these roles.

The Lack of Equal Opportunity in Access to Training
Obviously, the presumption that there are no competent staff to carry out humanitarian work in Africa is not entirely true. Africa has many candidates with the required motivation, knowledge of the area within which they live, communication skills, team building, problem-solving, innovation and language skills that, if supplemented with a little theoretical training, would make for perfect humanitarian professionals. Indeed, there could actually be a surplus of candidates but there is failure by the international humanitarian organizations to identify, acknowledge, recognize, encourage or offer further training to otherwise competent nationals.

For many humanitarian workers, their entry point into the humanitarian business is found in internships and voluntary work, both of which offer the necessary working experience to make them credible in the eyes of prospective northern-based organizations. Most existing international internship, volunteer and recruitment schemes in humanitarian organizations give unfair advantage to students from developed countries. Unfunded internship and volunteer schemes the world over favour students from the developed countries who come from well-to-do families and can therefore sponsor themselves or have gone to good/reputable institutions that can sponsor them to take on internship positions anywhere in the world regardless of whether they have the values to take on humanitarian work.

At the RLP, we frequently get sponsored students from Harvard, Yale, Krocs, LSE etc who sometimes are on mission to find out what they want to do in life - some are encouraged by their sending institution to keep a journal of their 'adventure' while in Africa. The reverse is not true for their counterparts from developing countries whose institutions or families cannot afford to sponsor them for such opportunities.

After two to three months of interning or volunteering with organizations like the RLP, foreign students and volunteers tend to be offered jobs by international humanitarian organizations that consider them "experts." Local staff who have worked in the same organizations for several years and built extensive experience generally get left out. The result is "white dominated" organizations that sometimes fail to rally the good will of the people and the governments they assist. Where local staff are taken on by international organizations, this is often at the expense of the local organizations in which they have built their capacities.

Local organizations and their staff in developing countries rarely have budgets for staff training. For a national organization like the RLP, for example, which has no core funding at the moment, staff training is high on our list of priorities, but equally low on the priorities of our donors. In short, it doesn't happen other than through 'learning on the job'. As such we can only pursue training opportunities abroad where they are fully funded.

Even where funded training opportunities are advertised, most efforts to apply by national staff that I am aware of have been fruitless - at best the person receives an acknowledgment of receipt of his/her application. The UN sometimes offers free trainings, but on average one person per year is admitted from some of the eligible countries. Some opportunities are only once every two years… i.e. one person trained in two years for many countries (the trainings rotate between Francophone and Anglophone countries). There are also the young professionals' programmes; however we are yet to find colleagues who were recruited under these schemes despite repeated applications.

Worse still, instead of building local capacity, national organizations are forced to take on more foreign interns and volunteers who can sponsor themselves. There is always a need for more human resources but lack of resources to hire local staff always necessitates "plan B" hence the influx of international volunteers and interns.

Obstacles to Providing In-Region Training
Most national institutions or universities in Africa have not yet incorporated humanitarian subjects in their curriculum, therefore local staff can only benefit from on job training and refresher courses during employment.

The donor factor has on occasions served as a constraint to training opportunities for national staff because the support always comes with strings attached. In East Africa for example, three universities in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania respectively, combined efforts to create a summer school on Refugee and Humanitarian issues. This was originally supposed to be hosted on a rotational basis by the founding universities in to benefit national humanitarian workers. This plan was thwarted by a donor who put in money and dictated that the summer school be held in Tanzania for the whole contract period. The result is that the training has now become a preserve of the international agencies in other East African countries that can afford to sponsor their staff to Tanzania.

Also many donors are yet to acknowledge staff training and capacity building programs as direct project costs that are essential for the success of any humanitarian response.

Conclusion and recommendations Building capacity for national humanitarian staff through systematic and quality training is a necessity. There is a need to identify candidates with the potential and target them for the relevant training courses, and I therefore make recommendations as follows:

To the donors:

• Recognize the role of training as a core component in career development and advancement, and treat it as a direct cost for all organizations.
• Reallocate existing resources to focus on preparing national staff and organizations to take on leading roles in humanitarian work.
• Prioritise the empowerment of local NGOs to manage humanitarian response through provision of resources for staff training or directly availing training opportunities to their staff and facilitation of national volunteers and interns.

To the international humanitarian agencies and training institutions:

• Create an accountability mechanism for international organizations, for example through annual independent evaluations to check their progress on including national staff in their training programmes, management and general work environment.
• Recruit more national staff for senior positions within international organizations in order to include them in the decision making processes at all stages, and ensure more involvement of national NGOs in the cluster system.
• Review contract policies to allow longer periods for international staff at particular stations and include training of national staff in their terms of reference.
• Work closely with local national training institutions and universities to incorporate humanitarian training in their curricula and provide both technical and material support to have humanitarian subjects taught in these universities.
• All international training institutions should ensure that they come up with affirmative action plans aimed at recruiting more people from the south into their training efforts.