Down But Not Out in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan – Skateistan is a media darling. The nonprofit organization teaches young Afghans to skateboard and has been lauded in dozens of major radio, video, print and online outlets across four continents.

Still it teeters on the brink.

"We spent the last few months doing a lot of press and the attention is really great, but the fact is, we're broke," said Director Oliver Percovich in September, sitting on a shabby couch in the sparsely furnished Skateistan headquarters. "Getting funding is not easy, especially when you don't have a great deal of experience at it."

Ever since Percovich and Sharna Nolan, his girlfriend and a fellow Australian, first dropped their skateboards on a Kabul sidewalk in early 2007, they've been swarmed with interest - from local kids, the press and, more recently, potential donors. But turning those good vibes into money - and establishing Skateistan as a stable and valuable organization - has been a stickier proposition.

Dancing with donors

Kabul is home to an estimated 60,000 street kids. Illiteracy is rife, along with crime and drug addiction. In an effort to improve some of those young, precarious lives, Skateistan has been offering free skateboarding lessons several times a week at an empty fountain not far from central Kabul. But no funding and minimal equipment limits what it can do.

Thus Percovish and Nolan are trying to build an indoor skate school that offers free skateboarding and that will expand into personal health education, English-language courses, computer skills classes and arts instruction. The duo prepared a few polished funding proposals and has since mid-2007 been knocking on the doors of nearly every major donor - from the United States and Canada to England, Germany, Australia and several arms of the United Nations.

"Everyone expresses interest," Percovich said. "But when it comes to donating even $10, it's been a lot more difficult."

Nolan has been spearheading Skateistan's fundraising efforts, wielding the knowledge she gained during a year working for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank, and on a rural project funded by the U.N. Development Program. She put together a proposal requesting $45,000 to build an indoor skate school and submitted it to the U.S. Agency for International Development via a friend - a consultant working under USAID's Assistance to Small and Medium Enterprises Development project. Nolan had come across consultants of ASMED, which funds locally-driven business projects with up to $50,000, while working with UNDP in Herat.

"They have millions and require minimal reporting and supervision, which was perfect for the Afghan management in Skateistan," Nolan said via e-mail from Darwin, Australia, where she is working on a government-backed community water project. "They deliver funds much faster than major donors and can be more flexible in their outlook. The only catch was that they needed an economic component to the proposal which we thought could be filled with merchandising."

Skateistan failed to quickly put together a compelling merchandising component and the proposal was turned down. A representative of USAID, which tends to fund much larger projects, told Devex that Skateistan "doesn't really fit into any of our objectives."

Despite the fact that Percovich and Nolan are Australian, making contact with their own government has been a long, strange trip. In early 2008 they applied for a direct assistance program. Months later they were turned down. Then Percovich, after dozens of calls and e-mails, wrangled a meeting with the Australian consul, who told him the Australian government was considering pitching in - not with money but with free shipping assistance.

Other governments have been more accessible. The Canadian aid arm expressed interest for months without settling on a funding amount. In September the Deutsche Entwicklungsdienst, the German aid agency, expressed its desire to pay the wages of one full-time Skateistan employee. A recent visit to the Norwegian embassy was promising.

"The Norwegian ambassador gave me an hour of his time," said Percovich of a meeting set up with the help of a friend of Nolan's. "That was really fantastic of them. They expressed interest, support, but what that will mean in the future I have no idea."

The Afghan government promised a free plot of land if Skateistan wins funding to build their skate school. In May, Percovich found an ideal spot in Wazir Akhbar Khan, an upscale, heavily patrolled neighborhood popular with embassies and expats. The Afghan government was supportive until August, when they gave the plot to the government of Kuwait.

"I'm guessing they represented a good deal more money than we do," Percovich said.

For the major donors, Nolan believes Skateistan's size has been a disadvantage.

"As there is the same reporting requirements no matter what they give, it's to their advantage to give larger grants rather than smaller ones to save on administrative costs and paperwork," Nolan said. "Two people with big hearts and the support of dozens of kids and the broader community often can't compete against the big giants on paper."

A bit of good news

The tide may be starting to turn. In August and September Skateistan raised nearly 2,000 euros from the sale of skateboarding photos and t-shirts and two fundraisers, one in Germany and another in Australia. More recently a private Austrian donor pledged another 2,000 euros. Weeks later Electronic Arts, the American video game giant, did the same.

As of early October the pledges had yet to arrive.

But donated goods have poured in. An Australian sporting goods firm donated safety equipment. Titus, a chain of sporting goods and skate shops in Germany, will donate to Skateistan all second-hand boards sold by customers to the store from July to November. DHL has pledged $15,000 worth of shipping fees to transport goods from Germany to Afghanistan.

In late September, Percovich began to receive offers of assistance from the type of international NGOs - People in Need and Mercy Corps, namely - that USAID tends to fund. Representatives of both organizations told him they'd help find funders.

And finally, in early October, a breakthrough: the Canadian International Development Agency donated $15,000 and the Norwegian aid arm promised $30,000. Percovich was ecstatic as he left for several charity events in Germany.

"I've learned that the people who've been here three, four or more years are really impressed with what we've done because they know how difficult it is to get anything done here," Percovich said. "It's a matter of getting to the right people and hopefully we'll get there."

Still, total costs have exceeded $15,000 and Skateistan is barely scraping by. A web of charity and Percovich's personal savings keep the organization afloat. Tired of working for no pay, staffers have begun to leave.

"It's not exactly the easiest thing for an Afghan to be a volunteer on this type of project," Percovich said. "The employees we have at the moment - I don't know how long we can keep them without pay."

Costs will rise during the coming Kabul winter. Outdoor skate venues will freeze. And relationships will be strained. One already reached the breaking point: Though they remain friends and working partners, Nolan and Percovich broke off their three-year relationship this summer.

A sustainable vision

Some have questioned Skateistan's sustainability. On this issue, Percovich and Nolan still speak with one voice.

Both admit that the whole plan hinges on building the skate park. Once that's done the school would require about $1,200 per month in donations to operate as they envision. The school would be run by Afghans and a couple international volunteers. Kids would sign up for sessions and borrow equipment, all without charge. They would be required to take care of the space and the equipment, which many already do at the current space, an empty fountain in north Kabul.

"We are confident that the Afghans can manage things pretty much themselves," Nolan said. "A lot will fall on the shoulders of the project volunteers. We have no shortage of students who are keen as mustard to volunteer. The kids already sweep the fountains where we skate and are caring for the boards - it's part of the life skill training."

Percovish and Nolan hope donor interest will at some point come to fruition. Dozens of Afghan students, teachers and artists have offered to help, in various capacities. Photo and t-shirts sales represent a slow-growing revenue stream.

"There are some other ideas for business development but first and foremost is the development of social capital that allows youth in Kabul to create opportunities for themselves and solve their problems," Percovich said. "Money hasn't solved many problems in Afghanistan and it is high time to try another approach. Aid has focused on providing money when a simple link with the right person would have sufficed. Intangible assets in society are frequently ignored or undervalued simply because they are hard to value. They do make a hell of a lot of difference, though."

An uncertain future

Inside a nondescript warehouse in Melbourne, 40 new skateboards, 50 pairs of sneakers and a variety of skating supplies sit shrink-wrapped on a palette because Skateistan cannot afford the $1,200 shipping costs.

On a late afternoon in September, meanwhile, a couple dozen Afghan children made do with torn sandals, no kneepads and two beat-up skateboards. They laughed, smiled and tried out a few new tricks, but some grew frustrated with the long wait for their turn.

Kids drifted off in twos and threes as an egg-shaped, red-orange sun sank low. A couple of girls lingered, one pushing her friend across the sidewalk on a skateboard. "Could I have the board back?" Percovich asked, reaching his hand out.

The girls pushed away from him, laughing. He and an assistant chased them down and gently took the skateboard as the girls whined playfully.

With that, darkness fell on Kabul.

-- posted on devex.com on October 20.

A Man of the Soil

By David Lepeska

Agronomist Stephen Carr gauges the degree of hunger stalking the Malawian countryside by opening his front door. “In a bad year I have 12 starving people on my doorstep every morning begging for food,” said Carr, who has lived in a cabin on Zomba mountain in southern Malawi since 1989. “This last year I had two old ladies in a month.”

As Carr’s stoop can attest, two bountiful maize harvests have filled stomachs and cupboards across this devastatingly poor sliver of southern Africa. Malawi exported a record 280,000 tons of maize last fall and felt generally flush for the first time in recent memory – a direct result of a bold new government-run fertilizer subsidies program.

Although loathe to take any credit, this humble octogenarian used his intimate knowledge of Malawian smallholder farming, his familiarity with the donor community and his aggressive charm to reduce donor opposition to the subsidies that helped the farmers buy the fertilizer that enriched the soil that grew the maize that overturned received wisdom in Washington.

Stumbling toward success

After graduating from London University in 1952, Carr moved to Sudan and began working with small-scale farmers. Years later Carr moved with his wife to Uganda, where they worked as agricultural missionaries and had two children. “We were extremely happily settled,” said Carr.

So much so that in 1971 he was considering an application for Ugandan citizenship when the Obote government was overthrown. The underlings of new strong-armed dictator Idi Amin Dada learned of Carr’s efforts to relocate locals to more fertile lands. “Without asking anybody they assumed that I was organizing a guerrilla camp to overthrow the government,” he said. “We grabbed our family and we escaped.”

Thus began the institutional mid-section of his career, from agricultural adviser posts with the governments of Sudan and Tanzania to a position with the world’s foremost development institution. “I joined the World Bank almost by accident,” Carr said of his hiring.

In mid-1978 the bank needed someone familiar with southern Sudan, its languages, farming and traditions, and it settled on Carr, who had spent two dozen years living in huts in African villages. “The bank found me moderately useful and so eventually I finished up as principal agriculturalist for all of sub-Saharan Africa,” Carr remembered. He also won the Royal African Society’s medal for “dedicated services to Africa” and became an Officer of the British Empire along the way.

In 1989 Carr approached retirement age in the World Bank and was anxious to get back to village-level work. He had planned to return to Uganda but had second thoughts. “I was sent to Malawi by the bank half a dozen times and encountered the worst poverty, and the most intransigent agricultural problems that I’d seen anywhere on the continent,” he recalled. “I decided I’d be of more use here than Uganda.”

A second career

In Malawi, Carr had a mountain to conquer. “When I came here the opposition to a subsidy by WB and USAID was so strong that it was absolutely like a brick wall,” he said. Although small fertilizer subsidies were offered through the 1980s and into the ‘90s, donors refused to extend the policy and it soon ended.

After attempting several organic soil improvement techniques, Carr started a fertilizer-for-work program. Locals built access roads and implemented irrigation and reforestation projects in return for inputs – mostly fertilizer and seed. Even with support from USAID and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, “it just became apparent at the end of ten years that we were not getting anywhere near the number of people on board, that this was never going to feed the country,” Carr recalled. “So I just switched my efforts.”

That switch occurred just before a devastating harvest in 2005, which prompted newly elected President Bingu wa Mutharika to reinstate and increase fertilizer subsidies despite staunch skepticism from the United States, Britain, and the World Bank. “As long as I’m president,” Mutharika famously declared, “I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food.”

The Malawi government turned to Carr to soften the international community’s opposition to Malawi’s fertilizer subsidies. Carr explained to major donors that at current prices the great majority of Malawians had no hope of buying fertilizer and thus little chance of feeding themselves without help.

Constant rejection spurred him on. At one event an American aid official told him the U.S. did not tolerate subsidies. Carr pounced. ”’Would you like to clarify,’” he asked her, ”’that while it’s perfectly alright for yellow, brown, or white people to be subsidized, you will not tolerate subsidies for black people?’” Carr recalled with a laugh. After another speech, a friend approached and told him he liked the subsidies idea but it wasn’t sustainable. “But 800,000 tons of famine relief every year is?” Carr responded.

“What one has to ram home to people is that there is not a third way,” he explained. “You either make inputs available to farmers so that they can grow their own food or you deny them the opportunity of growing enough food for themselves and you have hungry people and you stop them from actually starving by bringing in relief.”

The end of the rainbow

Over time Carr wore the opposition down, and President Mutharika’s subsidy plan went into effect in early 2006 with $8 million from the U.K.’s Department for International Development. The results have been staggering, with corn harvests nearly tripling from 1.2 million metric tons in 2005 to 3.4 million metric tons in 2007. Some, like U.S. ambassador Alan Eastham, believe the bountiful harvests are merely the result of good rains. But eight of the past 20 years witnessed as much precipitation as 2006 and 2007.

According to Carr the reason for success was simple: fertilizer became affordable for a larger portion of the population. The World Bank’s subsidy program of the 1980s and early ‘90s subsidized 35 percent of the fertilizer cost, enabling only the wealthiest quarter of the population to buy fertilizer. The new government-run plan, which subsidizes 70 percent of the cost, is affordable for two-thirds of the populace.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, now uses Malawi as Exhibit A in his “aid is good” argument. The country’s success has sparked a reappraisal of the value of farm basics — fertilizer, improved seed, and farmer education — and could ultimately become a tipping point for public support of fertilizer subsidies. Carr believes a few more good years would change donor minds.

Yet hurdles remain. The government has taken a staunch lead role, giving Malawi’s relatively mature private sector minimal involvement. This has meant slower distribution, according to Carr, but could become more problematic in the near future. USAID has demanded a greater role for the private sector as a condition of its acceptance of the subsidy program, which means continued governmental control could jeopardize the program.

Still, Malawi has undergone an economic sea change, as Carr’s empty front stoop can attest. Even more encouraging, a Malawian doctor recently reported an 80 percent drop in seriously malnourished children at his hospital.

Carr is happy to have played a part. “What I have done is act as a midwife,” he said. “It was Malawians did the hard labor.”

-- posted on devex.com on 18 May 2008

The Future of Farm Output in Africa and the Promising Case of Malawi

By David Lepeska

A food crisis grips the planet. Prices of rice, wheat and other essentials skyrocket, leading to food shortage riots in a dozen countries and jolting governments and policymakers to rethink their ideas about commodities markets, biofuels and agricultural production in the developing world. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said the losses could drop 100 million people back into extreme poverty, wiping out a decade of development gains. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran has called the crisis “the silent tsunami.”

Within this haystack of gloom shines the needle of Malawi, where a government-led fertilizer subsidies program has produced two bountiful maize harvests, filling stomachs and cupboards across this formerly destitute sliver of southern Africa. Last year Malawi exported 280,000 tons of maize as child malnutrition dropped an impressive 80 percent. And the good times are set to continue. Despite the global economic downturn the International Monetary Fund is forecasting nearly 8 percent growth for Malawi in 2008, as compared to 3.7 percent globally.

The success of Malawi’s subsidy program has overturned conventional donor wisdom and may have set an example for other African nations to follow. As we enter an era of high food prices, increasing Africa’s agricultural production is of greater urgency than ever before.

Few are more familiar with these issues than Uma Lele and Stephen Carr. In separate interviews and an e-mail discussion the duo discussed why the Malawi program worked, what it might mean for the policies of the World Bank and other major donors, and whether Malawi offers a replicable model.

Malawi and the problem of soil infertility

“The world is fed by inorganic fertilizer and good seed, and the only continent where that’s not being used is Africa,” said Carr, the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist for sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1980s. He has lived in Africa for more than 50 years and was instrumental in getting the Malawi subsidy program off the ground.

Low soil fertility contributes greatly to low agricultural productivity in Africa. China’s farmland boasts 279 kilograms of fertilizer nutrients per hectare. South Asia’s receives 113. Africa, on the other hand, makes due with 6 kilograms, a paltry sum considering only 6 percent of this vast continent's land has high agricultural potential.

“We’ve got to find ways of giving farmers access to fertilizer,” says Carr.

Malawi found a way, with Carr wearing down donor opposition and the government managing a comprehensive plan that covered 70 percent of the price of fertilizer. The impact was immediate and revelatory.

“This program succeeded because it made fertilizer affordable to the majority of the population,” Carr said. Because of import, distribution and marketing costs, Malawi’s pre-subsidy fertilizer is about 40 percent more expensive than that of the United States, and representative of sub-Saharan Africa. “What the 70 percent subsidy has done is bring the Malawian farmer to the same level playing field as the American farmer," he noted.

American farm subsidies have long been a target for critics of Western aid policies. If the United States, European Union and other Western nations removed all domestic subsidies and tariffs on imported cotton, soybeans and other oilseeds, the developing world’s share in these products would jump from its current 50 percent to more than 80 percent, according to some experts. And it’s not only wealthy Western nations that provide farmer hand-outs; India and China spend lavishly to boost production.

African nations are not so flush.

“What are these countries supposed to do when [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries are not reducing their subsidies?” wondered Lele. An agricultural economist, she worked at the World Bank for 35 years and has written extensively about funding of farm basics. The United States doles out $5.2 billion every year in direct subsidies to farmers, while fertilizer prices have doubled, even tripled, across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the past six months. “They’re facing a ridiculous world market situation; there isn’t a willingness to recognize the reality," Lele added.

Some experts recommend a policy shift akin to India's Green Revolution in the 1960s. As new high-yield varieties of rice and wheat were introduced, major donors encouraged the Indian government to provide their farmers with essential inputs – seed, fertilizer and credit. The government also set floor prices to ensure farmers a return on investment. The result was a decade of vigorous productivity growth in India, and robust public spending on agriculture across the developing world.

But in the 1980s huge farm surpluses from developed countries depressed prices and slashed farmer's profits. As a result, developing nations cut farm budgets in half between 1980 and 2004. Donor agricultural aid also dropped by half over the same period as production growth dropped two- to three-fold across the developing world.

As donors and governments begin to increase investment in developing world agriculture – part of a post-millennial push to reduce global poverty – the Malawian success story has become Exhibit A for the backers of farm funding.

The World Bank mulls its options

In recent years the World Bank has undergone a transformation far beyond the arrival of Zoellick as a replacement for the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz. As the single largest donor to African agriculture since 1990, the bank remaims integral to the future of farming in Africa. But on fertilizers and farm inputs it’s still dragging its feet.

The most recent edition of the World Bank's annual global review, the World Development Report (WDR), focuses on agriculture and argues that “subsidies must be used with caution,… [and] need to be part of a comprehensive strategy to improve productivity and must have credible exit options.”

However subsides are implemented, Lele believes donors hold far too much sway. “The reality is that donors have much more power in Africa than they did even in the heyday," when policies were much more holistic, she said.

In a December interview with National Public Radio, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Bank’s new managing director, acknowledged the bank had pushed political reforms abroad in the past. “The bank has changed dramatically from that period,” she said. Nowadays, “each country should take the lead.”

Carr agrees, in part. “The nature of the bank has changed a great deal,” he said. “With interest rates at up to 75 percent, little government oversight and no smallholder credit, the bank has been driven to get more involved in macro policies.”

These broader policies have led to diminishing returns, according to the latest report from World Bank watchdog the Internal Evaluation Group. It found that the donor community has neglected the agriculture sector and that the World Bank’s strategy for agriculture has increasingly been subsumed within a broader rural focus, limiting its success.

During the 1980s Carr used his technical knowledge on straightforward projects such as smallholder irrigation. “At that time the projects department had virtually nothing to do with policy,” he recalled. “I didn’t have to deal with the organization of whole governments.”

The IEG report found the importance of agriculture had declined, with a subsequent loss of technical skills. The bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department in sub-Saharan Africa had 17 technical workers in 2006, compared with 40 in 1997.

That loss of technical skill can be seen in bank policies that pay little heed to ground realities like widespread hunger. For example, according to the report the bank “appears to have addressed soil fertility more as an environmental than as an agricultural productivity issue.” As food shortages lead to starving and riotous populations across the developing world, that error looms ever larger.

Spending the right way

To feed those masses production must be increased, most likely via aggressive governmental involvement. But public spending on farm inputs such as fertilizer must be done with deliberation and foresight. The WDR warns of the dangers of politicians claiming ownership of the beneficial subsidy program as well as the dependence such programs can create.

Yet Malawi's current administration has taken the lion’s share of the credit for the good harvests resulting from its “boma,” or government, fertilizer – and watched its popularity soar.

What will President Mutharika do now that fertilizer prices have increased by 120 percent across southern Africa? Will he turn to donors he so recently spurned? And what if the price hike forces the discontinuation of the program – will Malawians again go hungry? If they do they will know where to point the finger.

Carr says greater private-sector involvement would have improved procurement and distribution in Malawi. Yet he believes African governments must fund farm basics to “maintain food production aligned with growth.” Risks – such as inadequate oversight, price fluctuation and corruption – will remain, and policies will vary from country to country. Regardless, implementation is paramount. “It depends how effectively the plans are carried out,” he said.

System design will be key, too.

“Developing national systems is very complex,” said Lele, adding that many developing countries require policy advice and help in building reliable institutions. Dedicated people who understand local traditions and farming techniques have to be part of any successful program. "Money is necessary but not sufficient to do those things," she noted.

Furthermore, funding for farm inputs link fertilizer and seed often have less impact today because the structure of international farm markets has fundamentally changed since the Green Revolution. Not only are prices of seed and fertilizer much higher, but credit is less readily available to farmers, particularly during the ongoing global credit crunch. Also, supermarkets account for half of food sales even in developing countries, further reducing farmer control over pricing. India will disburse $37 billion to farmers in fiscal 2008 - $15 billion to cover debt and $22 billion for fertilizer subsidies - an increase of 50 percent and not a scheme to be emulated in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa’s lack of funding, poor infrastructure and weak public sector and civil society hamper productivity growth. “African countries don’t have the benefit of indigenous volunteer organizations, like India and some other developing nations,” said Lele. “Malawi occurred under very unique circumstances.”

Malawi, floodlit

The IEG report recommended the World Bank and other donors help governments design efficient mechanisms to provide farmers with critical inputs such as fertilizer. Now, into donor laps falls the case of Malawi. In a May op-ed in Time, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute and author of “The End of Poverty,” urged policymakers "to scale up the dramatic success of Malawi" and create an "international fund based on the Malawi model." He suggested $10 per developed world citizen, or $10 billion total, and argued the fund could fight hunger as the Global Fund battles AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. But could Malawi serve as a model, a tipping point in ending the donor fad against fertilizer subsidies?

Lele is skeptical. “We think it’s a simple idea – fertilizer subsidies – but transportability of the particular design elements of that intervention are so intricate and complex," she said. "This is what often people don’t appreciate and they try to multiply things when it becomes a fad – and then they fail.”

Carr cites Rwanda and Burundi as possible imitators, as well as Tanzania, which recently sent consultants to review Malawi’s program. But he's more concerned about Malawi’s continued success.

“If Malawi’s subsidies become too politicized, or there’s too much corruption, or too inefficient, the international community’s going to say, ‘There you are, this shows that this kind of program cannot be run in Africa,’” he cautioned.

Lele sees no quick fix. "Short-term solutions are necessary in times like today," she acknowledged. "But not sufficient – holistic and long-term approaches with consistent, predictable policies are needed to develop food and agricultural sectors."

Malawi is headed in the right direction. “If we had another two or three really successful years,” said Carr, “it would be very hard for the donor community to go back to famine relief rather than helping people grow their own food.”

-- posted on devex.com on 15 May 2008

In Conflict Zones, Aid Gets Defensive

By David Lepeska

The end of humanitarian innocence arrived with a bang on August 19, 2003, when a truck bomb gutted the United Nations’ Baghdad headquarters, killing 22 staffers and wounding more than 120. There had been gruesome and deadly attacks on aid efforts in the past, but none had been so devastating and pointedly directed. The blast tore off the building’s façade, exposing its guts to the dusty city. Parts of desks, chairs, and bodies were strewn about the grounds of what had so recently been the Canal Hotel.

Among the dead were Special Representative and highly regarded career humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello and a host of selfless and determined young Arabs. Then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the attack “brought us face to face with danger in a new and more intimidating form.” It also removed any lingering doubt about the sanctity of the humanitarian space and irrevocably altered the aid security dynamic.

Even so, the Baghdad bombing was just an exclamation point in a steadily building drumbeat. Major attacks on aid workers more than doubled from 1999 to 2005, according to a joint study by the British government-supported Overseas Development Institute and New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Even adjusted for a considerable increase of field workers over that span, the incidence of attacks per 10,000 workers rose more than 50 percent. The report, “Providing Aid in Insecure Environments,” also found that aid workers were attacked more for political than economic reasons. “The perception that aid workers are associated with political processes clearly exists in the minds of local belligerents,” the authors state.

As the line between humanitarian and military activity has blurred aid worker security has eroded along with neutrality, jolting humanitarian actors into action. Some of their security decisions have raised ethical questions about equal treatment for all national and international staff. This report dissects what international development organizations have done to adapt, which strategies have been most successful, and what still needs to be done.

Shifting Policy, Coordinating Security

Within weeks of the Baghdad bombing, the United Nations pulled 600 staffers out of Iraq and assumed a lower international profile, as did the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their share of attack victims has decreased considerably in the past five years, the aid worker security report found, but progress towards entrenching adequate security in policy and planning has been fitful.

On the plus side, the U.N. and Interaction, a consortium of U.S.-based NGO’s, have each created Minimum Operating Security Standards, which have been broadly mandated and widely applauded. Furthermore, in 2006 the U.N. joined together with a network of non-governmental organizations to enact a security framework called Saving Lives Together.

Interaction Security Coordinator John Schafer related a tale of the project’s effectiveness. When the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted in violence this past summer a U.S. citizen found himself stuck alone in his compound after local staff left to take care of their families. “Fighting was continuing the whole time,” recalled Mr. Schafer. “It was right outside his gate – there were bodies in the street.”

The American field worker called the U.S. embassy, which told him there was nothing they could do as their doors had already been locked. He called the local U.N. peacekeeping mission, which told him they didn’t know where he was. Finally he called his own headquarters, which in turn contacted Mr. Schafer, who called the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at U.N. Headquarters in New York and gave him the field worker’s position. The U.N. relayed the American’s position back to the field and UNDPKO quickly mounted a rescue mission and saved the worker.

The entire process took six hours, during which Schafer kept up the aid worker’s spirits via Skype chat and used Google maps to pinpoint his location. Mr. Schafer was pleased with the result but acknowledged that Saving Lives Together was more Plan B than anything else. “We can talk all we want about the importance of having security plans on the ground but when the actual emergency hits rarely is it within the parameters of what we planned,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to have a little bit of flexibility in our plans.”

Other efforts have been less successful. As part of the post-Baghdad bombing shake-up the U.N. created the Department for Safety and Security in 2004, which replaced the Security Coordination Office, established in 1988. The new department was given higher-level leadership, additional resources, and tasked to create a new and innovative vision for defining, assessing, and enhancing security for its own and other humanitarian operatives.
Reports of UNDSS have been unfavorable. “Many complain that operation restrictions remain the principal security strategy used by the U.N. in many field-settings,” says the ODI study, adding that the department suffered “from considerable distrust among international NGOs, both in terms of capability and intent.”

Programmers and policymakers have long wanted a database in which to report, record and analyze attack incidents and security failings. Used universally, such a tool would offer a wealth of invaluable security and planning information. But initiatives such as UNDSS’ Security Incident Reporting Service have fallen short of expectations. “It looked like we were about to get going with this universal shared database of incidence and analysis but it’s just completely stalled,” Abby Stoddard, senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the ODI report’s lead author, said in an interview. “It hasn’t gotten up and running, either at the U.N. or through NGOs.”

Nationals in Harm’s Way, Ex-Pats Far Away

Inevitably, the burden has fallen to international NGOs to provide field security, which, according to the industry bible, Koenraad Van Brabant’s Operation Security Management in Violent Environments, is marked by three elements: protection, deterrence and acceptance. The first means reducing vulnerability, the second involves presenting a counter-threat, and the last is about cultivating positive relationships with locals.

For example, Somalia is one of the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environments. An ODI backgrounder advocated community-based strategies yet noted that such practices are often ineffective because “local authorities do not accept national staff members, but want to interact directly with leading expatriate staff.” And with only a few locations accessible for internationals and a heavy reliance on nationals, such interactions seem unlikely anytime soon.

In a perfect world strategies would stress acceptance, but growing security concerns often render acceptance-heavy strategies too costly and difficult to implement. In such areas some aid groups take extreme steps, such as removing all identity markers from facilities, staff, and vehicles to maintain an ultra low-profile. Others take the opposite tack, arming staffers and fortifying offices or hiring military protection. “Both of these approaches can compromise security,” write Ms. Stoddard et al. “Once an organization has confined its staff to a compound, accepted military protection or adopted clandestine programming, its access to security information becomes extremely limited.”

In high danger zones most actors have kept the aid flowing by localizing their efforts. “The way they’ve done this is through remote management, where they will have their national staff or other national organizations that they’ve subcontracted to, or private contractors, do the work,” Ms. Stoddard said in an interview. “The plus side of that is more aid getting to more people because they’re operating.”

Reliance on national staff in the most dangerous and distant aid environments is not new. Oxfam used what some called “long-arm programming” over 50 years ago in India and others employed similar techniques in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Afghanistan throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In theory, such practices decrease risk. But Ms. Stoddard says these practices mean less efficient delivery, a loss of strategic focus, and increased corruption and accountability concerns.

Yet remote management has boomed. Overall, field-based international staff dropped 20 percent from 1997 to 2005, and some of the bigger humanitarian organizations went much further: international field staff for the U.N., CARE and World Vision hovers around three percent today. Most local staff, or foreign nationals, work without adequate training, resources and support. “It’s very uncommon that you would leave them your radios, that you would give them training, that you would give them any of the security assets that you would have,” said Ms. Stoddard.

As a result, national staffers have been left twisting in ever more dangerous winds. While total aid worker victims rose from 66 in 1999 to 211 in 2006, the number of international victims dropped while national victims jumped four-fold. Moreover, of 83 aid workers killed in 2006, 78 (94 percent) were nationals. “What they are doing is abdicating their responsibility for protecting people that work for them,” said Mr. Schafer, pointing out that life insurance payments are considerably lower for a national worker.

Ms. Stoddard explained some of the reasoning behind remote management. “These are local organizations that are doing this work anyway,” she said. “It’s employment for one thing but also they have incentive to help and to partner with internationals… The nationals haven’t really thought through what it means ethically. They’re more concerned with, ‘we want to keep the aid flowing.’”

Protecting Your Own

Although remote management is problematic, it does do precisely that. And because building local capacity has long been a key goal of humanitarian work there is little debate about the utility of nationalizing aid and relief. It simply has to be done better. “The true definition of security is providing it for the entire community,” said Mr. Shafer, referring to internationals and nationals as well as their friends and family. “There can’t just be an evacuation plan only for your ex-pats.”

Ms. Stoddard concurred. “There needs to be some way of assessing what risk you’ll be putting these nationals in,” she said. “They have different vulnerabilities than international staff – that has to be part of your risk assessment. I haven’t seen any evidence that people are now looking at their national staff and coming up with better remote management strategies.”

Conor Foley, a veteran aid worker writing a book about humanitarian aid, said many NGOs were increasing training and resources but that these improvements had been generally ineffective. “Security has become a buzzword,” he said. “But it’s been a bit un-thought out.”

Recently, a major NGO bid on a $300 million USAID project in Pakistan without consulting their security director about the budgeting. “The problem is most people don’t have the systems in place to even make educated decisions on what is acceptable and unacceptable risk for their organization,” Mr. Schafer said. “They don’t have a management system for their security program.”

Thus, many key questions are left unanswered. What is the line of acceptable risk, for instance, and how do you draw it? How much will aid delivery cost you in a higher threshold of risk? What security info are you gathering to quantify the security situation, make programming decisions and put together an operational plan? And if you pull out, how do you assess risk and game plan for nationals, as opposed to internationals?

Because the security risks are not assessed beforehand there’s no funding leeway in the event of a worsening security situation. “First and foremost the NGO’s have to develop systems internal to their organizations,” said Mr. Schafer. Once funding had been tied into security, he added, donors would fall in line.

One hopes they appreciate the urgency. In late October, CARE International’s Battagram, Pakistan compound was riddled with machine-gun fire mere hours after the office of a nearby NGO was bombed, wounding eight Pakistanis. Unknown gunmen attacked and shot dead two Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development staff in Uganda’s Amuru district on Halloween.

In late November unidentified gunmen shot up a Medecins sans Frontieres car in south Sudan, killing four. And in early December top U.N. aid official John Holmes visited Somalia, the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environment. “It is very hard for aid agencies to operate in Somalia because of the general security situation,” Holmes told reporters. He pointed out frequent checkpoints, at which aid workers were harassed and halted, and sharply curbed operations overall. “We need to do more.”

Indeed, multilaterals, aid groups, and donors need to better adapt to a world in which humanitarians wear bullseyes and another Baghdad bombing constantly looms. Adapt, that is, or continue losing ground.

-- posted on devex.com on 17 March 2008