Douglas Alexander responds to Madeleine Bunting on the militarisation of aid

My department has every reason to work in countries affected by conflict – not because aid has been "subordinated to achieve military objectives", or even because "poverty causes conflict", but rather because conflict causes poverty. Half of all children out of school today live in countries affected by conflict, and half of all children who die before the age of five were born in fragile states.

Read more on the Guardian's website. Madeleine Bunting's op-ed is available here.

Resilient global institutions

A new report, 'Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalisation: Risk, Resilience and International Order', by Alex Evans and David Stevens of Global Dashboard for the Brookings Institute, has been highlighted by the Economist:

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure. How will that change politics?

...what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

The report's conclusions are summarised in a blog post by Alex:

Creating new analytical mechanisms for creating shared awareness about shared risks. E.g. the IPCC provides crucial analysis of the problem of climate change – but there’s no equivalent on the solution.

Improving the ‘bandwidth’ of the G20. E.g. by strengthening Sherpa mechanisms, and building links between the G20 and formal institutions, thus improving the range of policy options going to heads.

Setting up a ‘red team’ in the international system that has the job of exploring risks and challenging policymakers on whether enough is being done to manage them – similar to the Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency in the US, which has the job of “preventing surprise”.

Changing how governments organize and deliver foreign policy. We argue that all governments will need to spend more money on managing global risks, and do more to integrate the different elements of foreign policy (aid, diplomacy, military).

Read more on Global Dashboard.

Updated 28.01.10: Ushahidi - social media and the Haiti response

Updated 28.01.2010: This New Scientist article praises the contribution made by crowdsourced data to search and rescue and needs mapping.

More on social media in humanitarian aid in another post, but wanted to put up a link to this initiative:

Ushahidi use information sourced from emails, texts and tweets to map events such as the recent tensions in Kampala, and the current needs in Haiti. People can text a number from Haiti, or internationally, or report events directly on the Ushahihi website, and volunteers code the responses onto a map. Some reports are verified and some not (the value of crowd-sourced information is a hot debate, as you can read here) but the result is compelling and to many on the ground, useful.



Read more about Ushahidi here, or look at the map as it currently stands here.

Haiti: agency instrospection

An incisive and thought-provoking post from Tales from the Hood, operational in Haiti:

In the first two weeks it was about visibility while the cameras were rolling. Getting your agency’s sign or T-shirted horde of volunteers in the background or foreground was the media game. But now it’s about reeling in big chunks of the real funding from the real donors. The real feeding frenzy has begun.

...Several NGOs will get their foothold in Haiti and possibly the world by playing their cards right in this emergency response. Many will remember this earthquake response as a time of winning grants and thinking through Civ/Mil issues and handling large quantities of stuff.

Read more on the Tales from the Hood blog.

Updated: Yemen meeting in London, 27.01.10

Update: Guardian article expresses approval that the meeting 'didn't get too preoccupied with al-Qaida and recognised that the country faces "many urgent problems" (to put it mildly) which are inter-related and need to be tackled across a broad front.'

The Yemen meeting, held on the eve of a major conference on Afghanistan with many foreign policy heavyweights present, deserves its own post.

Before the meeting, the Foreign Secretary and Development Secretary set out their aims in a piece for the al-Hayat website - the focus is clearly on long-term stability, seeking to build the

'Government’s capacity, help it to take forward political and economic reform, and deliver services and jobs to its citizens. In our view, this is the best way to help the people of Yemen get the basic opportunities they deserve, which will, in turn, help address the drivers of instability and conflict.'

A statement by the Foreign Secretary on the outcomes of the meeting broadly confirmed this focus, and announced the beginning of a Friends of Yemen process.

These statements do not mention the humanitarian impacts of the current unrest, or point to any increased efforts to address them, as Care International called for on Tuesday.

BAAG conference on Afghanistan

Ahead of the London Conference on Afghanistan on the 28th January, the British Agencies in Afghanistan Group held a one-day conference at Canada House on the 26th January to contribute an Afghan perspective. Invited speakers included Afghan NGO staff, MPs, and activists, as well as UK-based experts and NGO speakers. Discussions broadly focussed on security and government, although several speakers raised the rights and voices of Afghan women, strikingly absent from the London Conference photo-call. Video from the conference is still to come. Daniel Gerstle of Change.org reflected on a day that had seen nothing very new announced or debated, and asked fellow attendees for concrete recommendations.

Sierra Leone supplies security contractors to Iraq

A report that a British PSC is employing ex-combatants from Sierra Leone in Iraq on a salary of $250 a month plus free training, room and board - just under ten times what they would earn at home but a fraction of the salary a Western security worker can command in Iraq, which can be in the region of $100k.