From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM HUMANITARIAN RELIEFblaming the UN is too easy; it is the donors who are fundamentallyresponsible for giving some emergencies little or no funding, whileothers get much more.Poor co-ordination: The explosion in the numbers of humanitarianagencies demonstrates the abiding strength of voluntary action, andthis core compassionate impulse is laudable. However, it can complicatethe effective delivery of aid. In the days and hours after a natural disaster,or in the ‘fog of war’, an element of chaos is unavoidable. Urgency cansave lives but can also compound the confusion, undermining theimpact of the response. The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination ofHumanitarian Affairs (OCHA) seeks to co-ordinate the work of themany UN and NGO agencies responding to a disaster, but it faces adaunting task. In Aceh, Indonesia following the 2004 Indian Oceantsunami, OCHA held daily co-ordinating sessions to identify needs,allocate responsibility, and avoid duplication of efforts. But with over100 agencies around the table, simply running the meeting was achallenge; dozens more simply failed to attend or to acknowledge theUN’s co-ordinating role.These problems, however, should not be exaggerated. Two majorevaluations of humanitarian assistance at moments of exceptionalcrisis (the Rwandan genocide and the Asian tsunami) – a decade apartand spanning the period of greatest growth in the NGO sector –concluded that the failure to effectively co-ordinate many hundreds ofagencies did not prevent a relatively small core of major NGOs fromproviding the bulk of the critical humanitarian assistance effectively. 176Besides the myriad non-government agencies that turn up in thewake of a disaster, the sprawling UN system of dozens of differentfunds, programmes, commissions, and specialised agencies is particularlychaotic and in need of rationalisation and reform. 177 In VietNam, there are 11 UN agencies, which between them account for only2 per cent of aid flows. In Ethiopia there are 17 different UN agencies;in Zanzibar there are 20. 178 Twenty-seven UN agencies claim somedegree of responsibility over water and sanitation. The level offragmentation and the ‘turf wars’ between competing UN bodies ledthe UN’s exasperated special envoy to Africa on AIDS to lament,‘Nobody is responsible. There is no money, there is no urgency, thereis no energy.’ 179387