When Nepal’s earthquake hit on 25 April, the world sprang into action. Hundreds of organisations began raising money for a humanitarian response. But did they know enough about Nepal for their relief efforts to be effective?
Many people assume that organisations raising money for a disaster are knowledgable about the affected country or region, but that might not be true. The only requirement for raising money after a disaster is a desire to help.
Though many campaigners increasingly advocate funding local groups, donors typically give to organisations with brand-name recognition, which does not work for locals. My findings show that the UN flash appeal, a consolidated global funding request, designated just 0.8% of direct funds to local organisations; they will eventually receive money, but it will trickle down to them as subcontractors.
When an international group arrives in Nepal from another country, the first task is to find local staff, whose salaries will be on average four times lower than those of international employees. Rather than hire a new team or bring in dozens of internationals, aid groups identify local organisations to whom they subcontract the work.
This can lead to some strange situations. For example, reporting documents show that Unicef, UN Habitat, MercyCorps, Oxfam and Plan International are all funding a local Nepalese group, Enpho, to deliver water and sanitation.
Why don’t donors just fund Enpho directly? The way aid works today, donors are paying the contract-management or “overhead” fee for each organisation involved. Organisations typically redirect about 10% of all funds to overheads such as office rent, cars, equipment and fuel. Local subcontractors claim the same. That means our donations don’t go as far. We’re paying for more offices, more generators, more cars, and more computers than necessary. It seems contrary to the spirit of humanitarian aid, yet it’s become the industry standard.
Big organisations have a vested financial interest in promoting themselves over local groups. They benefit from their position as middlemen and from not promoting the work of smaller organisations because this allows them to hold monopolies on donor dollars. Although they may redirect some funds to local groups, they take a “management fee” for overheads. While local organisations may make good – and necessary – partners, ultimately, they are treated as competition.
In contrast, local organisations don’t operate that way at all. Enpho, for example, has been providing water and sanitation in Nepal for 25 years. It lists more than 50 international partners on its website. It does this partly to give itself legitimacy in donors’ eyes. For local groups, this is also a way to prove their value in the aid marketplace.
One of the challenges when redistributing aid dollars is that donor governments prefer to give directly to organisations that will provide “oversight” to locals. But as private individuals, we can endeavour to give our money to local groups like Enpho even if we cannot influence aid policy on a bigger scale.
Each year, private donors are responsible for 25% of all donations made to humanitarian aid. Individuals contributed $3.9bn (£2.4bn) in 2013, giving us a huge stake in how those dollars should be spent. While some donors question the capacity for corruption or the transparency of local groups, they don’t always think to apply the same standards to brand-name international groups.
This year in the US, International Relief and Development, one of the top US non-profits operating in Afghanistan, was suspended from receiving new funds after it admitted mismanagement. In the UK, the founder of the charity ShelterBox is on trial for three counts of corruption that allegedly took place while he was at the helm of the organisation. Clearly, it isn’t only aid groups and employees in developing countries who know how to waste well-intentioned money. The truth is, no one is immune to mismanagement.
Through their donations, individual donors have enormous power to change the system, but they are mostly kept in the dark about how aid really works. If we moved our donations just one or two organisations closer to the people in need, each dollar we give could be 10% or 20% more effective.
For the Nepalese, that would mean more lives saved, more food on the table and a local community that is fully supported for the challenges that lie ahead.
-
Emily Troutman is an independent writer and photographer. In 2009, she was named citizen ambassador to the UN
