GLOBAL: Humanitarian system gets a “B-minus” – The aid sector: richer, more professional and better coordinated, but slow to learn, still top-down and poor at thinking ahead
DAKAR, 8 February 2010 (IRIN): The emer-gency aid industry has improved but must try harder, according to the broadest ever assessment of its performance.
Reviewers from the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in humanitarian action (ALNAP) assessed how well donors, UN agencies, the International Organization for Migration, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and NGOs were meeting humanitarian needs worldwide and coordinating.
The review involved interviews with hundreds of aid workers, analyses of financial data and agency evaluations.
While past inter-agency reviews have addressed indivi-dual emergency responses – notably the Joint Evalua-tion of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda (JEEAR) and the joint Tsunami evaluation (TEC) – ALNAP said it was time the strengths and weakness of the whole sector were analyzed to identify its future direction.
– You can not ascertain (få en fornemmelse af) the performance of a national health system just by reviewing individual hospitals, ALNAP head John Mitchell told IRIN.
– We needed a review because over the past 20 years the humanitarian sector has become bigger and expectations have grown; the sector is (higher on political agendas) and receives more media scrutiny; and in principle there is agreement that the way aid is delivered should be more coherent (sammenhængende), noted he.
Surprises
The first surprise for reviewers was that the system is actually improving, Mitchell said. The JEEAR painted an ugly picture of uncoordinated, inefficient assistance and the TEC an operation where competition among agencies supplanted cooperation.
The latest analysis showed that aid on the whole was becoming “more efficient, better coordinated and timelier,” said Mitchell.
The cluster coordination system, while far from perfect, has improved response and the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has sped up first-phase funding, ALNAP found.
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