Humanitarians need to pick up the pace

10 February 2021

"In the face of increased vulnerability and decreased funding, the sector cannot afford to drag its feet. Change must happen, and it must happen more rapidly than it has done over the past five years."

2020 was a year of remarkable shock and dislocation. COVID-19 showed us how quickly our environment can be transformed; how painful these transformations can be; and the importance of resilience and the ability to change.  It is still too early to say how well the humanitarian system has responded to COVID-19, but the Humanitarian Accountability Report (HAR) 2020 provides some interesting insights into how successfully the system has approached change over the past five years.

Information sharing group. Credit: CHS Alliance member CAFOD
At first glance..

The results of the HAR 2020 are disappointing, to say the least. They show that CHS-verified organisations, and the aid sector as a whole, have failed to put in place the essential elements of principled, accountable, high-quality aid. None of the nine commitments outlined in the Standard have been met by all of the organisations (although many organisations are meeting some). This suggests that there is still a substantial way to go before the system puts the basics in place.

Overall, CHS-verified organisations are closer to meeting some commitments than others. The one that comes closest to being fulfilled (as illustrated by the average verification score) is Commitment 6, on coordination and complementarity. This may reflect the significant investment in humanitarian coordination over the past decade. At the other end of the scale, Commitment 5, which states that complaints should be welcomed and addressed, scores lowest.

This is of deep concern. It shows that despite much activity (and more rhetoric?) we still face a challenge about how we listen to the feedback, concerns and complaints of the people for whom we work. Despite acknowledging the huge challenges the sector faces in protecting people from sexual exploitation and abuse, and the substantial efforts made to strengthen these protections, there are still systemic weaknesses. If people don’t know how to complain about their treatment, organisations are less able to put a stop to abuse.

Click table to expand image. Credit: HAR 2020

CHS verification data also illustrates that performance is generally better when it comes to establishing organisational policies, rather than changing what staff do in practice, a finding which calls into question the sector’s dominant HQ and policy-led approach to change and improvement.

But change is coming…

The aggregated data, however, obscure the changes that are happening within individual organisations. Results from all organisations undergoing CHS verification in 2018 and 2019 show that two-thirds of these organisations fully meet at least one of the nine commitments, and more than one-third meet three or more.

Since 2016, almost half of the certified organisations assessed for three years or more have made major improvements in over one-quarter of the 62 CHS indicators. As a collective, organisations who have been in the process for at least three years have made gains on three vital accountability issues (albeit from a low base) that the aid sector has been trying to tackle for decades:

Click table to expand image. Credit: HAR 2020

1. Strengthening local capacities and avoiding the negative effects of aid (Commitment 3)

2. Basing humanitarian response on communication, participation and feedback with people affected by crisis (Commitment 4)

3. Welcoming and addressing complaints from people affected by crisis (Commitment 5)

These results are the outcome of the ingenuity and dedication of humanitarians who have developed ways of making their work better and more accountable. Verified organisations credit the CHS with driving these changes.

The CHS verification data show that it is possible for dedicated aid organisations to tackle some of the the toughest barriers to meeting their quality and accountability commitments. The CHS is a catalyst to make aid more accountable, and, critically, it is a mechanism for communicating and amplifying ‘what works’, in order to speed up the process of change.

Click table to expand image. Credit: HAR 2020
Change can be accelerated

In the face of increased vulnerability and decreased funding, the sector cannot afford to drag its feet. Change must happen, and it must happen more rapidly than it has done over the past five years. Sharing and adapting good practices across the sector (rather than reinventing very similar wheels with different organisational branding) will help, but the HAR 2020 also points to another way to fast-track change. Hiding beneath the 62 indicators and the nine commitments of the CHS, were three consistent areas of weakness:

  1. communication between aid providers and affected people
  2. information management
  3. organisational flexibility.

Tackling these areas could have a massive multiplier effect, catalysing change across the board. Doing so collectively could create the step change that so many people have been working towards for years.

2020 has shown us that we have to change. Will 2021 be the year that the sector focusses its energy for a real transformation? I find this an exciting prospect.

Read full the Humanitarian Accountability Report 2020 here.

Since the launch of the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) in 2014, over 100 organisations have measured their performance against it.

The creation of the Standard itself was an important collective achievement, as the autonomous, often competitive organisations that make up the humanitarian aid sector agreed on the essential elements for working with people affected by crisis and on how they would be measured against these elements. This was particularly significant because it made many organisations acknowledge that they would have to make significant changes in order to fully comply with the commitments that they had made.