Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted once again that the humanitarian business model is poorly suited to today’s world. Humanitarian action is most effective when it is demand-driven and locally owned. But the humanitarian sector remains supply-driven: oriented primarily around donor preference and the global mandates of large aid agencies.
Coordination is essential to effective humanitarian action. But as a recent policy paper argues, the cluster system struggles with persistent weaknesses. To understand the impacts of this model at the local level, Patrick Saez spoke with May Kayali, executive director of Pekawa in Iraq about her experiences of humanitarian coordination. Below is their exchange.
Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the multilateral aid system continues to face a vexing challenge: how best to align international support with locally-driven expertise, capacity, and priorities?
Longstanding weaknesses in the humanitarian business model are undermining the COVID-19 response in fragile and conflict affected states. Extensive delays, poor mechanisms for tracking disbursement of funds from intermediaries to implementers, and persistent obstacles to financing local actors are preventing funds from reaching organizations on the frontlines of the COVID-19 fight. Donor governments have generously contributed nearly $2.5bn in humanitarian COVID-19 financing.
This is a crisis of truly global scale and it will place enormous constraints on traditional humanitarian operations.
Is the humanitarian system broke or broken?
The political and economic crisis in Venezuela has caused the biggest population movement in recent Latin American history. Support from the international community has predominantly focused on short-term humanitarian assistance, which will remain important for the most vulnerable Venezuelans. However, in what has become a protracted displacement crisis, it is also essential to shift to a longer-term vision and approach underpinned by development finance.
Criminalizing humanitarian aid to refugees and migrants has not only failed, it is also causing unnecessary deaths and suffering. The recent agreement last month by 14 EU member states to a new “solidarity mechanism” to allocate migrants and refugees rescued at sea is a welcome development.
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