The State of HR in International Humanitarian and Development Organisations. A People In Aid paper for discussion and debate, focusing on HR’s challenges in recessionary times

While acknowledging the recession is not global, we have made no attempt in this report to contextualise, to say that people in one region do it differently or that anyone does it better. When you travel in humanitarian or development situations you often hear the word context. Religion, tribe or clan, environment, state of development, connectivity: they all make a difference for those who are working with a community. ‘Evaluations’, says ALNAP’s State of the Humanitarian System report, ‘consistently show that staff in NGOSs, UN and clusters were perceived to be illprepared in terms of basic language and context training.’ This matters, because working with Somali women in Kenya requires aidworkers with great gender sensitivity, because a national employee from a capital city can be just as culturally unaware in a rural setting as an expatriate, because one employee’s rewards package may not be equitable with a colleague in the programme just a hundred miles away. One of our members explicitly ensures that there are strong HR positions in the field, ‘to make sure national staff and expats are served based on the local context and needs’; but there remains strong “central” steering from the HQ. As we say, ‘people make international aid organisations work’ but the challenges may differ between contexts, and solutions must be tailored.