Changing the way humanitarian organisations operate

The notion that humanitarian organisations and their workers should be accountable to their beneficiaries is still an unusual one in Pakistan - and indeed in much of the world.

Yet the need for such accountability and for high standards of service is the message that dominated the recent five-day training workshop organised by the Pakistan office of the Geneva-based Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP).

The workshop on standards in accountability and quality management set out to educate participants about the HAP standard, which lays down six benchmarks against which it is possible to compare an organisation’s policies and practices to assess how effectively it assures quality and accountability in its work.

The standard emphasises quality management, enabling beneficiaries to participate in decision-making, establishing and implementing a complaints-handling mechanism, and working for continual improvement.

The organisations that attended the HAP training, held 21-25 July, included the Canadian Red Cross, Islamic Relief, ActionAid, ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development), Raahbaar Foundation, Swabi Community Development Organisation, Church World Service (CWS) and the Sungi Development Foundation.

Many of the participating NGOs have been involved in relief work since the October 2005 earthquake that killed 73,000 in parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Discussions on precisely what humanitarian accountability entailed dominated the sessions, as HAP set out its mission to make humanitarian action accountable to those it is intended to benefit.

Naveedul Haq, Maria Kiani and Shaukat Iqbal from HAP led the discussions, at which themes of the feasibility and practicality of the standard in Pakistan’s social context came up repeatedly, as did the accountability practices of organisations, especially in the post-quake scenario.

Wahid Shah, who participated in the workshop on behalf of the Pakistan wing of ActionAid, the international anti-poverty group headquartered in South Africa, told IRIN “these discussions helped us look at our own policies and think about how the HAP standard could be incorporated into them”.

Photo: Photo taken by witness

Security incidents involving members of the humanitarian community have witnessed a recent upsurge in the quake area

Backlash 

The issue has special significance in Pakistan. In a backlash that began in the months after the devastating 2005 earthquake, there have been attacks on international and local organisations engaged in relief work in various parts of the quake-hit NWFP.

In the town of Mansehra, about 100km north of Islamabad, which became an epicentre for relief work, edicts have been issued warning humanitarian organisations to quit.

The attack early this year on the offices of the UK-based Plan International NGO, leading to the death of three employees, was proof of the danger inherent in these threats.

Complaints

“The NGOs who come in pretending to help quake-hit people really wish to change our culture and traditions,” said Muhammad Yusuf, 40, who runs a bakery in Mansehra and tutors children seeking religious education.

“The organisations have recruited our women to work for them, changing our culture. They teach them immorality,” he said.

In other places, complaints from local people have focused on long delays in providing relief or on a reluctance to involve local communities in decision-making about their future.

“The HAP 2007 standard is geared towards better systems, improved communication, increased participation, competent staff and a complaints handling mechanism. All these empower beneficiaries, improve programming and impart quality service delivery while having better relationship with all the stakeholders and affected communities,” Maria Kiani, programme officer, communication and monitoring, for HAP in Islamabad, told IRIN.

She said HAP believed following the standard would create a “more secure environment”.

Origins of HAP

HAP, set up in Geneva in 2003, evolved from the growing international concern about humanitarian work - and the negative impact it could sometimes have, for example in civil war-hit Rwanda in the 1990s.

The programme has changed a little bit… now we encourage and assist agencies to implement the HAP 2007 standard.

HAP set up its Pakistan office in the aftermath of the 2005 quake. It has since monitored other natural disasters, including flooding in 2007.

Maria Kiani said in the days that followed the quake, HAP focused on offering organisations strategic and technical guidance, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation, advocacy and awareness raising training - supporting agencies to improve their levels of humanitarian accountability and quality and in setting up beneficiary complaints handling mechanisms.

“The programme has changed a little bit… now we encourage and assist agencies to implement the HAP 2007 standard,” Kiani said.

The implementation of the standard could bring important changes in the manner in which humanitarian organisations operate, and, as Najwa Khan of CWS, a US-based humanitarian organisation that works across Pakistan, says, “help us all to think more about what we are doing and how we can be more accountable to the communities we work for”.

kh/at/cb