Transparent famine relief is no luxury!

13 Million people at the horn of Africa are facing hunger and it is expected that between 100.000 and 200.000 people will die from hunger until the end of this year. Every day more the 2000 people from Somalia cross the border into Kenya and arrive at the refugee camps in search of food and water. The international community and private donors are responding, but not enough. Much more help is needed to help aid agencies to get food to the people. Is this not the wrong moment to continue bickering over aid transparency? I do not think it is. Aid transparency, as I understand it, has three major objectives: to increase efficiency, to curb corruption and to assure accountability and participation. Let's look at these three aspects with respect to the famine in the horn of Africa.

In order to increase efficiency in the fight against hunger, it is primarily the staff of aid agencies working in the area, that need access to good information: Who is doing what, when, where and for how long. There are hundreds of aid agencies providing emergency relief – how is this work coordinated to assure that as many people as possible can be reached with the funds available? I am sure there are coordinating efforts – but as long as data is not standardized and the sharing of information is not inbuilt in the system, it is cumbersome and potentially slow. Coordination based on real-time information in crisis situation is not a luxury. It is vital. Think about the earth-quake in Haiti. Within a short period of time a large number of aid agencies started activities in Haiti to rescue people, to provide emergency relief and to rebuild the country. Despite efforts by the UN and the government of Haiti to manage this massive influx of aid, criticism of lack of coordination was rife. To improve coordination the American NGO network InterAction had created an online map illustrating all relief activities of its member organisations in Haiti. The UN has its own, much less detailed map. If all aid agencies had basic information, such as those suggested by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) available online and open to reuse, a comprehensive map could be built easily. Based on such such information relief efforts by donors, by the Haitian government and also individuals in Haiti and abroad (e.g. migrants) could be better targeted. In situations with massive need and limited resources such improvements can safe lives! In the Horn of Africa the World Food Programme (WFP) also launched a map. However this map only indicates the worst affected areas and the WFP distribution centres. Is all help concentrated on the distribution centres? What are other organisations doing? What are the governments of Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya doing? And what has been done in the past to prevent the famine? As the Economist points out, the international community was aware of the risk of famine back in November 2010 but called for international support only in July 2011. Development experts very often stress the need to learn from past successes and failures. In the case of this famine, it would be important to assess the overall food security activities in the horn of Africa in recent years and analyse which efforts have reduced the risk of famine and which haven't. Looking at individual projects will not suffice. Good analysis to increase food security in this area will depend on comparable data by all development stakeholders. There are already a good systems in place to monitor climate, markets and other factors of food security in risk areas – it would be highly desirable to combine this data with data on aid activities in the same area.

What about corruption? Is corruption an issue in the current crisis in the horn of Africa and can aid transparency do something about it? According to research by Transparency International it is a critical problem in humanitarian aid. Countries affected by humanitarian crisis often are often characterised by high levels of corruption, political instability and lack of infrastructure even prior to the crisis. In the event of a crisis the high influx of humanitarian aid and the pressure to spent the money quickly increase the risk for corruption. In addition, the impact of corruption is much more devastating in humanitarian aid than in development cooperation. The diversion of funds for services and goods in humanitarian aid can have direct results on how many people are dying or suffer irreparable damage. Corruption, the report by TI continues, can also have negatively “impact the morale of humanitarian agency staff and their local partners, and can damage organisations’ reputations” and thus further reduce the help to people in dire need. In the famine relief in the horn of Africa there have already been first reports about corruption as Nicolas Seris, the Programme Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid from TI Kenya points out on the TI blog. TI Kenya is currently implementing a programme to enhance integrity in the food sector and to reduce the opportunities for corruption. To avoid corruption in food aid, many different measure are necessary. One fundamental requirement for reducing corruption according to Seris is is the transparency of aid. If the volume of aid and the amount of food aid is public knowledge, there is a lot less scope for local officials like in the Kenyan corruption case, to divert the much needed food.

The third expected benefit of aid transparency is, that it increases accountability. In humanitarian crisis relatively large sums of tax revenues and private donations are spent and like in long-term development activities, governments and NGOs should be as transparent as possible about where the money goes and how it is spent. But in the case of this famine, the question of accountability goes beyond financial flows. According to a post by Jake Grover on the Center for Global Development Blog, this famine did not come as a surprise. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) of the US government agency USAid did see this famine coming. Grover stresses, that USAid did prepare for the famine by providing both food and money and the main reasons for the famine are the political situation in Somalia. The terrorist group al-Shabab, who controls Somalia refuses food aid to enter the country. So they are the main culprit and should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity as Charles Kenny argues. But, this is not the whole story. According to the Economist article cited earlier, the UN started as late as in July 2011 to appeal for international support and explains that NGOs and governments could have done more and sooner to avoid the catastrophic situation we have now. Kenny supports this view and Duncan Green, Oxfam's policy officer is cited in the Economist saying “Aid officers worry about being criticised by the public and their own bosses if they spend scarce resources before there is an outcry. The result is that donors often ignore their own early warnings.” For me, this clearly illustrates the need for closer monitoring of aid and that access to information is important. The FEWS Net of USAid is public, so anybody interested and with access to internet could have been informed about the threat of famine. But nobody could have known in late 2010 or early 2011 or even today, which government and which organisation is doing what in order to prevent this crisis? For this, you would have needed standardized information about development activities related to food security by both aid agencies and national governments. If a public outcry is necessary for NGOs, like Oxfam, and for western governments to react sooner and with more funds to prevent famine, then the public needs relevant, current and easily accessibly information to for this public pressure to build up. So in this case, accountability is more about when aid agencies reacted to a crisis and not about if all the money was indeed spent on saving lives. All around the world there are people who feel that hunger is a scandal and who are willing to commit time and money to reduce hunger. Technology and social networks have created many new opportunities to do this. So I do think that a crowd-sourced early warning system based on FEWS-Net data and on transparent, standardised and open aid data is possible.

Information, as Owen Barder from the Center for Global development says, is a critical aspect in the overall effort to save people's life in the horn of Africa. It is critical for early warning systems and for an efficient, coordinated and uncorrupted delivery of aid. It is critical for public pressure on NGOs and governments to do the right thing at the right time. Transparency, access to information, in humanitarian aid is no luxury. It is essential.