Interview with acting Emergency Relief Coordinator Carolyn McAskie [Pt 1]

In the first part of an interview with IRIN, Carolyn McAskie - acting Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC) and Acting Head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)

· said that coordination among the relief community was essential in crisis-affected countries to avoid duplication and to improve fund-raising efforts. She said that UN humanitarian coordinators reporting to her office acted as “linchpins” in ensuring that aid programmes are implemented in a coordinated fashion. She added that OCHA was making efforts to improve its internal systems and procedures to improve its ability to manage field coordination.

QUESTION: How do you see your role as acting Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC)?

ANSWER: The last two years have seen the launching of coordination as a strategic and useful tool for the humanitarian community. I’ve been involved with these issues from outside the [UN] system for a long time and it is very heartening to come into the system and see the extent to which coordination really does work.

We tend often to focus on the problems, the issues of the day, the negotiations with agencies, the problems in the field but these are problems of daily life and the fact is that the whole concept of coordination is far more deeply rooted in the system than I would have expected.

The other thing that makes the job much easier is the tremendous commitment of the current [UN] Secretary-General [SG] to the humanitarian side of all that we do and to his commitment to link the political, peacekeeping and humanitarian both in the form of the integrated mission concept but also in the form of looking at the human side of all of the political work of the United Nations. This means that the humanitarian work is validated and that the Emergency Relief Coordinator has quite a lot of authority with the [UN] agencies. I don’t think this job would work if OCHA was a separate enterprise working with the agencies. The reason this position works is because you are speaking with the weight of the Secretary-General behind you.

Q: But what is OCHA actually doing to improve coordination?

A: We work with all the humanitarian players at several different levels. One is at the headquarters level. At the highest level the heads of agencies meet either in a group twice a year through the Inter Agency Standing Committee [IASC] or informally...

In the field, however, is where it really works but it wouldn’t work in the field unless you have strength and buy-in from Headquarters. The appointment of a humanitarian coordinator who reports to the Emergency Relief Coordinator’s office is the linchpin of the whole exercise...

In addition to the heads of agency you have the whole network of working groups and consultative processes whereby staff at headquarters consult at all levels on a whole variety of subjects either formally through the IASC, through ECHA [Executive Committee on Humanitarian Affairs] and UNDG [UN Development Group] or informally by the network of relationships that is built up and through the tremendous collegiality that exists now to the point where UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR, UNDP, Red Cross colleagues will readily pick up the phone to OCHA and vice versa.

Q: How does all this actually improve the lives of people in crisis-affected countries in Africa? What does it mean for them?

A: We have to get away from the bureaucratic concept that we all work with and see how this makes a difference. If the various players can work together they can share information and make sure that everyone has a common idea of where the worst problems are and how they can address them together.

If every single agency - including all the international NGOs that are so present and so active - had to come out to the scene of a crisis, analyse the situation and decide where they were going to go there would be a tremendous danger of duplication: everyone rushing to the same crisis spot and people in need being missed.

If you have a coordination process what we can do is bring them together to share the information and to provide a forum for decision-making and backstopping so that the agencies can help each other. They can make decisions on where to go, they can get information on where the real problems are, they can support each other by providing security and communications for each other so that they can get into dangerous places more safely and just generally cover the ground better.

The other way we can make a difference is through the coordination of fund raising. We can put all the fund raising efforts of the different partners together into one massive appeal and we can provide the publicity and the international profile to raise more funds for these emergencies and that has worked.

Q: But the response to appeals in many African countries such as Angola or the DRC has been poor.

A: Well Angola is not your best example. Last year Angola’s appeal was about 75-80 percent funded. This year it appears slow. This year we have had tremendous funding pressures because so much of the donor money has gone to Kosovo and East Timor and our major preoccupation will be to get more money to the forgotten emergencies.

But the money is coming in. Take the drought in the Horn of Africa as an example. The process that was put together with [WFP chief] Catherine Bertini going out as the Special Envoy [of the UN Secretary-General] has really brought the issue to the front page. [UNICEF chief] Carol Bellamy followed her and I followed her three weeks later and got tremendous press coverage. When such people visit these crises and talk to governments we can often put pressure on them to change their policies and to make things more efficient in the field. In Ethiopia we managed to persuade the government to remove 200 percent tax on NGO vehicles in response to the drought. I managed to persuade them that having NGOs pay for the privilege of providing the only services in some small town was unacceptable. Some increased pledges have come in as a result of that and the response to the drought is far more than it would have been if we had not had this coordinated approach.
But you’re right. I’m not saying that we have managed to raise all the money we need for all the emergencies but I do believe that we’re doing better than if the agencies were all out there scrambling by themselves.

Q: You recently initiated a review of OCHA. What will this achieve?

A: The review is necessary now because if we are to launch OCHA as an institution capable of managing field coordination we need to put all the management systems and processes in place to sustain that. Right now we are in a situation where everyone is running the shop. What we need is a process whereby a lot of these things happen automatically. We need to improve our processes for hiring and administering our staff both at Headquarters and in the field. We need to have better information systems, better financial tracking systems.
With a young organisation you can do a lot of these things on the run but as OCHA gets bigger and more involved in the field and more spread out around the world, we cannot sustain it unless we can ground ourselves in more professional systems and methodologies...

Another big decision we’ve made which I think has been universally applauded by our agency partners is that we have realised that we were wasting a lot of energy in trying to deal with natural disasters and complex emergencies through two different and separate approaches. It’s true that disasters are different from emergencies but what is the same is our need to coordinate the international response... So we want to truly integrate the disaster function into everything we do and make sure that managers understand that OCHA’s role is to respond at the time of any emergency whether from natural causes or based on conflict.