The simplest breakdown goes like this:
Humanitarian relief programs are focused on rapid start-up, and rapid impact. Implementers of humanitarian programs need to gear up as fast as possible, and start providing necessary assistance as fast as possible. Their primary focus is not building local capacity, sustainability, or monitoring and evaluation. Their primary focus is getting help to people in need. They end when the emergency ends. Relief can come from the outside, and it is a response to some kind of breakdown or disaster.
Development programs are focused on achieving long-term change of some kind, with the intent of improving people’s lives and the lives of their descendants. They involve rigorous planning and ongoing operational research. They are rooted in local capacity building, because they are aimed at change which continues after the project ends. Even if it has outside support, development in the end has to come from inside.
In practice, however, it’s not that simple. (It never is, is it?) Sometimes the emergency doesn’t end. Situations that look like short-term humanitarian emergencies can go on for years, or even decades. Somalia, for example, Afghanistan, or Sudan. Programs designed to provide immediate assistance become a way of life for people in crisis. It would be nice if those programs could be converted into development programs, but it’s very hard to turn a relief program into a development program. The skill sets for the staff are different, for one thing. Building latrines and building community capacity can be a long, long way apart. You can hire new staff, though, or retrain your people. The other hurdle – usually the big one – is that relief programs and development programs have different donors.
Relief programs are generally funded by private donations and specific government donors. The US government, for example, funds emergency relief through the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Relief. Development programs are far less popular with private donors, and they’re funded by a different set of government agencies. If you want to change the focus of your program, you have to get different different donors. Which mostly you can’t do. Donors don’t like to take over each other’s programs, you won’t be familiar with the new donor’s procedures and evaluation requirements, and development donors plan their financial priorities a long time in advance. They often won’t have money to pick up your newly transformed relief project.
Everyone’s perfect ideal for relief is to give aid that empowers the communities who receive it. Immediate assistance that also builds skills and improves quality of life for the long term. You could, for example, truck in water to a community struck by drought. Then you could dig wells and turn the wells over to local management. You could train a local engineering association or the Ministry of Water on well-digging and irrigation management and safe drinking water. We just need a funding structure that makes it happen.
A great post, and one I wish I had read before I was living in and visiting developing countries.
My questions are:
– What happens when a relief agency realizes that the emergency isn’t over, but leaves anyway? (and a sub-question – why do they do this? is it only about the funding?)
– How many organizations claim to be in development, but are really just providing relief? (This one in particular bothers me.)
– How can relief truly help? If, like you say, relief should “give aid that empowers the communities who receive it”, then shouldn’t relief be kind of like mini-development?
I was in Kashmir, Pakistan 6 months after the 2005 earthquake — so, I was there in April of 2006. That was my first wake-up call of sadness and pessimism about development organizations. Most organizations had been, dropped things off, and left — but of course they did not remove their huge banners hung for all to see, so that everyone knew exactly who had provided the latrines (OxFam) and bags of rice (Save the Children). Talking to the local people, however, I realized how few of those organizations were left after the “relief” efforts ended (which was when? I wanted to know. How did they decide that it was “over”?). It was as if they hadn’t relieved anyone of anything — the local people still didn’t have food to eat, and still did not have homes or access to clean water. Sure, they made it through the first month, but then what? They had no idea where to start, because they had nothing to start with, and no one to show them how.
The only two organizations that were still there were the Red Cross / Red Crescent (who I was with) and UNDP, and they had made long-term commitments to help the locals re-build their communities.
So really, this left me thinking that sometimes relief *must* turn into development. I might even argue that it’s not worth sending relief unless it is empowering, because to do otherwise is irresponsible and (possibly) insulting.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/05/re-whats-difference-between-relief-and.html
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