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Introduction:

As the need for humanitarian assistance around the world increases, so too do expectations of effectiveness and successful, coordinated response. It would seem, however, that the more NGOs that are formed, the greater the competition for funding and recognition. The challenge to manage and coordinate both individual and organizational concerns has, therefore, become all the more pressing. A report by New York University’s Center on International Cooperation states that despite the remarkable growth in emergency expenditures, humanitarian assistance still constitutes a very small portion of spending in the overall world economy, and furthermore, “the proliferation of voluntary aid agencies now compete openly with each other for funds.” [1] The widespread and often chaotic growth of the humanitarian NGO community in the face of these challenges has, at times, been detrimental to its effectiveness in alleviating suffering. Counterproductive competition in areas of overlap and poorly coordinated response are sometimes the unfortunate outcomes of this dilemma.

The emergence of NGO consortia aimed at enhancing legitimacy, responsibility and capacity in the field, as well as promoting dialogue and information exchange, are a crucial prerequisite for any accountable and transparent humanitarian response. To assist this, a number of NGO support institutions have been established, interagency structures dedicated specifically to issues of accountability, learning and best practices in the field. There is a concern, however, that here too one can witness clear overlaps in objectives, which may, at times, cause confusion rather than organized and coordinated response during a crisis. A pertinent issue to explore, therefore, is the humanitarian community’s approach to overlapping issues.

This paper will examine five such institutions in more detail (The Sphere Project, ALNAP, People In Aid, The Humanitarian Accountability Project and the Quality Platform), as well as one example of a project arising from a smaller, more specific partnership (the CARDI Experiment). The aim is to introduce and compare the various similar initiatives that have emerged in the humanitarian field and provide a preliminary look at each of these organizations.

The Sphere Project

Who?

In bringing together thousands of individuals from over 300 organizations representing 60 countries, this extensive multilateral consultation in the humanitarian community led to the development of a humanitarian charter and minimum standards in the management of humanitarian assistance, designed to be inclusive, transparent and globally representative.

Why?

The Sphere Project was established after the events of 1994 in Rwanda in July 1997, when it became clear that the increased demand for humanitarian action far exceeded capacity, causing the quality and accountability of relief and response to suffer.

What?

The Sphere guidelines, developed in Phase I of the project, include the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards for the care sectors of water supply and sanitation, nutrition, food aid, shelter and site management and health services, as well as outlining the rights of persons based on international humanitarian law, refugee law and human rights conventions.

Currently there are 20 pilot agencies applying Sphere in the field. These are both international and national, faith based and secular, aimed primarily at institutionalizing Sphere with greater emphasis on networking and decentralized training strategies.

Useful documentation for further reference:

Lessons Learned in Sphere Implementation from 2000-2002: Institutionalizing Sphere…A Great Start, Next Steps - this latest report brings us up to date with the pilot agencies’ experiences, applications and attitudes, the effectiveness of training, the experience of Sphere outreach, issues and dilemmas in implementation and future directions.
Quarterly newsletters are available on the website (www.sphereproject.org) for updated news and information.

Issues:

The gap between awareness of the project and its application. Although Sphere has been incorporated into many pilot agency procedures, the Charter and Standards are not yet implemented systematically by agencies in the field.
Concern has been expressed that Sphere is one of a number of similar initiatives in the field of enhancing quality and accountability in humanitarianism. Some representatives have suggested that linkages, both conceptual and institutional, should be clarified and explained to the NGO community. Example: Save the Children UK has cited in the Lessons Learned Report that Sphere is recognized as only one of many new policies and approaches being introduced throughout the organization and that it needs to be seen as offering tangible benefits while not constituting an unwelcome additional management burden.
Representatives of pilot agencies suggest that there needs to be a broader sense of ownership of both the handbook and the Sphere process. Greater ownership would enhance incentives and confidence to apply and adapt Sphere in ways that are appropriate to the organization and to local situations.
The Lessons Learned Report mentions that Sphere’s “diversity amongst agencies” should be more widely recognized to promote ‘south-south’ networking and training and that the employment of trainers from disaster affected countries would help to diversify Sphere’s institutionalization.
The use of Sphere in monitoring has been cited as a particular weakness in the Lessons Learned Report by pilot agencies. Additional simple monitoring tools in the Sphere handbook could help to reinforce monitoring capacity for donors. The report suggests that rather than using monitoring as a means of information for donors, there ought to be a partnership relationship with donors in which monitoring is a joint activity to test and review progress.

Successes and Activities:

The Sphere Lessons Learned Report states that pilot agencies have considered the application of Sphere as powerful in promoting enhanced quality and accountability in the following ways: By providing points of reference to ensure systematic responses; by ensuring uniformity of approach, equity in provision and more effective coordination during disaster response; by outlining skills required for a professional response; by including the affected population to ensure greater accountability to the population.
Sphere provides a target to aim for with technical indicators rather than basing proposals on previous emergencies.
Using Sphere as a comprehensive checklist has drawn attention to issues that may otherwise not have been noticed – for example, gender issues and participation.
Exposure to Sphere helps to minimize the misuse of aid. For example, in the Gujarat earthquake response, it tended to be agencies that were not aware of Sphere that provided culturally inappropriate items.

More specifically:

Catholic Relief Services has established a systems approach to Sphere implementation and reported that Sphere has presented the CRS with a common language in emergency response. In addition, CRS is using Sphere as a basis for rapid assessment and there is increased reference to Sphere in project planning and development.
Mercy Corps cited that “Sphere has provided a baseline and departure point for identifying needs” [2] , as well as ensuring greater parity and credibility.
International Rescue Committee reported that using Sphere standards in work in water and sanitation in New Shamshatoo, Pakistan, enabled the assessment to be completed in under two weeks. The population also gained accessible and safe latrines and therefore the project was a huge success.
ADRA reported that by sharing Sphere with the Government of Peru, Sphere has helped to strengthen relations between NGOs and government. Also, there is a more comprehensive approach to disaster response amongst agencies.
Oxfam also reported the strengthening of collaboration with governments through the sharing of Sphere. For example, in Kenya, Oxfam had success in gaining government endorsement for the Sphere system and methodology. In Ethiopia, Oxfam shared Sphere with the government through training workshops and promoted the Humanitarian Charter, and in Nicaragua, Oxfam shared Sphere with the government while it was drawing up new legislation and policies for disaster response.
The Christian Council of Burundi (CNEB) cited that the Sphere standards plus contingency planning and awareness of the availability of humanitarian items makes tackling an emergency easier through the application of the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in selecting items for supply, coordinating with other agencies and monitoring, evaluation and impact assessments. Regular coordination meetings and training and awareness of Sphere also improves overall humanitarian response.
The Sphere handbook is currently being revised and a draft will be available on the Sphere Project’s website (www.sphereproject.org) in late 2003.

N.B. A full evaluation of the Sphere Project is currently in progress by the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

(Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action)

ALNAP’s membership consists of 51 Full Members and a growing number of Observer Members, currently 287. Full Member representatives are drawn from a mix of policy, operations, evaluation and monitoring sections of humanitarian organizations. Funding is provided on a voluntary basis and donors include bilateral donor organizations, UN agencies, NGOs and Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

ALNAP was also established in 1997 for similar reasons that prompted the creation of the Sphere Project. Its statement of purpose is as follows: “ALNAP, as a unique sector-wide active-learning membership network, is dedicated to improving the quality and accountability of humanitarian action, by sharing lessons, identifying common problems and, where appropriate, building consensus on approaches.” Its objective therefore, rather like Sphere, is to improve performance in humanitarian action on a sector-wide level and to provide a forum owned by all and dominated by none, through which to address learning, accountability and quality issues of sector-wide concern.

ALNAP’s current program of activities is aimed at realizing its potential through a work plan that systematically focuses on those aspects that are strategically significant and amenable to intervention, and that delivers products that are useful to the membership and the wider humanitarian sector. Its activities are divided into three main categories: Network Activities, consisting of the sharing of information, reports and evaluations, and lessons learned; Program Activities, consisting of improvements in learning mechanisms and monitoring and strengthening protection frameworks; and lastly, Interest Group Activities, consisting of the Learning Support Office Test in Malawi and case and consultation studies of complex emergency programs.

N.B. ALNAP takes on a more evaluative and analytical policy approach to improving humanitarian action, whereas Sphere’s approach is more practical, making it more difficult to assess ALNAP’s overall value in the humanitarian field.

The People in Aid Code of Best Practice in the Management and Support of Aid Personnel helps agencies working in relief and development. The Code supports moves towards best practice in the management of agencies’ most important resource – the people who work for them. The aim is to improve the quality of programs, confirm accountability to staff and strengthen human resource development in the humanitarian community. It helps agencies address issues such as staff retention, security and health, stress, terms and conditions, equity, communication and consultation. The Code gives agencies a framework with which to study existing policies and procedures, and then monitor and improve support and management of their staff and volunteers in the field.

The People in Aid Code of Best Practice was first established in 1996 in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, which prompted collaborations between British and Irish relief agencies who had participated in the humanitarian intervention in Rwanda. There was input from a wide variety of organizations, including representative bodies from America and Europe, as well as from multilateral agencies. It was realized that the key to effective humanitarian response was not only to improve accountability, standards and technical guidelines in humanitarian practices, as put forth by Sphere and ALNAP, but to establish a standard of policy and management support to the numerous staff of the humanitarian agencies themselves. People in Aid was set up in response to the stresses placed on staff and volunteers in the field during a crisis, which often derive as much from bad management, undue workload and the insecurity of short term contracts as from the dangers and emotional impact of the aid work itself.

The Code’s contains seven principles, ranging from human resource policies aimed at best practice, efficiency, fairness and transparency, plans and budgets, training and support programs, and security and well being of staff. All these are expressed in specific indicators that are subject to auditing, monitoring and evaluation. It is completely unlike Sphere, ALNAP and the other agencies, which, rather generally, deal with the accountability and best practices of agencies and humanitarian responses; People in Aid deals only with issues of human resource development and the staff.

HAP is an inter-agency project launched in 2001 in Geneva, in response to concerns among the humanitarian community about the lack of accountability in humanitarian crises. The HAP’s governing bodies consist of a Board and an Advisory Committee. The project is funded by AusAID, Care International, Danida, DRC, DACAAR, DFID, the Ford Foundation, the IFRC, Oxfam GB and World Vision International.

The HAP was established in 2000 after representatives from 50 humanitarian organizations came together to discuss the findings of the Humanitarian Ombudsman Project (an inter-agency initiative originating from the evaluation of response to the Rwandan genocide). The meeting came up with the idea of possibly creating a similar Ombudsman for the humanitarian sector. Like the other agencies discussed in this paper, participants realized that the need for improved accountability in humanitarian response was best fulfilled by relying on a combination of mechanisms rather than on just one. An international Steering Committee was then set up to oversee the project proposal and the establishment of the Humanitarian Accountability.

HAP is part of a wider effort within the international humanitarian sector to improve transparency, accountability and performance. Its vision is for all humanitarian operations to mobilize mechanisms at field, organizational and sector-wide levels to ensure greater accountability to crisis affected populations. At the core of these mechanisms are the participation of affected populations and an ethical commitment to listen, monitor and respond accordingly.

The Quality Platform is a two year project, initiated by the Groupe Urgence Rehabilitation Developpement (URD) with an initial pilot year (2001) and two development years (2002-2003). The costs of the project are in the region of 140,000 Euros and are funded by the French and Swiss governments, private foundations, Groupe URD’s own resources and NGO partners. It was set up by a group of French NGOs in mid-2000, and within a few months, NGOs from nine other countries had joined.

It is designed to raise awareness of the disagreement in the humanitarian community over the value of Sphere and HAP, as a reaction to what one African NGO has termed Sphere’s “bulldozer” approach and the late Ombudsman Project, which was later renamed and reshaped as HAP. According to the Quality Platform, the Sphere’s Humanitarian Charter contains legal weaknesses and lack of coherence, as well as endangering existing legal texts and laws. Even the Sphere Minimum Standards have been challenged. The Quality Platform is a lobbying tool to respond to these criticisms. Its founders question why the externally imposed, theoretically universal quantitative benchmarking, as promulgated by the Sphere Project, should be the “ultimate collective tool for performance”. It has therefore become a multi-country counter-reaction to what is perceived as the hegemonic approach of Sphere. [7]

Its mission: From emergency to development: a project for improving the quality of humanitarian practices. The Quality Platform argues that technical standards can only be used within the framework of policies that pay much greater attention to the specific and diverse contexts in which humanitarian aid is delivered. It advocates the enhancement of local participation, improved analysis of the political context and a better understanding of the impact of aid on the local environment, greater attention to staff training and a reaffirmation that states, not NGOs, have the primary responsibility for safeguarding their citizens. Participating agencies have also developed a Quality Project, which sets out alternative ways of improving humanitarian assistance. The project is built around the three stages of the project cycle: initial diagnosis and context analysis; design and implementation; and evaluation and learning.

The Consortium for Assistance of Refugees and the Displaced in

Indonesia

CARDI consists of a four-member Steering Committee representing each of the member organizations, a Secretariat and Field Operations. The four-member partnership is between the Danish Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, The Norwegian Refugee Council and Stichting Vluchteling, a Dutch refugee agency designed to support operational groups.

This consortium-building initiative came about when a group of like-minded NGOs, all dealing with issues of refugees and displaced persons, decided to come together and establish a working international coalition and a field-based consortium in Indonesia.

The original vision, which never came to fruition, was for a centrally-coordinated NGO response to humanitarian crises and post-conflict follow up. The concept envisioned a large group of participating NGOs joining in a coalition, so that upon joining, members would pool together their mandates, areas of expertise and access to financial and human resources to maximize the effectiveness of the eventual output. A “broker” would then be hired to coordinate the coalition partners in the event of a crisis, to orchestrate the responses of coalition partners depending on their areas of expertise and their strengths. Unfortunately, this never happened due to the dissolution of the original group, but a slightly less ambitious model along the same lines was established in its place – the CARDI.

By working through a single organization, the aim is to assure optimal coordination of assistance activities for refugees and displaced persons in Indonesia. By combining the four members’ human and financial resources, the participating agencies hoped to make the operation as cost effective as possible, while at the same time leveraging resources that might otherwise not have been made available to individual members. Indonesia was chosen because although the IRC already had a small presence there, the others did not, and it therefore offered the opportunity to build an integrated program from scratch with the advantage of on-the-ground capacity.

The CARDI experiment and People In Aid are different from the other organizations discussed in this paper, namely because they are distinct in their objectives. CARDI is a partnership of four similar groups dealing with refugees and displaced persons with a successful mission underway in Indonesia and People In Aid deals specifically with issues of human resource management and administration.

However, the years following the disaster in Rwanda seem to have brought about the establishment of a number of like-minded initiatives and there are clear overlaps in the objectives of the other NGO support institutions such as the Sphere Project, ALNAP, HAP and the Quality Platform. Each aims primarily to improve the quality and accountability of disaster response on a sector wide level. Sphere works to do this by institutionalizing its Humanitarian Charters and Standards, while ALNAP, HAP (previously Ombudsman) and the Quality Platform work on more of an evaluative, analytical approach. It is important to note though that while the final objectives of these groups are the same, the methods employed are fundamentally different. The Quality Platform was essentially established as a result of criticisms against the methods adopted by Sphere and HAP.

It is therefore difficult to assess which of these approaches is of higher value in the humanitarian community, although they all essentially work toward the same goal. But it can be argued that the employment of these different, but often overlapping, approaches and methods toward humanitarian response could ultimately strengthen the humanitarian community by forcing it to examine and improve upon basic assumptions, thereby working to achieve the long term objectives it had set out to achieve from the start.

[2] See Lessons Learned in Sphere Implementation from 2000-2002: Institutionalizing Sphere….A Great Start, Next Steps

[3] The Vision for ALNAP, February 2002, available on www.alnap.org.

[4] The Vision for ALNAP, February 2002

[5] Please see the section on the HAP website (www.hapgeneva.org) under Study Trials, Sierra Leone, for more specific information.

[6] Please see the section on the HAP website under Study Trials, Afghanistan, for more information on the HAP tests in Herat.

[7] For more information, please visit the Quality Project section of the URD website (www.urd.org)

[8] For more information on the Quality Platform’s counterpropositions, please refer to Part 4: Counterpropositions of the report entitled The Dangers and Inconsistencies of Normative Approaches to Humanitarian Aid: Summary of Reflections Raised, by Francois Gruenewald and Veronique de Geoffrey, Groupe URD (www.urd.org).

[9] From the Mission Report: Institutional Framework for the Inter-Institutions Evaluation Process in Afghanistan by Francois Gruenewald, Groupe URD/Quality Project (www. urd. org)