Source: IRIN
Accountability after Haiyan
By Elizabeth Blunt
London, 21 January 2015 (IRIN) - When Typhoon Haiyan swept across the central Philippines in November 2013, the subsequent emergency response was a test case for the aid industry's aspiration to be accountable to affected populations.
The phrase became a term of art,
with its own initials, AAP, and in the early days of the response the UN
appointed its first ever AAP Coordinator.
In normal times at least the
Philippines, as a middle-income country, has considerable human and
infrastructural resources for informing people, consulting them and
soliciting their views. Even if radio transmitters and phone masts were
destroyed (and it was mostly only the teenagers who managed to hold onto
their mobile phones in the scramble to survive the typhoon) the
Philippines still had a lot going for it.
So how well did agencies do? The London-based Humanitarian Practice Network attempts an assessment in a special Typhoon Haiyan edition of its publication, Humanitarian Exchange, which includes an article by that very first AAP coordinator, Barb Wigley.
The trouble with tools
Wigley warns against too great a
preoccupation with tools and systems, leading to what she calls a drift
away from the primary purpose of a culture of accountability.
“The tools and mechanisms,” she says, “have increasingly become an end in themselves.”
One of the most useful things she
describes doing was done very simply, without text messaging or
smartphones or social media. Small teams went into evacuation centres
and just talked to people, all sorts of people, including young boys and
girls and elderly people, to see what they had to say about the
response.
They found adults distressed by
the lack of information, and wanting to know far more than the simple
messages which, she says, the humanitarian community was inclined to
transmit to them. They found young people upset by any unfairness and
disturbed by seeing so many dead bodies around, and elderly people
embarrassed by the lack of appropriate underwear.
Agencies were able to respond.
HelpAge International tackled the underwear problem; UNFPA started
including radios in the kits of non-food items it was distributing. And
by quickly writing up and distributing their findings as widely as
possible, Wigley says they were able to reinforce the point “that the
voices and opinions of ordinary people...were as important and as
instructive as input from what are usually more privileged, better
educated and more powerful 'Key Informants.'”
Systems and culture
So some things did work, but
participants at a meeting in London to launch the publication – many of
whom had worked on the response to Haiyan – were more inclined to a
verdict of 'could do better.'
Mike Noyes of Action Aid, who helped compile a report, 'Missed Again', on the shortcomings of partnerships with local NGOs during the Haiyan operation said this couldn't be blamed on the local situation.
“In Haiti it was
because the system works in English and everyone spoke French; in the
Philippines the lingua franca for most educated people was English
anyway,” he said.
Noyes went on to dismiss other oft-voiced excuses, such as “security issues.”
“No, that wasn't the case there.
'Mistrust of the outsider'.... all those easy, practical reasons why it
might not be happening just weren't big factors in the Philippines. So
it does come back much more to a system and to a culture.”
Noyes blames a culture where the
international UN and NGO staff all know each other and local
organizations don't understand the system, especially the UN cluster
system, and feel excluded.
Yet local NGOs are inherently accessible and accountable, rooted in
their communities, and they can also be of great help to the
internationals – if they are allowed.
“There is an assumption,” said
Noyes, “that local NGOs don't have resources, so our natural thing is
not to look round and say, 'Now which is the organization which might
help us with warehousing?' We just assume they don't exist because
that's the way it's always been, and we are not catching up with those
developments and those changes.”
Alex Jacobs, from Plan
International, worked on a project in the Philippines called Pamati
Kita, or 'Let's Listen Together'. He stressed the need to cut through
alphabet soup of acronyms and the proliferation of agencies, and make
things much simpler for people to deal with.
“At its most simple, we were
saying, 'Well, how about a common hotline, rather than twenty different
numbers which people have to call or text? Wouldn't it make sense from
the community's point of view if there was just one number?' Which is a
very appealing idea, but – as ever – turned out to be a little bit
harder than we had hoped.”
But it's still a good idea, and is
now being tried in Iraq, a much more difficult environment. The plan is
for a call centre for all UN organizations and clusters, with between
four and six staff, and a coordinator who can direct comments and
questions to the relevant agencies.
UN OCHA's Sarah Mace described it
as a mandated, response-wide accountability tool. But she conceded that
local groups would not be directly involved, at least not in the
initial phase.
Mace told IRIN, “Iraq is more complicated because there is a
combination of Kurdish and different dialects of Kurdish, Arabic and
different dialects of Arabic.....but the people we are recruiting to
work in the call centre have to have all these languages and will be
using them to reach out to local NGOs. The engagement of local NGOs and
local partners is one of our key indicators for achievement.”The value of radio
Radio was hugely important in the Haiyan emergency. The CDAC (Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities) Network's own learning review of the response
notes a dramatic shift in people's main source of information from
television before the typhoon, to radio afterwards. But several
participants in the London meeting stressed the need for humanitarian
actors to change their mindset and accept radio as a two-way medium, not
just for delivering information, but also for discussion and dialogue.
Internews, a US-based non-profit
which works with local media across the world, got a radio station and
information centre up and running just three weeks after the storm.
Radio Bakdaw, set up
by Internews, put officials live on air, and at its peak was receiving a
thousand text messages from listeners a day. Its project director,
Stijn Aelbers, worries about what happens when organizations want to be
better at communication.
“It must be acknowledged that if
people have questions, they are allowed to ask them,” he told IRIN. “I
am worried that humanitarians are very wary of false information; as a
result there will be communications staff appointed that are allowed to
talk, but they talk about their organization. It's inevitable. They
will have a hard time translating it into very practical, very simple
information for the affected people. And the result is a very, very
controlled communication. If people come to you, then have your
programme staff available, because they know the practical stuff. This
is not about crafting a message.”
What it is about, finally, is fundamental attitudes to the people affected by disasters like Haiyan. In the words of that first AAP coordinator, Barb Wigley, it's “about seeing the people we seek to assist as our equals.”
