Call for funding to reach 20% by 2020 for local agencies which typically take greatest risks and can operate faster and more cheaply

Less than 2% of all humanitarian funding goes directly to local NGOs, despite them taking the lion’s share of the risk and often being better placed to deliver, according to aid insiders.

Stephen O’Brien, the head of United Nations humanitarian affairs, told a conference in Switzerland that aid delivered by local agencies was often faster, cheaper and more “culturally appropriate”.

“In Syria, the Arab Red Crescent risked their lives every day to help,” O’Brien said. “In west Africa during the Ebola outbreak, community leaders succeeded where international actors had failed to persuade local communities to change traditional burial practices and help to end the transmission of the disease.”

This exposure meant that about 90% of humanitarian workers who died in 2014 were local staff, he said.

But despite years of discussion about the issue, almost all aid funding continues to flow to the large international agencies; a situation that is increasingly embarrassing for the sector.

“It’s been going on for decades,” said one insider. “They talk and talk but nothing ever changes.”



Figures for how much funding goes directly to local NGOs are hard to find, but the World Disasters report puts it at 1.6%.

Degan Ali, the head of Adeso Africa, argued for a target of 20% by 2020.

“Local NGOs are taking the risks, are the first responders, are the innovators. But we are persistently sidelined – in Nepal, in Philippines and in a grotesque way in Haiti,” Ali told the Guardian, referring to the locations of natural disasters in recent years.



Most accounts of international intervention in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 acknowledge that the big organisations marginalised local NGOs and even stole their staff.



“Without money, without funding, we are so constricted,” Ali said. “We are told persistently that the main issue is risk aversion, accountability, corruption. But you can’t do risk management without funding.”



She said one large UN agency would only pay overheads to international NGOs. “How can we build and grow without proper financial support?”

Another campaigner from the global south said: “Please don’t keep telling us that we need to build capacity; it’s insulting and patronising. It’s an old-fashioned, colonial viewpoint. These organisations are run by people with two PhDs, they are not stupid. Just assume that the capacity is there and fund us properly.”

International NGOs point out, however, that they already fund local NGOs, and worry that Ali’s proposal marks an artificial line between north and south.

“What we need now is a global approach,” said Sean Lowrie, of the Start Network, which brings together international and national NGOs for humanitarian response. Its members include Save the Children, Oxfam and Christian Aid.

He said the current model was not working. “We’re still working in an old-fashioned, centralised, top-down system, which believes in the fallacy of control. We’re stuck and we’re not talking about the real issue, which are incentives, behaviour and governance. What we need is a whole new eco-system of smart humanitarianism, which responds to what is needed, which is flexible and diversified, and which is financed in new, smart ways.”

The humanitarian sector took a hard look at itself in Geneva this week, and the picture was not quite the heroic, saintly image it would prefer to see. After unprecedented levels of demand, with the number of people needing humanitarian assistance doubling in the last decade, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called last year for a review of the entire sector and led a large consultation with more than 23,000 people around the world. Next spring at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, they will agree, everyone hopes, concrete and long-lasting improvements for a system at full stretch.



Money, as usual, is the biggest problem. Humanitarian aid depends on regular appeals to donors rather than a steady funding stream, but the intense and demanding conflict work of the last five years has meant the gap between appeals and actual funding has widened.



O’Brien’s predecessor, Jan Eliasson, told the conference that when he was in the job a few years ago they usually managed a 60-70% fulfilment rate. “That would be pretty fantastic for you, Stephen,” he said to his successor, whose rate is closer to 30-40%.



There are also growing demands for accountability and transparency from both ends of the system. Faced with ever greater requests for money, donors want to know exactly where their money is going. At the same time there is a growing movement to give more accountability and discretion to the people at the receiving end of aid.

“At the moment it’s very template driven,” said Manu Gupta, co-founder of the National Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction in India. “International agents go in and don’t take into consideration the context, the culture. There’s no space for communities to express what they actually need and want. The mindset around this really has to change.” The need to give “dignity” and control back to beneficiaries was one of the critical goals for the summit.



The bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, this month, in which 10 patients and at least 12 staff died, has thrown light on another issue for the sector: with 75% of humanitarian work now occurring in conflict zones, “how do we protect people in those environments, how do we give them aid?” asked John Mitchell, head of ALNAP, an international network around humanitarian work. “We’re not doing that very well.”

Migration and forced displacement is another challenge. “It’s absurd that people have to put themselves into a boat that can sink and pay $1,000 to cross a three-mile channel,” the UNHCR head, Antonio Guterres, said to energetic applause. “What we need are many more legal methods to come to Europe.”

The summit chief, Jemilah Mahmood, welcomed Ali’s proposal for 20% of funding to go to local NGOs. “It’s ambitious and I like it. We have to set ourselves ambitious targets, that is what this whole process has been about from the beginning.”

All proposals at the Geneva conference will have to be made into coherent proposals for the Istanbul summit.

“It’s been an extraordinary and unique process,” said Mahmood, who is stepping down and handing over to the UN veteran Antoine Gerard. “From the beginning Ban Ki-moon wanted a very inclusive process that would bring together these people, particularly those affected by crises, and the local actors who are rarely in the room when decisions are made.”