Missed opportunities: the case of strengthening national and local partnership - based humanitarian responses.

1. September 2014 , Nairobi

2. Agenda
• Context
• Findings
• Conclusions

3. In 2006, the Tsunami Evaluation
Coalition called for:
“…a fundamental reorientation from
supplying aid to supporting and
facilitating communities’ own relief and
recovery priorities.…”

4. This call has had little impact on the formal
policies and practices that shape the
humanitarian system
For example in Haiti“….INGOs were not making use of
local partnerships….
Local relationships are critical to understanding the
context, shaping and informing the response, and
encouraging local acceptance of assistance…..
Few of these relationships are in place… a serious lack
of connectedness to the context persists…”
ECB Independent Joint Evaluation

5. The Ashdown Review flagged this as an
issue and linked it directly to funding
“the funding of
national and local NGOs by
DFID remains a hit and
miss. It is
not a conscious strategy,
but more of a by-product”

6. The role of local partners in providing
aid in humanitarian crises remains
a major systemic issue for the sector
• More and better local engagement is seen to pose
threats to the status quo of the sector, in terms of
resource distribution, power and control
• Contrasts with many of the most successful change
efforts in the sector have been characterized by
incremental changes

7. The Research programme
• Focus on partnerships of 5 UK NGOs in 4 emergency
settings
– Haiti, Kenya, Pakistan floods, DRC
• Interviews, document and evaluation review
• 4 month research phase

8. Used OECD criteria for analysing contribution of
partnerships to aid effectiveness, benchmarked against
system-wide performance
The research used the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development -
OECD-DAC Criteria for Aid Effectiveness
• Relevance/Appropriateness
• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Coverage
• Connectedness

9. Do partnerships
enhance the relevance and
appropriateness of aid?
• Conventional aid delivery approaches are often criticized for their
lack of relevance and appropriateness, and the evidence shows that
well-designed partnerships can help address these issues.
• Partnerships can ensure program design that is contextually
appropriate, culturally sensitive, responsive to needs, and based
on communities’ own understanding
• Relevance and appropriateness was the area most strongly
identified as a beneficial outcome of partnerships
• Potential contribution of partnerships: Strong
• Overall system performance: Moderate

10. Do partnerships enhance
the effectiveness of aid?
• Partner-based responses can be fast, responsive, and well
prepared for action
• Partner-based responses can contribute to accountability and
community engagement
• Issues of coordination, learning and human resources are as much
a problem for partners as they are for the wider system
• Potential contribution of partnerships: Good
• Overall system performance: Moderate

11. Do partnerships
enhance the efficiency of aid?
• Efficiency should not be reduced to a simplistic assessment of how cheap
a response can be, but should be based on an understanding of the
relative strengths and weaknesses of partnership work in different settings
• Cost savings of partnerships can be considerable, in terms of staff costs,
but most other aspects of financing a humanitarian response are at parity
with international efforts
• There are costs of partnerships that must be considered in any efficiency
assessment include setting up, maintaining and ongoing capacity support.
• Potential contribution of partnerships: Moderate
• Overall system performance: Moderate

12. Do partnerships
enhance the coverage of aid?
• Coverage is a major limiting factor for partnerships, as seen by
partnership-focused agencies and direct delivery organisations
alike.
• Partners themselves suggest that the issue is less about delivering
effective programmes at scale, and more about spending.
• There is a need for the humanitarian sector to engage more closely
with larger national NGOs / governmental ancillaries and network
bodies on issues of scale and coverage.
• Potential contribution of partnerships: Moderate
• Overall system performance: Poor

13. Do partnerships
enhance the connectedness of aid?
• National partners can clearly help to smooth the links between
resilience, preparedness, response, recovery and development
• They cannot do this unless funding NGOs and donors put their
house in order – otherwise the institutional divides simply get
transferred down the system
• The resilience agenda has potential to address this issue, but more
needs to be done to position it as a means of bridging the
humanitarian development divide if it is going to tap this potential
• Potential contribution of partnerships: Good
• Overall system performance: Moderate

14. Summary

15. • The diagram shows clearly that the potential for the partnership
approach is strongest in three specific areas:
relevance/appropriateness, effectiveness and connectedness. In
these areas, partnerships were making the most consistent and
unambiguous contribution to humanitarian performance.
• In the other two areas, the picture was rather more nuanced and
involved both potential and also some considerable challenges.
• This illustrative diagram should not be taken to mean that by
investing in partnerships these problems will be simply or easily
resolved. Nor, should it be taken to mean that partnerships couldn’t
contribute positively to coverage or efficiency. Rather, the
comparison is to show that there are clearly areas where the sector
as a whole is not performing as might be wished, and where
partnership efforts – on the basis of evidence from five agencies in
four major emergency responses – have potential to help enhance
performance

16. Conclusions
• Factors beyond the sector are pushing for a
greater localisation of humanitarian aid
• Within the sector, while there has been some
rhetoric, funding and structures still give
preference to international actors over national
ones
• There is evidence, scope and space for a
renewed focus on capacity and partnerships

17. Recommendations
• Investing in change
– Investments in national and local partnerships as priority for donors
– A multi-donor fund for disaster management capacity building
• Setting the agenda
– Southern partnerships to be central to humanitarian policy agendas
– Partnerships role in resilience acknowledged and integrated
• Building knowledge and shared understanding
– Build the evidence base through case studies from across the sector.
– Establish a knowledge platform on capacity and partnerships
• Strengthening practices
– Strengthen use of capacity assessments in humanitarian responses
– Partnerships need to move from ‘bilateral’ to networked efforts

18. Building the future of the system
“The vision expressed by many of those
interviewed was for …a humanitarian sector which
is a more democratic, balanced and accountable
endeavor, where capacities are fully considered as
well as needs, and where the emphasis is less on
assistance and more on cooperation...”
this vision is achievable, if we have the necessary
collective political and institutional will.
Thank you!

19. APPENDIX
The full report is available in ALNAP website
below :
http://www.alnap.org/resource/8890.aspx