SG of Kenya Red Cross awarded 'UN in Kenya Person of the Year'

Nairobi, 22 October – The United Nations in Kenya, on the occasion of UN Day on 24 October, has decided to award the 2007 "UN in Kenya Person of the Year" to Mr. Abbas Gullet, Secretary General of Kenya Red Cross Society.

Speaking for the UN agencies based in the country, the United Nations Resident Coordinator Elizabeth Lwanga said: "Today the United Nations family in Kenya recognizes Abbas Gullet for his important contributions in making the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) the first place the Government of Kenya and locally based humanitarian organizations look to for leadership in times of national emergencies.

Ms. Lwanga added that “it is also our judgment that Mr. Gullet’s many years of professional and personal sacrifice exhibits a character of extraordinary accomplishment, integrity and courage – and one determined to relieve human suffering and misery in his country.

Abbas Gullet’s timely interventions and leadership has made the KRCS the leading National humanitarian organization in the country, recognized across the world as one of the best performing National Red Cross Societies, and an example of what local relief groups can achieve.

Under his leadership, the KRCS has experienced phenomenal growth. With regional warehouses around the country, offices linked by radio, telephone and Internet, the KRCS today has the capacity to handle 120,000 people in situations requiring humanitarian intervention. Its annual budget has grown from Ksh338 million in 2005 to Ksh1.4 billion in 2006.

Intrac updates: Rethinking Monitoring and Evaluation

INTRAC's latest newsletter ONTRAC deals with 'Rethinking M&E' and included perspectives
on

• the logframe from Oman,
• storytelling M&E from CDRA in South Africa,
• how to combine qualitative and quantitative M&E in QUIP
• Monitoring and Learning and
• Brian Pratt on the increasingly sharp polarisation within civil society M&E.

Click on the link to download the newsletter as a pdf.

The newsletter coincides with the publication of their new book 'Rethinking M&E: Challenges and Prospects in the Changing Global Aid Environment' - we hope to have a copy in the BRC Library soon.

The book 'incorporates the good examples and innovative M&E solutions of 120 development professionals from an enormous range of countries, circumstances and specialisms', '[e]mphasising Southern perspectives and covering a rich variety of experiences, it stresses the important role of M&E in challenging many of our assumptions about poverty alleviation.'

Read more about the book in the longer post:

‘Rethinking M&E’ both analyses practitioner issues and situates them within wider aid trends. It takes as its premise the observation that official development aid is shifting towards an increasingly technocratic, managerial, state-centred approach. It follows that M&E within the aid chain worldwide is directed away from its focus on qualitative outcomes and long-term poverty alleviation impacts. Within this context, ‘Rethinking M&E’ provides innovative insights into such areas as M&E of NGOs as donors, the M&E of advocacy and the M&E of humanitarian emergencies.

Wherever you find yourself in the world of development M&E, this book will present useful experiences from others in similar situations. It shows that there is momentum and energy going into making M&E work for learning, empowerment and poverty eradication.'

Federation: Defusing Disaster, Reducing the Risk: calamity is unnatural

Disaster is unnatural and risk reduction measures diminish the odds of it occurring by doing everything possible before the event to protect life, limit damage and strengthen a vulnerable community’s ability to bounce back quickly from adversity. The solutions may lie in simple things like educating children on what to do in emergencies, or planting trees on unstable hillsides to stop those releasing landslides. The more complex include early warning systems, coastal protection, earthquake-safe construction and urban planning.

Whatever they are, thousands of lives and billions of dollars could be saved every year if a fraction of the cost of disaster response was spent minimizing the impact of hazards. Studies have shown that every dollar invested in risk reduction can save between two and ten dollars in disaster response and recovery cost.

Part call to action, part showcase of Federation DRR work, this new 12-page publication is now available for download as a pdf from Reliefweb.

RC/RC Movement Cash Guidelines (produced by BRC with Federation support) now available for download from FedNet!

After a long gestational period, the Cash Guidelines are here, they're beautiful, and they are available online or in hardcopy from Charles-Antoine.

Please note that you'll need a FedNet access username and password to download the PDF - follow the links on the page to set one up, if you don't already have one.

UPDATE: The Guidelines are now also available from the ICRC website.

HPG Policy Brief: Humanitarian advocacy in Darfur: The challenge of neutrality

This latest HPG Policy Brief reviews operational aid actors' international advocacy on Darfur since the outbreak of the conflict in 2003 and assesses the issues and challenges that humanitarian organisations face when undertaking advocacy on high profile political emergencies. It makes the following points:

• In order to gain access to communities affected by war, humanitarians have historically remained neutral in matters of political controversy. However, this strict notion of neutrality has been much eroded in recent years. A more ‘pragmatic' form of neutrality is emerging: sufficiently non-partisan to facilitate access to affected communities, while also sufficiently flexible to allow advocacy.
• Aid actors concerned to retain access to affected communities should do more to define and safeguard this new form of neutrality. This may involve distancing themselves from other non-neutral campaigners.
• There is a lack of clarity around humanitarian actors' role in advocacy. This can lead to aid actors overstepping humanitarian boundaries and being drawn into discussions in which they have limited competence or expertise. More discussion and evaluation of the role of advocacy, and its effectiveness in humanitarian action, is required.

Click on the link to download the Policy Brief in pdf format from the HPG website.

ECB Report: Promising Practices for Risk Reduction

The Emergency Capacity Building (ECB) Project carried out pilot projects in three countries (Ethiopia, Guatemala and Indonesia) to identify models and promising practices for disaster risk reduction based on practical programs.

This report summarizes some of the more significant learnings and promising practices, and highlights some key examples that give ideas for moving forward with risk reduction in other areas.

The pdf report is available for download from the Reliefweb site.

Federation: Global Alliance for disaster risk reduction - Building safer, resilient communities

The Federation have published a new paper on their Global Alliance for DRR - follow the link for the pdf document. Don't forget you can post any comments by clicking on the link below!

Advocacy and Darfur seminar - a summary

HPG event: Humanitarian advocacy and Darfur
Wednesday 17 October – ODI offices, 111 Westminster Bridge Road

A really interesting seminar exploring the difficulties of advocacy within an increasingly insecure environment. There were three speakers; Sorcha O’Callaghan, Research Fellow, Humanitarian Policy Group, Brendan Cox, Executive Director, Crisis Action and Rebecca Dale, Independent Policy Advisor on Sudan. I particularly liked Rebecca who spoke with great clarity and had some thought provoking points to make. To see a summary of their comments, read my blog post below:

Sorcha:

• Focussed on the fact that agencies have now become relatively silent compared to three or four years ago when press releases and public advocacy was at its peak. Agencies are increasingly being pulled into political and military discussions. This is undermining their ability to operate and is manifesting itself in the form of growing insecurity for aid workers, increasing problems with access and further restrictions being imposed by the Sudanese government.
• Maintaining neutrality whilst conducting advocacy – not easy when the Sudanese President claims that the aid agencies are the real enemy of the state. A clearer definition is needed of what advocacy is.

Brendan:

• Representing Crisis Action, a campaigning coalition on armed conflict that works behind the scenes to engender change.
• No clear line between humanitarian action and political advocacy. Agencies must be responsible for their actions. He cited the example of MSF denouncing sexual violence – they could not have chosen a more politically sensitive topic.
• The issue is not with principles but with judgement. Judgement in making decisions needs to be improved, further resources are required and greater professionalisation.

Rebecca:

• Damned if you speak out, damned if you do not.
• Again underlined the responsibility of agencies for their actions. Link between field workers on the ground and advocacy campaigns at headquarters level needs to be strengthened. Those running advocacy campaign must fully understand the implications of their actions.
• ‘War on Terror’ has fundamentally changed the way international NGOs are seen. An association has been created between western politcal powers and NGOs, that they are now somehow instruments of government. The request by international NGOs for a non consensual military force to enter Darfur reinforces this – will an Iraq/Afghanistan type occupation follow this request?
• Are NGOs undermining sovereignty?
• A shift has occurred from NGOs needing to provide purely basic needs to now having to be involved in advocacy, understand the root causes of conflict and become involved in post conflict work.
• Support for humanitarian work is dependent on ease of involvement. There is nowhere near the level of engagement in the US on the humanitarian situation in Palestine compared to the massive engagement on Darfur.
• Agencies under increased pressure to speak out.
• If access is not improved the UN will impose sanctions, this puts a lot of pressure on NGOs to stay and improve access.
• Neutrality does not mean condoning violations of IHL.
  

Northern Uganda: Red Cross support to returning communities

A 20 year internal conflict between the Lords Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people in the north of Uganda displaced from their villages in to overcrowded IDP camps. 2006 saw some signs of improvement in the security situation as peace talks began between the parties to the conflict. The Uganda Red Cross Society (URCS) has been running a relief operation in the north of Uganda for the past 5 years, providing essential items, water and sanitation, and seeds and tools to the IDP camps and is now also supporting those who are starting to return to their villages.

In September 2007, I travelled to northern Uganda to see a project run by the URCS and supported by the British Red Cross. Opimo village is a village in Lira district, northern Uganda, where after years of a brutal civil war, some people who were displaced in to IDP camps have begun returning to their homes as ongoing peace talks have brought some security to the region.

The URCS is working to assist those people who have returned to their villages such as Opimo, to rebuild their lives and regain their livelihoods. One way in which the URCS is doing this is to distribute seed and tool kits to families. This enables families to prepare their land, plant and harvest crops to feed themselves, sell produce at nearby markets and build up seed banks for future harvests.

In September 2007, floods swept across parts of northern Uganda, washing away bridges and roads and devastating farmland. Many crops were washed away or ruined. In Opimo village, although not as badly affected as other parts of the district, the rain fell hard and the waterlogged ground is causing farmers to fear that their harvest will fail. In 2007, WFP had been scaling down food distributions to returning communities but because of the floods, WFP is now having to scale up again to meet the growing demands for food assistance.

I met Lawrence, 28 years old, who lives in Opimo village and is married with one child. He received seeds and tools from the URCS, and was very happy with his harvest in the first half of 2007. He went on and prepared and planted in his land in time for the second harvest of the year. However, the heavy rains have brought him and his family concern: “There has been too much rain and this means I will have a very poor harvest.” Lawrence planned to keep some of his beans to plant for the next harvest, but due to the bad weather conditions he has been forced to plant all the bean seeds the URCS gave him in order to maximise what crops he can grow in his waterlogged fields.

The villagers plant their crops wherever they can around the village, with the vegetable gardens being closer to their homes. The waterlogged ground is causing major problems for the farmers, with many of the seeds growing too quickly. This means the crops die off without bearing fruit. With fears of a poor harvest, many people are resorting to planting all of their seeds that they had been keeping from the first harvest in order to maximise the possible crop production from their waterlogged fields.Therefore if the harvest is as poor as predicted, many families will be reliant again on external food aid.

Despite the flooding and worries about their crops, the people of Opimo Village maintain they are happy to be back in their villages after years of conflict forced them and their families to live in the terrible conditions of the IDP camps. Villager, Ojok Moses, 31 years old and responsible for an extended family of 14 people, returned from the IDP camp to his village nearly one year ago. He said “Returning to my village was very important for me. When we lived in the camp I struggled to provide for my family, and this was a big problem for us. Now I am back I have a garden where I can grow vegetables and feed my children.” Lawrence agreed: “In the camp we were surviving day to day, now we can have a livelihood again.” Another villager, Alfred, put it simply: “No longer do we have to be running, security is better and life is good.”

British Red Cross video

Video on Climate change from Antigua and Bermuda Red Cross

ODI Blog: Hugo Slim on killing civilians

Last year, I found myself watching an early round of the African football cup finals on the television at the Acholi Inn in Gulu, Northern Uganda. Next to me was a former senior leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army who had said he might give me an interview about civilian protection after the match.

The game was extremely “physical” and the LRA man was getting quite heated about the conduct on the pitch. Eventually, one deeply cynical tackle was too much for him. He leapt from his chair, shouting at the referee:

“Hey, that’s unfair, that’s terrible, send him off!”

I was gob smacked. Here was a man who had been the official spokesman for one of the most vicious armed groups in the world (whose troops think nothing of the murder and mutilation of unarmed civilians) bitterly complaining about a tackle that went for the man rather than the ball. But he was genuinely outraged. I had obviously got him wrong. After the match, he turned to me and said:

“Why do you want to talk to me about civilians?”

“Because your organization has killed and terrified so many of them and I want to understand why.”

Accusing him of a foul so soon after the match was not a good idea. He grew angry.

“You want to write a book about our war” he said “but you and all the other white people have only just turned up. We have been fighting this war for years but only now are you interested. You talk about civilians. But what is a civilian? Go around this area for a bit and then, if you can tell me what a civilian is, I will talk to you about it.”

Read the rest of his piece on the ODI Online Exchange. His new book, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War, is on its way to the BRC library - it's being published in November.

Report: 10 years of Sphere in Action, enhancing the quality and accountability of humanitarian action

When it was first conceived, it was acknowledged that the Sphere Project was ‘an initial step towards effectiveness and accountability’ to those affected by calamity or armed conflict, and also to those providing resources, financial or otherwise. The Humanitarian Charter reaffirmed the primacy of the humanitarian imperative, reinforcing the right to life with dignity.

Ten years later, the Sphere Project continues to maintain these core principles, working together with other quality and accountability initiatives in the humanitarian sector.

This report aims to provide a small insight into the first ten years of the Sphere Project - with reference to some of those who 'govern' the Project as well as to a number of examples of those who 'use' the Humanitarian Charter and the Minimum Standards, citing first-hand experiences and case studies.

The report is available for download from the Sphere website.

WHO: Risk Reduction and Emergency Preparedness

This six-year strategy is based on the recommendations of a global consultation held by WHO in February 2006. Available for download via Reliefweb.



With the finalization of the strategy, work to bring it into practice had already been started by WHO and its partners. Indeed several new initiatives took place in 2006 while the Strategy was under finalization. The main ones were the development and the implementation of a global survey on country emergency preparedness, a global consultation on mass casualty management in emergency settings, a consultation on the role of nursing and midwifery in emergencies, and another on non-communicable disease management in emergencies. Other initiatives are planned for 2007.

TUFTS: Sharpening the Strategic Focus of Livelihoods Programming in the Darfur Region

This report by the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University captures the process and outputs from a series of four recent workshops in Darfur that produced a shared and common understanding of the impact of conflict on livelihoods, and based on this developed a more strategic approach for support of livelihoods through humanitarian assistance.

The workshops brought together more than 180 national and international actors of differing views and perspectives, who through a participatory process were able to reach consensus. Important common themes that emerged included:

* Conflict and insecurity are continuing to destroy livelihoods, and the adaptations that particular livelihood groups make, in turn fuel the conflict.

* The continued disruption of markets and trade, particularly impacting those who are still able to engage in some of their pre-conflict livelihood strategies, namely pastoralists and resident farmers.

* The breakdown and failures in local governance, particularly in relation to competition over natural resources and local conflict resolution.

* Acceleration of environmental degradation, particularly in areas of high population concentrations as a result of displacement, but also as a result of the breakdown in natural resource governance and the impact of conflict in constraining livelihoods.

* The inequitable distribution of humanitarian livelihoods programming, with some groups, particularly pastoralists widely neglected.

Download the full report from the Tufts website.

HPG Background Paper: Business engagement in humanitarian relief: key trends and policy implications

A slightly belated link to a paper published in June by Andrea Binder and Jan Martin Witte of the Global Public Policy Institute, funded by HPG.

For decades, companies have occupied a secondary presence in humanitarian relief, providing goods and services to dominant humanitarian actors contracting their assistance. However, recently, the business community has started to respond unconventionally to needs arising from humanitarian emergencies, offering more than just logistical support or the delivery of construction materials on a fee-basis. While most donors expend humanitarian funds only to non-profit organisations, certain key donors have started to contract commercial providers directly for planning and implementation of humanitarian projects.

These developments have given rise to much discussion within the humanitarian community regarding the role of the private sector in humanitarian relief. Critics and supporters alike argue that the two trends depicted above, if significant and persistent, have the potential to transform the humanitarian domain and will affect humanitarian principles.

Download the paper from the HPG website; full details of the GPPI project are available from the GPPI website.

Thanks to Jutta for sending this in.

MSF Dialogues: Humanitarian NGOs' responsibilities and limitations in providing 'protection'

In this fourth Dialogues publication from MSF, two speakers (Marc DuBois from MSF and Katy Barnett from Save the Children) discuss what they see as the main issues - and respond to each other's viewpoints. The publication is available from the MSF website.

If you find the discussion thought-provoking, or vehemently agree or disagree with one of the speakers, then check out the latest postings related to this debate on the Dialogues website, and post your own opinions.

Tufts: Feinstein International Center: Impact Assessment of Innovative Humanitarian projects in Sub-Saharan Africa

This is the first in a series of four field studies which makes extensive use of participatory impact assessment methodologies in seeking to answer a simple question: What actually is the true impact of humanitarian assistance?

Partnering with five major NGOs and seven assistance programs in Africa this research seeks to understand not just the expected impact but the total impact of a variety of humanitarian interventions. Early in 2008 the project will also be publishing a tool box of PIA field tested techniques for use in impact assessments.

Download the document in pdf format from the Tufts website.