CIAO DATE: 08/07

GJIA

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2006

 

The Changing Tide of Aid Provision
Anisya Thomas

 

Excerpt

Anisya Thomas is the managing director of the Fritz Institute, a non-profit organization that addresses challenges and opportunities in the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The South Asian tsunami, which is estimated to have killed 230,000 and left 1.7 million people homeless, elicited an outpouring of sympathy and generosity from governments, corporations, and individuals around the world. The official figures estimate that $12 billion was raised, but experts agree that this is a conservative estimate and does not take into account the resources raised by small NGOs and other community and grass roots groups. One year after the tsunami, traditional donors (usually governments of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan) as well as first-time donors began to ask about the effectiveness of the relief efforts and the impact of the money spent.

In anticipating and responding to the calls for accountability, a spate of aid evaluation reports have begun to be released detailing the progress made. In addition to the standard accountability reviews by individual aid agencies such as Oxfam and CARE, a variety of multi-agency and independent reports are also emerging.1 However, the focus of these reports is accountability to donors. Although most of them speak to the critical importance of accountability to beneficiaries, most admit to have fallen short in this domain. As the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC) has observed, “The lack of accountability to aid recipients is an acknowledged weakness of the international relief system.”2 Nonetheless, these reports also freely acknowledge that “Wherever agencies havelistened to the communities’ perspectives of their needs and allowed communities to shape the response, there has been a good impact.”3  For example, the village committees that were formed in Ampara, Sri Lanka, to advise Oxfam on water and sanitation needs ensured that the subsequent intervention designed by Oxfam achieved the outcomes intended of providing the community with adequate and appropriate water and sanitation systems. Conversely, when agency perceptions of what was needed were used to guide the type of aid provided, or when speed and efficiency were the determining criteria—at the cost of community participation—the intervention was often a failure.

Yet, few aid agencies or donors have initiated or released systematic evaluations of beneficiary perceptions of the effectiveness or impact of aid. The CARE/Oxfam/World Vision report suggests that the current approaches and methodologies being used in the field are inadequate or too hard to implement. They recommend the exploration of alternatives to the traditional log frames, such as results-based management frameworks, which have proved to be restrictive.4  Two other issues impeding the assessment of beneficiary perceptions include the practice of each agency creating its own reporting, which makes the study of beneficiaries prohibitively expensive, and the potential for damaging information to reach donors or the public.

The inability to engage beneficiaries in systematic evaluations results in a gap in the knowledge systems of organizations whose day-to-day business is providing aid. Without incorporating the perspectives of aid recipients, the lessons learned are partial, and the true impact of the assistance cannot be assessed. To begin to address this gap, the Fritz Institute undertook a large-scale survey of the beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance after the tsunami, across countries, across aid agencies and across time.5

In this paper we briefly describe the study of beneficiaries and the methodology by which it was conducted, and provide an indication of the results obtained. We then discuss the importance of engaging beneficiaries and provide recommendations for how the voice of the affected can be incorporated into improving disaster preparedness, disaster relief and rehabilitation, and evaluations of relief effectiveness...

1Tony Vaux et. al, Independent Evaluation of the DEC Tsunami Crisis Response (December 2005);
John Cosgrave, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition: Initial Findings (December 2005): 13; Abhijit Bhattacharjee et. al, Multi-Agency Evaluation of Tsunami Response: India and Sri Lanka (July 2005): 5.
2John Cosgrave, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition: Initial Findings (December 2005): 13.
3Abhijit Bhattacharjee et. al, Multi-Agency Evaluation of Tsunami Response: India and Sri Lanka (July 2005): 5.
4The World Bank defines the logical framework as a methodology for conceptualizing projects and an analytic tool that has the power to communicate a complex project clearly and understandably on a single sheet of paper.  It is best used to help project designers and stakeholders set proper objectives, define indicators of success, identify key activity clusters (project components), define critical assumptions on which the project is based, identify means of verifying project accomplishments, and define resources required for implementation.
5Anisya Thomas and Vimala Ramalingam, “Lessons from the Tsunami: Top Line Findings,” http://www.fritzinstitute.org/PDFs/Programs/Findings_Sept2605.pdf (San Francisco: Fritz Institute, 2005); Anisya Thomas and Vimala Ramalingam, “Recipients Perceptions of Aid Effectiveness: Rescue, Relief and Rehabilitation in Tsunami Affected Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka,” http://www.fritzinstitute.org/PDFs/findings/NineMonthReport.pdf (San Francisco: Fritz Institute, 2005).