By Sam Mednick
From the article:
JUBA, South Sudan — In April, one of Angelina Nyajima Simon’s staff members was shot when an armed group ambushed the NGO-marked car he was traveling in back to a United Nations base in northern South Sudan. He died instantly. It was the first time the executive director lost a staffer since founding Hope Restoration South Sudan eight years ago.
After he was killed, a devastated Simon reached out to her local aid organization’s international partner, Norwegian People’s Aid, to ask if the group could provide financial support and compensation for the family. The Norwegian humanitarian organization replied that there was little they could do because it wasn’t part of their working agreement, she said.
“I felt bad [hearing this], it’s as if they didn’t care about our lives,” Simon said.
In the end, NPA helped return the victim’s body to his family, but they were unable to financially compensate his three wives and eight children. To date, Hope Restoration has paid $8,000 to the family.
At least 107 aid workers, all of them local, have been killed in South Sudan since the country erupted in fighting five years ago, making it the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarians to operate for three years in a row, according to research by Humanitarian Outcomes. Some local organizations, such as Hope Restoration, say they don’t feel they’re well-equipped with security training or adequately funded to purchase the resources that would make their operations safer — yet they commonly find themselves on the frontlines of the conflict.
A partner’s responsibility
At the start of any new project, NPA conducts a thorough contextual analysis, which includes identifying potential risks while encouraging an ongoing dialogue with its partners about how to alleviate them, said Grant Pritchard, country director for NPA in South Sudan.
The organization doesn’t provide compensation for families of deceased for its implementing partners and says it’s up to each group to establish practices to support staff and their families if something happens. The group wasn’t contractually obligated to charter a flight and return the deceased Hope Restoration staff member to his family for burial, but covered the costs as an act of compassion, Pritchard told Devex.
It’s not uncommon for the burden of security to fall to individual NGOs, but “it's a tough question because [local NGOs] and [international NGOs] have fairly different risk profiles,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and a former senior official at the United States Agency for International Development. While international organizations tend to be more overt targets for violence, as they’re perceived to have greater wealth, it makes sense to better train and equip local organizations’ security capacity in high-risk environments, he said.
Even though local aid groups have gained greater recognition than they had 10 years ago, Konyndyk said the power dynamics remain uneven. The imbalance is clearest during response at the field level, James Keah, founder of Universal Intervention and Development Organisation, a local NGO in South Sudan, added.
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