Getting it Right from the Start - Oxfam New Zealand

More documents

Recommendations

Info

9 Provide timely, predictable fundsIn the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Principles and GoodPractice of Humanitarian Donorship and various other commitments togood practice, donors have explicitly recognised the importance oftimely, predictable funding. 72 This means that funding mechanismsmust facilitate, not hinder, rapid intervention. But in South Sudan theconverse has often been true, and the considerable delays encounteredby agencies trying to access pooled funds have been welldocumented. 73‘The problem of short timeframes… forrecovery/developmentprograms is particularlyacute and at odds with therealities on the ground.NGOs … are underpressure to report back onprogram outcomes andbudgets spent, yet the leadtime for starting anintervention, plus the limitedwindow of opportunityoutside the rainy season,leads to bottlenecks.Unsurprisingly, anassessment of impact iseither superficial or nonexistent.’J Bennet et al, „Aiding the Peace: AMulti-Donor Evaluation of Supportto Conflict Prevention and Peace-Building Activities in SouthernSudan 2005-2010‟ (NetherlandsMinistry of Foreign Affairs, 2010).The slowest and most bureaucratic of the pooled funds has been theMDTF. At the end of 2009, four years after the establishment of thefund, donor contributions amounted to $526m. Of this, just $212.5 hadbeen disbursed to partners and $190m actually spent. Performance inthe health sector was particularly poor. The MDTF-funded multi-agencyprogram for health sector development was supposed to deliver thegovernment‟s Basic Package of Health Services to 37 counties acrossall states in South Sudan. Four years in, just three out of ten lead agentcontracts were active and not a single subcontract had been signed nordollar disbursed. 74The effectiveness of the Common Humanitarian Fund (CHF) has beensimilarly hampered by disbursement delays. CHF grants run fromJanuary through December, but funds are not normally disbursed toNGOs until the end of the dry season (April/May) – leaving just a fewmonths for project implementation and making it almost impossible forpartners to synchronise activities with the seasonal calendar. SomeNGOs are able to pre-finance activities, but this is impossible for manyof the smaller agencies, who must wait for funds to arrive beforecommencing implementation. This experience is reflected in OCHA‟sown evaluation of the CHF, which found that „the calendar-year basis offunding creates particular difficulty in South Sudan where funding cancome too late both for the purchase of seeds and tools for the rainyseason, and for construction‟, and that „in practice the period of timeavailable to NGOs to implement projects is no longer than sevenmonths‟. 75It‟s not just that implementation is interrupted by the rainy season, butthat good development and even humanitarian assistance in protractedcrises takes time. It takes time to assess the context and introduce aproject to communities, time to facilitate community participation, time tobuild community capacity to maintain a project, and time to monitor tosee if it‟s working and take corrective action if it‟s not. As described byone NGO staff in Upper Nile, „a committee only works once you get to acertain level of understanding. It needs a lot of work. If you just providethe training but then don‟t follow up, you get nothing‟. 7628
Box 3: The implications of short term funding – rehabilitationof hand pumps and boreholes in South Sudan„Many NGOs drill boreholes and install hand pumps, and then a year laterwhen the pumps have stopped working, they get more funding to repairthem. Some NGOs have annual hand pump rehabilitation programs.Rehabilitation is standard in emergency response, but when it‟s such a focusin development programs – that‟s a problem. It undermines governmentstructures, it‟s expensive, and it‟s all because the job isn‟t getting doneproperly in the first place. What‟s needed is community water managementcommittees with the capacity and the drive to maintain the pumps, but this isalmost impossible to set up in a year, which is normally all you‟ve got, or justsix months if you take out the rainy season. The government needs to beinvolved, there needs to be a proper community selection process, and thestructure needs to be discussed and agreed. To have a reasonable chanceof success, you‟d need a year of planning, followed by a year of hands-onwork in the community, followed by another year of monitoring and support.This could be done using a phased approach – starting with one county forthe first year, then continuing to work with that county in the second yearwhile at the same time doing preliminary work in the next one. But the wholething would need to be part of a three to five year program.‟Oxfam Public Health Coordinator, Juba, May 2011‘The Basic Services Fund(BSF) works exceptionallywell. They’re professional,functional, well managed.They have monitoring teamswith specialists who reallyknow what they’re talkingabout.They keep us on ourtoes – it’s actually nice to beheld accountable like that.’NGO staff, Western Equatoria,June 2011.Recommendations:• Recognise that in a context as complex as South Sudan, effectiveresponse requires a range of funding mechanisms; and that thisincludes substantial bilateral funds channelled directly toimplementing agencies, which multiple evaluations have foundprovide the most timely, effective response to crisis affectedpopulations. 77• Ensure that the design of a new CHF for South Sudan takes intoaccount lessons learnt during the CPA interim period. Specifically,the delayed disbursement of funds, short implementation periodsand lack of synchronisation with the seasonal calendar must beaddressed. This could be achieved by extending the duration of CHFprojects (and the humanitarian work-plan) from one to two years, butwith multiple openings during each period (two – three openingsannually); and aligning the CHF funding schedule with the seasonalcalendar. Donors should where possible make multi-yearcommitments so that the allocations process is not held up due touncertainties over available funds, and should ensure that funds arecommitted well before the start of the project year. 78 Donors shouldalso work with OCHA and the UNDP to streamline the allocationsprocess so as to ensure that funds are disbursed before, not after,projects are due to commence.• Ensure that future pooled funds are designed with a view tofacilitating timely response. Management agents must be selectedon the basis of clear criteria including past performance (noting that29
Page 1: Joint Briefing Paper 06 September 2
Page 4 and 5: Recommendations1. Balance developme
Page 6 and 7: IntroductionOn 9 July, millions of
Page 8 and 9: esponding to a worst case scenario
Page 10 and 11: persons displaced. All this took pl
Page 12 and 13: anecdotal evidence suggests that in
Page 14 and 15: 4 Ensure an equitable distribution
Page 16 and 17: 5 Prioritise the most vulnerable an
Page 18 and 19: • Targeting strategies must be ba
Page 20 and 21: 6 Support pro-poor, sustainablelive
Page 22 and 23: interventions must support, not exc
Page 24 and 25: ‘There’s a school, but thereare
Page 26 and 27: 8 Allow sufficient time for transit
Page 30 and 31: pooled funds managed by private con
Page 32 and 33: comes up. We should have a good fiv
Page 34 and 35: ConclusionFollowing substantial sum
Page 36 and 37: 1516171819sufficient farming commun
Page 38 and 39: 7475767778798081828384858687Bennett

Getting it Right from the Start - Oxfam New Zealand

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?