"Our Misery, Their Jobs"

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The Humanitarian Industry in Haiti

By DANIEL MOSS

Georges Marie is a proud and angry Haitian lawyer who lost her husband in the earthquake. As she mourned, the humanitarian industry exploded.

She watched with concern as Port au Prince's narrow streets became clogged with white Landrovers, each stamped with an aid agency logo on the driver's door. It still rankles her when the humanitarian aid workers dine and dance in a four-star restaurant overlooking the Place Boyer, a public square now strung with tarps, home to some of the million-plus people still displaced after the 2010 earthquake.

Some aid organizations, Georges Marie said, don't pay the taxes required to operate in Haiti — although to be fair it's quite possible that the under-resourced Haitian state has never asked. Others don't fulfill local hiring mandates, placing foreigners in positions that Haitians could fill — although, to be fair, many development agencies try hard to hire locally but are thwarted by a fierce brain drain. Quebec, said Georges Marie, offers Cuban-trained Haitian doctors a plane ticket to Canada and a license to practice there. La industrie de misere, she called it — "our misery, their jobs," she said.

My language skills are rotten, but not so bad as to miss her criticism of humanitarian consultants for not speaking Kreyol and relying on their underpaid, multilingual Haitian drivers for translation. As an international development professional, I'd had some low moments coming to terms with an occasionally bizarre industry. But nowhere else have I looked so long and hard in the mirror than when on assignment in Haiti.

Marie has a new job. She is taking a post with the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). Led by Bill Clinton and outgoing Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, the IHRC is seen by many as an unelected parallel government, invented by nervous donors to keep their aid money safe from corruption. For many Haitians, including Georges Marie, the IHRC is a poster child for the hijacking of Haiti's sovereignty. Won't the job burn you up inside? I asked. I need the money, she responded. Why not work in President-elect Michael Martelly's administration? She shook her head. I have a family to feed.

Alfredo Mena, a Dominican-born Interamerican Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative to Haiti, estimates that there are 9,000 NGOs in Haiti. And they are all welcome to contribute to Haiti's development, he said. But IICA and others have worked hard with the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture to craft a national plan for food security, a guidebook for agricultural development. Each cooperating development organization should study this and ensure their projects contribute to the plan's successful implementation. Many don't.

Contradictions and complexities abound within the aid industry, causing it to struggle to make headway in a sputtering reconstruction process. The good news is that, unlike a few years ago, there is near unanimity on the need for a strong Haitian state to direct the aid flows. The bad news is that state capacity is wanting — and no one is quite sure how to build it. How do aid agencies act responsibly in the interim with few functional public institutions to coordinate the aid?

A View of Development from the Street

Over a colonial breakfast of croissants and baguettes, I chatted with Georges Marie's neighbor, Iderle Charles*. "Haiti's civil society and government capacity are weak," she said. "My sense is that the aid industry is making this problem worse." She lived in exile in Mexico City throughout the Duvalier dictatorships, agitating for Haitian democracy from afar.

We discussed MINUSTAH, the 10,000 strong United Nations security force brought in after President Aristide was deposed in 2004 that still patrols Haiti's streets today. Not one Haitian I met could define its mission or jurisdiction. Although public security is nominally a state responsibility, I rarely saw Haitian police during my time there. I watched a platoon of M-16 bearing Rwandan soldiers maneuver their armored vehicle through a crowded fruit market. Peacekeeping in Haiti is a plum post; it might earn them a promotion back home. For Haiti's under-resourced cops, it is demoralizing that foreign troops are better equipped, better paid and are treading on their beat.

Despite the UN's critical global role, its bloated Haitian operations are perverse and give it a bad name. A tour of duty in Haiti, I was told, is an excellent way to advance upwards in the UN bureaucracy. Haitians I met with questioned how another UN program evaluation of another micro-credit project conducted by yet another foreigner resolves their daily suffering.

"But," Iderle said, "it doesn't get us far to pin the blame on the aid industry. I think that they are mostly people of good will. It's the Haitian government's responsibility to coordinate their efforts and ensure that they help strengthen a national plan for democracy and development. The state needs to ensure that the aid industry follows rules." It wasn't lost on either of us that the credibility of the newly elected Haitian president is already tainted. Martelly takes office amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Aid Agencies' Expanded Mission: Building Government

It is now commonplace for aid agencies to claim that part of their mission is to strengthen Haiti's public institutions. It's part of their discourse, Iderle said. Paul Farmer, the UN's deputy special envoy to Haiti and founder of Partners in Health, is insistent on this point. In remarks to the Congressional Black Caucus, Farmer said, "How can there be public health and public education without a stronger government at the national and local levels?" Philippe Bellerive of the USAID WINNER program in Haiti told me, "We never act alone, we work hand in hand with the Ministry of Agriculture." That's a big step forward. There was a recent time when beating up on the corrupt government was sport, when development agencies were seen as Haiti's savior and the government simply an obstacle.

But the earthquake damage is so vast that fewer and fewer development groups claim they can rebuild on their own. Housing construction, for example, begs for a strong government role, even the politically unpopular use of eminent domain. Zoning, land titling and assigning public lands are essential. The World Bank and others are waiting for a cue from government on how to proceed.

The desire to involve the public sector is not matched by those institutions' day-to-day capacity to coordinate and deliver services. Faced with this glaring public gap and the development agencies' eagerness, is there a productive role for foreign NGOs in strengthening Haiti's weak institutions? NGOs and bi- and multilateral development agencies are arguably better suited to implement infrastructure and income generation projects. It's one thing to support a new irrigation system — although more complex politically than the average development expert might have you think — and quite another to boost the morale and skills of a public agronomist corps. Mucking around in strengthening public institutions is delicate stuff.

USAID seeks to pursue both objectives. As they introduce technology packages to modernize agriculture, they similarly seek to upgrade management systems — including public sector support to farmers. USAID agronomists claim to be agents of change, introducing modern techniques even when farmers may be resistant. "At times they are stubborn and it's true that we are strict," Bellerive said. "We won't agree to support their old farming methods that don't work and leave them hungry."

Questions also arise regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of foreign training programs. For example, although trainers may have useful knowledge to impart, when you follow the money, it may be that a considerable percentage stays with the foreign training institution. Is an underpaid Haitian agronomist working for the Ministry of Agriculture best served by receiving training sessions from a U.S. technician earning many times his salary with experience in vastly different circumstances? Does training from well-equipped MINUSTAH forces prepare a Haitian National Police agent for Port-au-Prince conditions? These teaching and learning moments are likely to be fraught with cultural miscues.

If development agencies are going to enter the business of strengthening public institutions, we need common sense guidelines to orient a healthy engagement: narrow the gap between foreign aid worker pay and what their public sector counterparts earn; abide by or help create public development plans, whether on the municipal or ministerial level; ensure that Haitian public workers take the lead in each step of private initiatives; ensure that a significant portion of development agency funds are administered by Haitians (a potential deal breaker); put conflict of interests on the table — for example, disclose ties to agribusiness; don't treat capacity building as technology transfer but rather a conversation — no information dumps and no PowerPoint; and lose the Landrover — take public transportation and get to know some locals.

Past and current poor practices have no doubt caused significant damage. But Haiti's reconstruction will take decades, meaning there's plenty of time to get it right. Any relationship — though some of the donor-directed work underway might not properly be called a relationship — has rough patches and power imbalances. If dysfunction is honestly called out, a healthy dynamic just might emerge.

That honest reflection is the critical first step, and adopting new guidelines for respectful local engagement must quickly follow. Haiti's public sector would be helped dramatically by such development industry reform.

Editor's note: all sources in the story with asterisks had their names changed to protect their identities.

Daniel Moss is an international development and human rights consultant. He wrote this article while on assignment in Haiti for American Jewish World Service.

This article was orignally published by CIP America's Program.

U.N.-Sponsored Report on Haiti’s Cholera Outbreak Points to U.N. Itself as Culprit

click here for this story

By George Russell

Published May 05, 2011 | FoxNews.com

A United Nations-sponsored report into the causes of a deadly cholera outbreak that ravaged Haiti in the wake of its disastrous 2010 earthquake has discovered a culprit -- the U.N. itself.

The 32-page report, prepared by an independent panel of medical experts at the behest of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, clearly states that the source of the epidemic was most likely a camp for U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti, whose human waste was dumped by independent contractors into an unsecured pit that was susceptible to flooding in heavy rainfall.

That conclusion, the report notes, mirrors “a commonly held belief in Haiti” virtually from the moment the outbreak began.

But the report buries that central finding under a welter of circumstances that caused investigators to conclude that the outbreak, which is ongoing, “was not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual.”

The cholera epidemic, which is still ongoing, has killed some 4,500 Haitians through severediarrhea and dehydration since its outbreak in October 2010. There had been no previous cholera outbreak in Haiti for nearly a century. The report confirms that the specific cholera bacteria involved in the Haitian epidemic are a variant first detected in Bangladesh in 2002, which is even more toxic than other cholera strains found in South Asia.

As the report also notes, military contingents from Bangladesh and Nepal were among members of the United Nations Stabilization Force in Haiti (known by its French-language acronym of MINUSTAH) stationed at U.N. peacekeeping camp Mirebalais, close to the initial outbreak. An additional contingent of 60 Bangladesh police officers was also stationed at Mirebalais between September and October 2010.

None of the U.N. personnel were recorded as cholera cases, but the bacteria, which is usually spread through water, can exist in small numbers in the human digestive tract until it hits a rapid-breeding environment.

According to the report, the MINUSTAH camp at Mirebalais was just such an environment. Water piping around the main toilet and showering area of the camp was “haphazard,” with “significant potential for cross-contamination through leakage from broken pipes and poor pipe connections.” Some of the pipes ran over a drainage ditch that fed into a tributary of the Artibonite River, Haiti’s largest, which subsequently became the main artery of the water-borne epidemic.

In addition, sewage from the camp, along with two other MINUSTAH facilities, was trucked by a contractor to an open and unfenced septic pit, in an area that was susceptible to flooding and overflow in wet weather that enters the same river tributary system.

Click here to view the full report

As the report notes, “there is significant human activity -- including washing, bathing, drinking, and recreation,” along the tributary system, while the Artibonite River itself is “extensively used for irrigation and agricultural purposes” through a canal system.

The experts reported that by the time they made an inspection of the Mirebalais area, long after the epidemic began, “the battalion stationed at the Mirebalais MINUSTAH facility had made substantial improvements in the sanitary conditions.” But even so, “conditions were not optimal and additional work was needed” to prevent further contamination.

The expert report knocks down any notion that the “explosive” cholera outbreak came from a natural environmental source, or an indigenous Haitian mutation of the deadly bacteria. But it argues that local factors played an important role: “The introduction of this cholera strain as a result of environmental contamination with feces could not have been the source of such an outbreak without simultaneous water and sanitation and health care system deficiencies.”

The combination of factors led the experts to their no-fault conclusion. And in any case, they argue, “the source of cholera in Haiti is no longer relevant to controlling the outbreak.” In general, they propose new hygiene precautions for future U.N. missions, and a big investment in safe pipes and drinking-water facilities in Haiti.

The U.N. predicts that an additional 400,000 people in Haiti may contract cholera this year as a result of the outbreak. Other estimates have run twice as high.

Meantime, at the U.N., spokesman Martin Nesirky says that Secretary General Ban will consider the report carefully. Nesirky said the U.N. chief will convene a task force to study the findings and recommendations to ensure they are dealt with promptly.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News

Haiti: Moving On From Here

this story from HuffingtonPost

It's been an extraordinary year in Haiti. On this, the one year anniversary of the earthquake, we find time to reflect on what has been and what's to come. Besides the pain and suffering there have been great moments of joy and hope. Yesterday, much of the media is focusing on what has not been done and what is claimed to be the failure of the international community. We have been working in Haiti for years before the earthquake and our view is different. Of course there have been frustrations but we are proud of what we have accomplished.

Together we have distributed millions of dollars in food and medicine, built health clinics, homes, one of the largest Cholera Camps in Haiti and in October opened our new Secondary School, the Academy for Peace and Justice. We are proud of our work and have spent nearly every dollar donated directly helping the people. Along the way and through all of the basic relief activities we met Rapheal Louigene, the hardest working Haitian we have ever met, and that's saying something.

Rapheal works for another great man Father Rick Frechette at St. Damiens hospital in Port-au-Prince. After long days providing care Rapheal would talk about the Port-au-Prince he knew as a kid. A city filled with tree-lined streets, working infrastructure and beauty, his
fondest memories were of going to see movies in the old colonial theaters downtown. All of those theatres collapsed in the earthquake and Rapheal dreamt of rebuilding them. In our spare time we built our own movie theatre in four days on a hill above a tent camp, the
first theater to be built since the earthquake (and the only functioning movie theater in Haiti). While it may seem frivolous in the face of such tragedies, it has proven that bringing joy and light and laughter is also an important part of the healing process. We spent months after the earthquake trying to heal the massive wounds at our hospital what we left behind from those wounds were deep scars.

Now, one year on, we are beginning to fix those scars and bring a country back to its feet.

Watch the full movie below and feel free to pass it on.

SUN CITY PICTURE HOUSE from David Darg & Bryn Mooser on Vimeo.

To support our work in Haiti please make a donation to www.apjnow.org

www.suncitypicturehouse.com

thousand die of cholera in Haiti - while WFP staffers leave the good life in private boats

millions of dollars of donations instead of going to eradicate extreme poverty in Haiti - has been diverted thanks to WFP/MINUSTAH to luxury boats and private residences where International Staffers enjoy the good life, dance and drink cold beers.

While Haitians die everyday of extreme poverty and misery - the United Nations Staffers receive the following:

- Daily Hardship: $ 189.00

- Rest & Recuperation travels : - every 3 weeks to Florida or Bahamas or Dominican Rep;

- Salaries: Net + H hardship level;

On top of the above United Nations and WFP/MINUSTAH spend close to 3 Million Dollars on administrative and operational expenses - every month to provide luxury accommodation and access to top health care facilities for all 9000 or so International Staffers.

So where are the poor Haitians? They are only good for Donor Conferences, where millions of dollars are trusted to the United Nations to "improve the life of Haitians". After the conferences are done, and the money is in Swissbank accounts of United Nations, no one cares any-longer about the Haitians. From January until October 2010 in less than 10 months the United Nations have made a profit close to 40 million USD form the donations that are sleeping in the UN's Bank Accounts in Switzerland.

Thank you Haiti !

U.N.’s ballooning $732 million Haiti peacekeeping budget goes mostly to its own personnel

The United Nations has quietly upped this year’s peacekeeping budget for earthquake-shattered Haiti to $732.4 million, with two-thirds of that amount going for the salary, perks and upkeep of its own personnel, not residents of the devastated island.

The world organization plans to spend the money on an expanded force of some 12,675 soldiers and police, plus some 479 international staffers, 669 international contract personnel, and 1,300 local workers, just for the 12 months ending June 30, 2010.

Some $495.8 million goes for salaries, benefits, hazard pay, mandatory R&R allowances and upkeep for the peacekeepers and their international staff support. Only about $33.9 million, or 4.6 percent, of that salary total is going to what the U.N. calls “national staff” attached to the peacekeeping effort.

Full Story: U.N.’s Ballooning $732 Million Haiti Peacekeeping Budget Goes Mostly to Its Own Personnel – FoxNews.com

UN Workers in Haiti Live on Luxury Cruise Ship

A Fox News report of April 8 notes that the UN is housing relief workers sent to Haiti to offer services following the nation’s devastating 7.0 earthquake on January 12 aboard two chartered luxury cruise ships. One of the ships has been dubbed the "Love Boat" by UN staff members.

The United Nations World Food Program announced on its website on March 19 that two UN-chartered passenger cruise ships, the Ola Esmeralda and the Sea Voyager, had docked in Port au Prince harbor.

But Fox noted that the website announcement did not disclose that the vessels were not intended to house homeless Haitian refugees, but would instead accommodate employees of the U.N. itself. The UN website also did not reveal that the cost of leasing the ships was $112,500 a day and that one of the vessels is owned by a company closely linked to the government of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Yet another thing the the WFP failed to mention: Even U.N. staffers regularly refer to one of the ships as "the Love Boat" — an illusion to the old TV series about a cruise ship on which single passengers booked passage to look for romance.

When a Fox News reporter questioned Edmond Mulet, head of the Haiti peacekeeping contingent, about the organization’s judgement in housing so many U.N. relief workers in such luxurious surroundings while most residents of Port au Price are homeless, the official justified the decision as follows: “You have to be in good shape in order to help the Haitians.”

"It is the least we could do for them," said Mulet. "They are working 14, 16 hours a day. The place was pulverized. Living conditions are really appalling."

Fox News did some excellent research in determining that the registered owner of one of the two ships the WFP chartered, the Ola Esmeralda, is a Venezuelan company, Servicios Acuaticos de Venezuela, C.A., or Saveca. And Saveca, as stated on the company’s own website, is part of an "alliance," with Dianca, a Venezuelan shipyard, that is owned by the government of the Marxist Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

The entire Fox report, “With Haiti in Ruins, Some U.N. Relief Workers Live Large on 'Love Boat,’” which has links to the researcher’s sources, makes for interesting reading.

“The worst-kept secret in Haiti: the UN's cruise ship hotel,” another online article about the UN-charter cruise ships posted on April 7 by Terra Daily’s staff writers, referred to a small office located in the UN’s logistics base in Port au Prince, where UN staff can sign up to stay on the Sea Voyager for a “heavily subsidized” rate of 40 dollars a night, including breakfast and dinner.

"It's the best deal in town," the report quoted a UN worker who told AFP on condition of anonymity, who said the usual rate should be around 150 dollars.

A UN coordinator who moved to the Sea Voyager after her house was destroyed by the earthquake told AFP she was happy because she had stopped working endless hours and sleeping in her office and that:

"Obviously some people are complaining because it is a long way away, 40 minutes by bus, but it's great, how can we complain, we have air-con, we have food, the mosquitos are under control.”

The report quoted Richard Morse, the owner of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson, who gave the following opinioin:

"If the UN is living on a cruise ship, it is the perfect metaphor for how they are viewed here in the country. If they think quake refugees should be living on cruise ships, then they should get cruise ships for the Haitian people, that's all I'm saying. Unless of course I am misinterpreting this and they really are better than Haitians."

Sarah Muscroft, the deputy head of mission for the UN's Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), offered the official reason that the ships were being used to house UN staff — because member states insisted on safe housing for staff.

"That is the reason why there is a boat here because the member states have basically said you have to have our nationals who work for you in non-prefab buildings," she said.

The story is not so surprising, considering that the UN and its agencies have become well-funded bureaucracies and have become subject to the excesses characteristic of all such bureaucracies. One could imagine the uproar if members of Christian relief agencies wallowed in luxury while the poor peasants were housed in tents and packing crates.

But the greatest danger presented by the UN is not that it’s staff members may prefer to stay on “The Love Boat,” instead of a shanty in Port au Prince. It is that the world body’s members states (including the United States) have consistently surrendered more and more of their national sovereignty to the UN, including control of their own national defense.

The process can only be reversed by the world’s nations withdrawing from the UN. The impoverished refugees of the world could be better served by private and church-based relief agencies.

Warren Mass is editor of the Bulletin of The John Birch Society.

UN sinks $$ into Haiti 'love boat'

The United Nations is spending more than $10 million to house some of its Haiti relief workers on a pair of chartered cruise ships -- one of which has been dubbed "the Love Boat" by UN staff.

And some of the funds are going to a company closely linked to the government of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, FOXNews.com reported yesterday.

Accountability in Aid

Aid Agencies, the United Nations, and Food Aid to the Republic of Georgia

By Till Bruckner

Till Bruckner has years of experience working with aid agencies in the Republic of Georgia and Afghanistan, including delivering WFP emergency food aid in Afghanistan. Between September 2008 and May 2009, he was the Aid Monitoring Coordinator of Transparency International Georgia. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on accountability and corruption in international aid to Georgia at the University of Bristol, UK. The views in this paper are those of the author alone, and in no way should be taken to reflect the position of Transparency International Georgia, the University of Bristol, or Global Governance Watch®. [tillbruckner@gmail.com]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In August 2008, the Republic of Georgia and Russia fought a brief but bitter war that made headlines around the world. Several days of intense fighting left hundreds of people dead. Tens of thousands of Georgians were forced to flee their homes and suddenly found themselves displaced within their own country. As Russian troops took up positions near Georgia’s capital and the republic’s economy teetered on the brink of collapse, the future of the Georgian state itself suddenly seemed in question.

The United States and the European Union were determined not to let Georgia disintegrate. The country has less than five million inhabitants, but it sits astride the only pipeline that directly links Caspian oil and gas fields with Western markets. Furthermore, the Bush administration had repeatedly hailed the Georgian government as a democratic success story and a key ally in the region.

Driven by strategic considerations and humanitarian concerns, international donors pledged to provide $4.5 billion in aid to Georgia. As part of the overall aid package, millions of dollars were to be used to provide emergency food aid to tens of thousands of Georgians who had been affected by the fighting, including many who had been forced to flee their homes during the conflict and were now internally displaced.

This report addresses the transparency and accountability of four aid agencies – CARE, the International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC), Save the Children and World Vision – and the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) during their provision of food aid to conflict-affected people in the Republic of Georgia in 2008-2009. After a brief section providing some background information on food aid in general and the specifics of the Georgian situation, this study briefly presents three case studies:

1. The size of food rations distributed by the World Food Program (WFP) and four NGOs

2. The size of quality of food rations distributed by the WFP and four NGOs

3. An information hotline for aid recipients publicized by WFP

The report concludes that the UN and four charities used donor money to distribute insufficient, inappropriate and in some case useless food rations to thousands of Georgians traumatized by war and displacement without being subsequently called to account. The three case studies document how food aid delivery in Georgia breached the following four global standards governing emergency aid:

• Sphere (Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response) standards (WFP and all four NGOs)

• Humanitarian Accountability Partnership standards (CARE and World Vision only)

• InterAction standards (CARE, IOCC, Save the Children, World Vision)

• Code of Conduct for NGOs in Disaster Relief (WFP and all four NGOs)

The report concludes with a discussion of current accountability deficits in international aid.

BACKGROUND: FOOD AID AND GEORGIA

In the wake of the war between the Republic of Georgia and Russia in August 2008, at a conference in Brussels in October 2008,1 international donors pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Georgia2 to be disbursed over a period of three years. One billion dollars of this money was pledged by the United States, making it the largest donor to Georgia. Food aid, priced at $20 million for a six-month period, was only a small part of the overall aid package. The largest donor for food aid has been the US, followed by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) and over a dozen other donors.

Georgia is unusual amongst aid recipient nations as it has a functioning government strongly supported by some Western countries and a comparatively good port, road and railway infrastructure. Georgian citizens differ from most aid beneficiaries in that they are universally literate, have access to the media, and have the possibility of holding their national government accountable through democratic elections. These factors make Georgia a best-case scenario for aid and development work.

The World Food Program (WFP), a United Nations agency that describes itself as “the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide,” with around 10,000 employees providing food to more than 100 million people every year,3 had already been working in Georgia for several years when the war broke out. Dozens of international NGOs – including the four discussed in this study – also already had offices in the country. In the wake of the war, WFP and the NGOs started delivering emergency humanitarian assistance in addition to continuing work on their longstanding development projects.

In line with standard operational procedures, donors transferred funds for food aid to WFP, which then procured the food globally through tenders issued by its headquarters in Rome. (Donors may also directly provide WFP with food, rather than with cash, but this was rarely the case in post-war Georgia.) WFP headquarters organized delivery up to the Georgian border, while WFP’s Georgian country office was responsible for transport and delivery inside the country.

Around the world, WFP regularly subcontracts NGOs to deliver food aid directly to people in need. In Georgia, it sub-contracted four large international NGOs: CARE, the International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC), Save the Children and World Vision. The food was delivered to people displaced by the conflict, and to residents of the so-called “Buffer Zone,” a rural area where much of the fighting had taken place. In total, the war had temporarily displaced over 130,000 people inside Georgia. While most of these had been able to return home by the end of 2008, up to 30,000 people are expected to remain displaced in the long term. As of March 2010, WFP and the four aid agencies discussed in this study are still working with conflict-affected people in Georgia.

CASE ONE: FOOD RATION QUANTITY

As an organization operating on a global level, WFP has a standardized approach towards food aid. Around the world, food parcels should contain the equivalent of 2,100 kilocalories (kcals) per day per beneficiary. In each country, parcels are adjusted according to the availability and price of food and beneficiary preference. In Georgia, WFP’s standard parcel – which may have varied occasionally due to breaks in the food supply pipeline4 – was heavily based on wheat products.5

Standard WFP food ration in Georgia

The Sphere project, which aims to improve the quality of assistance to people affected by disaster and to improve the accountability of states and humanitarian agencies, has developed a handbook that sets out minimum standards and key indicators for a variety of sectors within emergency humanitarian relief, including food aid.6 WFP was heavily involved in drafting the food standards section of the Sphere handbook.7

At first glance, the WFP food parcel makeup in Georgia seems to follow the 2,100 kcals per person per day basic global standards set by the Sphere project. However, the Sphere manual (pp. 189-191) clearly states that food rations must be increased if:

o “the mean ambient temperature is less than 20°C [68°F]” [and/or]

o “the mean body weight for adult males exceeds 60kg[132lb] and the mean body weight for adult females exceeds 52kg [115lb]”

The mean ambient temperature – inside beneficiaries’ dwellings as well as outdoors – during the snowy Georgian winter is well below 20°C (68° Fahrenheit). While relevant statistical data is not available, mean body weights in Georgia are above the benchmarks set by Sphere. Georgians’ minimum daily requirements therefore exceeded 2,100 kcals. However, during the winter of 2008-2009, WFP and its NGO sub-contractors, in a context of plentiful donor funding for emergency food aid and a fully functional national transport infrastructure, did not appear to meet the adjusted global Sphere standards that WFP itself had played a lead role in developing.

There are also questions whether the unadjusted food rations met the standards of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP),8 of which two of the four NGOs (CARE and World Vision) are members.9 HAP’s “principles of humanitarian action” include a commitment to “ensuring that humanitarian assistance meets or exceeds recognised minimum standards pertaining to the wellbeing of the intended beneficiaries.”

It appears that neither the Georgian government nor international donors realized at first that WFP and the four NGOs were delivering food parcels that fell short of the minimum needs of those affected by the war. The situation was not rectified until February 2009, when – in an unrelated development – the UN distributed plastic cards to food aid beneficiaries (see also below). With these cards, beneficiaries could withdraw a small monthly cash allowance for “supplementary food” to top up their rations. The supplementary food money, while welcomed, was not distributed to correct the problem of insufficient rations. It was already in the pipeline, intended to allow beneficiaries to buy some fruit and vegetables to top up their food packages with fresh produce. Instead, some beneficiaries had to use it to meet basic requirements such as flour and oil rather than buy fresh produce as intended. During meetings in Tbilisi, after the embarrassing incident became an issue, WFP argued that rations had been sufficient to meet minimum standards because people had this extra money. This turn of events was totally coincidental, however. Otherwise, the affected Georgians might still have been without sufficient rations the following winter.

CASE TWO: FOOD RATION QUALITY

Beginning shortly after the crisis began, the WFP began distributing wheat flour to the needy residents with no incidents. Then in early 2009, using its global procurement system, WFP purchased 1,800 tons of wheat flour from a supplier in Turkey and began distributing it. While the flour complied with WFP procurement standards and was theoretically fit for human consumption, it could not be used to make Georgian bread due to a problem with the flour’s gluten index. When people tried to bake bread using the newly procured batch of flour, they found that the bread turned hard, making it barely edible. Mixing this flour with flour from other sources did not solve the problem. The absence of edible bread left thousands of people with a huge calorie gap.

Despite being aware of the problem, WFP together with its NGO subcontractors CARE, World Vision, Save the Children and IOCC continued distributing this flour over a period of weeks. In total, 800 metric tons of the flour costing over half a million dollars were distributed to tens of thousands of people before WFP finally ordered a halt to the distribution.10 To put this figure into context, the 800,000 kilograms were the equivalent of about 20% of all tonnage distributed by WFP between the outbreak of the August 2008 war and the end of that year, and the equivalent of the flour content of 1.6 million individual daily rations.

The flour scandal briefly made headlines in the Georgian media on March 2, 2009, when members of the opposition Labor Party conducted a self-styled “monitoring visit” to a conflict-affected area. At a press conference, Paata Jibladze, Labor Party Executive Secretary, strongly criticized aid efforts, blaming the government for a variety of problems, including that of the useless flour. A few days later, the Anti-Crisis Council, a body created by the President of Georgia to oversee international aid, summoned the Minister for Refugees and Accommodation, Koba Subeliani, for a televised questioning. According to council staff, they were aware that the ministry had not actually distributed the flour (about which they had received numerous complaints from IDPs), but that they were trying to hold the minister accountable on the basis that his ministry had signed a memorandum of understanding with UNHCR in which the ministry accepted responsibility for coordinating aid efforts to IDPs.11 During the hearing, the minister denied culpability, saying that the flour had been distributed by the United Nations, not by his ministry. The Anti-Crisis Council then wrote a letter to UNHCR, asking it to clarify the flour controversy.12 Somewhat unsurprisingly, UNHCR never responded to this letter, as it had nothing to do with the matter.

The WFP and its partner NGOs were fully aware of the problem with the flour but downplayed its significance. WFP’s original draft for the minutes of a food security cluster meeting held on March 12, 2009, read:

“WFP mentioned the current wheat flour issue; while the quality and fitness for human consumption is good, there is an issue with the gluten index which results in poor performance when bread is baked. WFP is working on finding out more and on how to prevent this in the future. But since the flour is perfectly fit for human consumption, WFP is not planning to take back the distributed tonnages.”

When the draft minutes were circulated for review and comments on March 16, 2009, the author of this study replied to the responsible WFP staff member on the same day by email and suggested the following addition, based on comments he had made at the meeting itself:

“Anecdotal reports from the field suggest that some IDPs [internally displaced persons] are using the wheat flour as animal feed because they cannot use it to bake bread.”

WFP did not include the suggested addition in the final version of the minutes, published on March 20, 2009.13 Distributing food commodities that are technically safe to eat, but that beneficiaries in practice cannot use to prepare meals constitutes a clear violation of Sphere standards (pp. 157-163):

o “The food items provided are appropriate and acceptable to recipients and can be used efficiently at the household level.”

o “There are no complaints concerning difficulties in storing, preparing, cooking or consuming the food distributed.”

o “There are no verifiable complaints about the quality of food distributed... recipients’ complaints about food quality should be followed up promptly and handled in a transparent and fair manner.”

All four aid agencies working with WFP in Georgia quietly continued distributing the flour for many weeks after they had learned that beneficiaries could not properly use it to bake bread. This arguably violated several standards set out by InterAction,14 an umbrella association of aid agencies that CARE, IOCC, Save the Children, and World Vision all belong to. CARE and World Vision, members of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP), also appear to have violated numerous clauses in HAP’s “principles of humanitarian actions”.

Even after the distributions were halted, and better quality flour was obtained and distributed, WFP never launched an additional distribution round to fill the gap it had left in people’s food supply, nor did it issue an explanation to the government or the intended beneficiaries. All four aid agencies working with WFP in Georgia continued distributing the flour long after they learnt that beneficiaries could not use it to bake bread.

CASE THREE: INFORMATION HOTLINE

In February 2009, WFP in collaboration with two other UN agencies issued plastic cash cards (see Case One) to food aid beneficiaries.15 In a press release, the UN agencies took credit for the cash transfer program, mentioning that it was being implemented “in collaboration with” the Ministry of Refugees and Accommodation (MRA) and a second government agency. WFP had signed memoranda of understanding with both of them. The release further stated that “a special hotline is operating within the MRA to address questions that may arise during the Program implementation... posters and leaflets were printed and disseminated among the beneficiaries to ensure full visibility and transparency of the Program”. The release concluded with the contact details of all three UN agencies involved, but did not give contact details for the MRA.16

The posters and leaflets distributed to beneficiaries prior to issuing the cards prominently featured the logos of WFP and the other two UN organizations, but did not give any contact details for WFP or its sister agencies. Instead, the contact information provided to beneficiaries was that of an MRA telephone hotline, even though the UN knew, or should have known, that this hotline was understaffed and unable to handle a large amount of phone calls as it had been set up by the ministry with the help of the UN.17

Because the WFP did not provide its contact details to beneficiaries or set up an independent hotline, beneficiaries were not in a position to effectively file complaints if their entitlements to food were not met. The move confused beneficiaries as to who was actually responsible for executing the program. When problems emerged during flour distribution (see above), beneficiaries were unable to voice their complaints to WFP; the MRA hotline never became functional. As a result, the frustrations of those Georgians who became dissatisfied with the program’s implementation were redirected away from the responsible agency, WFP, and towards the MRA and the government.

DISCUSSION: AID AGENCY ACCOUNTABILITY

In theory, international aid agencies are accountable to a variety of stakeholders, including private and institutional donors, their beneficiaries, the governments of the countries they work in, and the wider aid community. In practice, as the three case studies above illustrate, aid agencies are often not accountable to key stakeholders.

Accountability to Private Donors

Private donors in wealthy countries simply lack the information needed to hold aid and development NGOs to account for how their donations are used thousands of miles away. The only information available to small private donors is that which is voluntarily provided by the NGOs themselves, who are extremely reluctant to open their books to scrutiny. When contacted by the author of this study, WFP and the four aid agencies would not release the Field Level Agreements governing their relationship, making it impossible to determine how much aid money WFP pays to NGOs for distributing food. The four NGOs are required by the Code of Conduct for NGOs in Disaster Relief18 (which WFP seems to require sub- contracting NGOs to follow19) and by InterAction standards20 to grant public access to these agreements.

Accountability to Citizens of Donor Countries

US citizens concerned about the use of their tax dollars abroad may find it equally hard to discover how NGOs awarded grants by USAID are spending their money.21 The author of this study filed a Freedom of Information Act request with USAID in May 2009, requesting copies of all NGO project budgets financed with American taxpayers’ money during the second half of 2008.22 Nine months later, USAID has still not provided the requested budgets.

Accountability to Institutional Donors

Institutional donors like USAID usually do have a presence on the ground in developing countries, but rarely directly monitor NGO activities in the field. Instead, they usually, though not always, rely on information provided by their grantees. As the flour donation incident illustrates, this information may not always be fully reliable. (It is unclear to the author whether any donor actually noticed that the flour that was being distributed was nearly inedible.) Interviews with dozens of donor and NGO representatives in Georgia, Afghanistan and Tajikistan conducted by the author suggest that neither NGOs nor donor country offices have an incentive to document instances in which aid money is stolen, wasted or unwisely spent. Projects are almost invariably portrayed as successful, irrespective of realities on the ground.

Accountability to the Aid Community

Aid organizations have responded to concerns about their lack of accountability through a variety of initiatives and mechanisms intended to create mutual accountability within the aid community. Four such initiatives – Sphere, HAP, InterAction and the Code of Conduct for NGOs in Disaster Relief – have been touched upon in this study.23 At least in this instance, a comparison of NGO declarations on paper with NGO actions in practice reveals that these standards do not adequately guide NGOs’ operations on the ground. There are two main reasons for this:

1. These initiatives lack teeth. No participant in any of these initiatives has a vested interest in holding the other participants accountable for their actions. Membership organizations like InterAction often appear to be more focused on protecting their institutional interests and their members. In contrast, those who do have a substantial vested interest in holding NGOs accountable – people directly affected by aid projects – do not have the information or skills needed to hold aid organizations accountable through these initiatives. As the first two case studies suggest, even clear and explicit technical standards can be disregarded by NGOs without triggering adverse consequences.

2. Because these initiatives lack teeth, they are almost universally ignored in practice. Senior staff members at NGOs’ global headquarters readily sign up to noble-sounding initiatives and commit their organizations to meeting certain standards, but there is little subsequent follow-up. Few field-level aid workers are aware of the various commitments that their organizations have made.

Accountability to Host Governments

Host governments in developing countries rarely hold international NGOs accountable for their activities. Partly this stems from a lack of interest, as NGO projects typically do not receive funding from host governments. In the rare cases in which host governments do try to hold the UN and NGOs accountable, they frequently lack the capacity to do so effectively. As the flour incident illustrates, the government of Georgia, which is far more capable than most governments in the developing world, was unable to effectively take action on numerous complaints from citizens. While the literature on aid is full of examples of host governments trying to take credit for the achievements of international aid and shifting blame for failures to international actors, the case studies above suggest that sometimes the reverse can also be true.

Accountability to Beneficiaries

There is currently much discussion in the development field about the need to make NGOs accountable towards their beneficiaries. The three case studies presented here show that the rhetoric of ‘downwards accountability’ is not always paralleled by implementation in the field. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Aid organizations lack institutional incentives to make themselves accountable to beneficiaries. NGOs live off private donations and government grants, so beneficiary satisfaction is irrelevant to organizational growth and survival. NGOs have a vested interest in presenting themselves as accountable to beneficiaries in their publications in order to keep funds pouring in, but have no incentives to actually follow through on their words in a meaningful way. Beneficiaries have little to no power to influence NGOs’ actions.

2. Beneficiaries lack the information to hold NGOs accountable. For example, most Georgians receiving food aid come from villages and do not speak English. Faced with a confusing array of foreign acronyms written in an alien alphabet, they do not know (and frequently do not care) which NGO delivers what aid. Beneficiaries in Georgia were generally unaware of which organization had provided their food and who had delivered it. Equally, despite Sphere standards (pp. 162-178) explicitly mandating the provision of such information, beneficiaries did not know when to expect the next delivery, or whether there would be a next delivery at all. Whether intentionally or not, NGOs can skirt accountability to beneficiaries by failing to identify themselves, not providing contact details, or leaving beneficiaries in the dark about their entitlements.

CONCLUSION: ACCOUNTABILITY IN AID

This study has found that during the crisis in Georgia––a best-case scenario of a functioning government, a literate society, and considerable international media and donor attention–– international aid and development agencies often breached international standards governing emergency relief and lacked accountability. The UN and its partner agencies might very well respond to this assertion by claiming that the food relief program was largely helpful and that there will always be some problems in complicated emergency response situations. To put these events in context, however, it might be helpful to draw an analogy to what the media and policy response would be in the United States if the government had knowingly distributed 800 tons of inedible food to hurricane victims over a period of weeks.

That such problems do not happen more often is due less to residual safeguards in the aid system, but more to the strong personal commitment, dedication and integrity of many individual aid workers. Time and again, frontline aid agency employees manage to make a positive difference to the lives of people in need. Whenever aid delivered by NGOs ‘works’, it is often not because of, but despite, the sometimes dysfunctional aid system that these individuals have to work through.

Launching yet another NGO-to-NGO mutual accountability initiative likely would be fruitless. Many standards have already been formulated. The problem is not a lack of standards and codes of conduct, but follow-up, enforcement and sanctioning related to those standards that already exist. As the examples above suggest, oversight by institutional donors such as USAID is inherently difficult because institutional incentives reward donor country offices for reporting successes and punish them for highlighting failures. Adding more of the same by encumbering NGOs that are already drowning in bureaucratic requirements with even more red tape could reduce the ability of committed NGO field workers to assist those in need, and would likely do little to address inefficiencies.

NGO project budgets are the single exception to this rule. USAID could require all grant recipients to post their proposed project budgets online before funding is released. These budgets already exist as part of the formal project proposals, so posting them would require negligible additional effort by NGOs. At a minimum, this would act as a constraint on some NGOs’ tendency to pay grossly inflated tax-free salaries to their international staff. However, as Transparency International Georgia’s experience has shown, any such initiative might be resisted by NGOs, and probably also by USAID itself, and is therefore unlikely to succeed in the absence of serious and sustained Congressional pressure.

Raising NGO accountability towards beneficiaries may hold out the greatest hope of improving accountability in international aid. However, in order to have real effects, such accountability must be backed by beneficiaries’ ability to effectively sanction NGOs when their performance fails short of expectations.