This is another edition of Inklings, where we explore all things aid and aid-adjacent unfolding in humanitarian hubs, on the front lines of emergency response, or in the wilds of UNGA.
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Today: Coordination power dynamics, UNGA shorthand, and why you shouldn’t plug that proposal into ChatGPT.
On the radar|
‘Something is clearly not right’: If meeting attendance were an Olympic event, then humanitarians would dominate the podium. But Humanitarian Country Team meetings, it turns out, are more of an endurance sport. Attending HCT meetings makes some feel “frustrated”, “demotivated”, “confused”, “lost”, and “tired”. That’s what 30+ NGO coordinators told the authors of a new report that sheds light on – and raises an alarm over – the dynamics at HCT meetings. The report was published this month by the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, or ICVA. Many participants said they felt excluded and unheard. “I eventually gave up participating,” one NGO leader said. “What was the point if my words didn’t matter?” There’s much at stake: These UN-led coordination meetings are meant to guide responses, and ensure high-pressure operations are focused and effective. The frustration and sense of exclusion “speak to poor engagement and consultation, which has critical implications for good decision-making”, the report authors said. “Something is clearly not right.”
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Power dynamics: Others have noted “dysfunction” among specific humanitarian country teams – such as in Ethiopia, where one evaluator called the UN-led response between 2020 and 2023 a “failure”. There’s also an underlying power imbalance in coordination meetings in general: Local humanitarian leaders are often unheard – literally. “Local actors – when in the room – spoke extremely rarely,” researchers analysing localisation in the Syria response recently wrote. Researchers in the Pacific Islands once took a stopwatch to a cluster meeting: There were only two international staff present, but they spoke for half the time.
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How to fix it: The good news is that coordination problems have solutions. The report has a few recommendations aimed at building trust: smaller meetings, clearer objectives, and dedicated time for perspectives from national NGOs, for example. Separate advice calls for recruiting leaders based on their “relational skills and emotional intelligence” (on top of general competence and experience). “The paper spotlights the cracks in coordination, but its intention is not to deepen them,” co-author Eileen Morrow, ICVA’s head of policy and advocacy, wrote in a recent ICVA newsletter. “I hope the results and recommendations will be taken seriously but not personally.” Luckily, the humanitarian sector is known for listening to people who use aid, its eagerness for accountability, and its thick skin for constructive criticism.
Mpox: Big aid agencies are scaling up funding requests to respond to the mpox emergency centred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Social media monitoring by data analysts Insecurity Insight flags public “mistrust and scepticism” around the emergency – mirroring the dynamics around previous, highly criticised responses to Ebola outbreaks.
Acronymage|
The UN General Assembly’s high-level week kicks off in a few days. Here are a few topical abbreviations buried amid the consonants:
NAFP: Will the proposed New Agenda for Peace help reduce conflict? It’s one of several policy frameworks feeding into the proposed Pact for the Future during the Summit of the Future (22-23 September) – the long-marinating push to reform global governance by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Colleague Will Worley canvasses the room for thoughts on the NAFP here.
QJSAMR: Also part of UNGA next week is the High-Level Meeting on anti-microbial resistance (26 September). The Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR is a double-barrelled abbreviation referring to the three UN agencies (and one other organisation) guiding the UN’s work on this issue.
WOAH: The World Organisation for Animal Health is the fourth corner of that quad. The three UN agencies: FAO, UNEP, and WHO.
OIE: WOAH was originally known as the Office International des Epizooties. This leads to an alphabet-packed bio on the QJSAMR site: “(WOAH) – founded as OIE”.
End quote|
Looking to do some consultant work for the Norwegian Refugee Council? Don’t turn to ChatGPT for help. A note on a recent ad warned:
“The consultant shall not enter any information provided by NRC into an artificial intelligence model or similar platform.”
In other words: Don’t train generative AI platforms on sensitive, confidential information. It’s probably sage advice across the humanitarian sector and beyond. Big corporations – including Amazon, Apple, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Samsung, and Spotify – have reportedly issued similar staff bans or restrictions.
Have any tips, recommendations, or indecipherable acronyms to share with the Inklings newsletter? Get in touch: [email protected]
