Transcriber: Napakcha P. Dutta Reviewer: David DeRuwe
It's a really big number.
A quarter billion people who see their lives
and livelihoods and their hopes destroyed by disasters every year:
by flood, by famines, by wars.
That's like half of the population of western Europe.
And as we heard tonight,
it's more than the entire French-speaking population of the world.
Aid agencies, mostly western and funded by western donors,
spend some 15 billion dollars a year on humanitarian aid in these crises.
That's a lot of money.
But if you do the math,
it's only about $60 a head for all those affected people.
And we have a challenge.
As climate change cuts in,
and our society struggles to adapt,
we are going to see more frequent disasters,
in more places,
with more destructive power than in the past.
We who work in this field - it's great for us.
We're in a growth business.
Even in a recession, I am not going to lose my job.
But ...
I have a problem.
The basic way of working is, as outsiders,
intervening to patch things up.
We're the ambulances of the globalized world.
And as the number of people caught up in crises increases,
our ability to provide effective relief with this centralized and top-down model
is going to fail.
Well actually, it's already failing.
We're going to need a new way of working
that adapts aid to the nuance of each crisis,
that is decentralized,
and allows us to deliver a tailored and locally-relevant product.
What we need is simple,
it's obvious,
and it's desperately hard to create.
So here's the big yet simple idea:
People caught up in crises can and should
take control of their own destiny.
Locally-led aid works, and it can work to scale
if, and only if,
the international agencies radically change
the way they act and think.
Let me illustrate.
Years ago, when I was younger,
well, much younger really,
I ran a relief operation in Ethiopia,
shipping food aid in to famine-affected villagers.
Now, I knew the cost of all that food aid
and had a fair idea of the cash value of all the coping mechanisms
that families had used to survive the famine so far.
Those came to nine times the value of my food aid.
So the aid effort, the true aid effort,
was 90% led and funded by Ethiopian families
and only 10% led and funded by my agency.
So sometimes,
what you see depends on where you are standing.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
There is hardly a single international agency
that doesn't proclaim its commitment to working in local partnerships.
Yet, when you follow the money,
the gap between rhetoric and reality -
it's quite astonishing.
Like I said, we spend about 15 billion a year on humanitarian aid,
yet less than 5% of that goes directly to local groups.
All the rest goes to the big guys and trickles its way down,
subcontract by subcontract, onto the ground.
I want to show you tonight how local aid can work
and suggest how the international aid systems take advantage of this
to build a truly vibrant and new vision for the future.
So ...
what should it look like?
Well ...
it should be locally-led.
That means that groups on the ground set the priorities and approaches,
and international agencies can provide the resources,
the technical know-how, and the connection to make the aid work.
Or it could be locally-owned.
It might start with an outside agency,
but they then hand over the running of the project to the local group.
The group takes ownership.
Unfortunately, what we normally see
is aid that is locally-delivered.
That means an international agency contracts a local group to do its bidding.
Now, these are often called partnership agreements, but they're not.
They're delivery contracts, and it doesn't have to be like that.
Locally-led can be innovative.
In Mozambique, communities that have been devastated by the civil war
have seen their children coming home as child soldiers,
having committed horrendous war crimes.
And this is something totally alien to them.
So they've innovated.
They have taken the normal ceremony they use for the dead and adapted it.
The ceremony involves the children entering the house of the dead,
stripping,
and then the house is set on fire.
The children are pulled out of the house, rescued from death - as it were, reborn.
Thereafter, they're given a new name;
they're a new person.
Nobody ever refers to them again
by that old name or refers to their old past.
And this adaptation has been phenomenally successful
in helping reintegrate these children back into society,
way more so
than the rehabilitation programs of the big external agencies.
Let's go across the world to Myanmar.
Here,
local communities have designed and built their own cyclone-proof bamboo houses,
at a fraction the cost of the designs suggested by their international partners.
They've used renewable materials
and local skills
to simultaneously improve disaster preparedness
and strengthen the local economy.
It's a great example of local ownership.
And locally-led happens in western disasters as well.
In Louisiana,
a local pressure group looking to clean up the oil pollution and the oil industry
has adapted software developed in Kenya
to map the oil spills along the coast.
And this has given them powerful data,
which allows them to fight back against the oil companies
and substantiate their claims for compensation.
Sometimes,
locally-led can be cheaper.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
a local group has been able to help demobilized soldiers
reintegrate back into civil society,
for about 150 dollars a head
compared with 300 dollars or more
typically quoted by the international agencies.
And locally-led can be smarter.
In the Philippines, municipal authorities have developed a text-messaging service
that allows people caught up in floods or cyclones and fires
to alert authorities to their needs.
The system analyzes the incoming texts in real time
and provides a live picture of where and how needs are changing.
This means aid can be accurately targeted, and it gives a super rapid response.
Okay, I don't want to be naive
and suggest that locally-led is a panacea for everything.
In some crises, you know, particularly violent ones,
external neutral third parties are often the only way
to deliver lifesaving assistance.
And where a program has to suddenly massively scale up,
funneling large amounts of cash and work
down to previously small, local organizations -
it can completely destroy them.
And we saw this after the tsunami in 2004,
after the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
But everything we know tells us that if you want to be effective,
locally-led aid has got to be part of the big picture.
Now, here's the thing.
Years ago, one of my gurus in this business, Mary Anderson,
drummed into me that nobody ever develops anybody else.
We all develop ourselves.
Resilient communities aren't built with external aid; they grow locally.
It's messy.
Locally-led aid - it's highly context-specific,
it's full of false starts,
and it's probably way more expensive
than those large monolithic programs dreamed up in Washington or in Geneva.
Yet, everything we know about making aid work
in complex, highly rapidly changing environments
tells us you need feedback all the time.
You need context-specific knowledge.
You need people on the ground willing to take leadership and risk.
And if you want to do anything
other than just keep people alive in a crisis,
locally-led has got to be part of the big picture.
What we need,
and Erika touched on this in her talk earlier,
what we really need is a radical rethink of what partnership actually means.
It is not about outsourcing and subcontracting.
It is about allying local knowledge,
idealism, and commitment to the future
with the heavy lifting power,
the technical know-how, and the strength of outside agencies.
It means that international agencies have to get way smarter
about how they help local groups scale up.
Don't blow them out of the water.
Don't turn them into mini-mes as it were.
True partnership
is based on respect,
humility, and trust.
If we can ally
the heavy lifting power and science of the international agencies
onto the local knowledge and commitment of the community groups
and put a local group in the driving seat,
then and only then will we have an aid system
capable of addressing the coming challenges
of our more globalized and chaotic world.
Locally-led aid and true partnerships with international agencies
will increase the appropriateness of aid.
It will increase the connectedness to the at-risk communities.
And ultimately, it will increase aid effectiveness.
This can happen. It is happening.
And all it takes to move from these one-off examples
that I have shared with you to a radical change
is a leap of faith
and a willingness to trust
and to experiment.
Thank you.
(Applause)