This year, one in 33 people around the world need humanitarian aid. According to the UN, this is a 40% increase from last year. More than half of the countries that need help to deal with the coronavirus pandemic are already in protracted crises, facing conflict or natural disasters.
Even before Covid-19 reversed decades of progress toward extreme poverty, health care, and education, aid programs were heading in the wrong direction. In 2020, the UN achieved only 48% of its $ 38.5 billion (£ 28 billion) funding applications, compared to 63% of the $ 29 billion requested in 2019.
The UK’s cuts in aid alone, from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, are projected by aid groups and MPs to result in 100,000 deaths, 1 million girls leaving school and 5.6 million children who are not going to be vaccinated.
“Need exceeds funding,” said Angus Urquhart, a crisis and humanitarian leader in development initiatives. “We’re seeing a perfect storm gathering.”
The pandemic has “increased the demands placed on governments and institutions while simultaneously weakening their ability to respond to people in a crisis,” he said.
But with the ability to expose weaknesses, coronavirus has also brought the institutionalized shortcomings and inequalities of the help system itself into sharp relief.
Development experts and critics who spoke to the Guardian have called for a global resource industry to be restored and, according to them, outdated and already under pressure to reform. They want international charities and non-governmental organizations to establish themselves in communities, decentralize their west-centered power and trust and invest in the people they need to help. One described the narrative where a donor is generous and the recipient needy as ‘helpless and inaccurate’.
Last year, “people realized we were all connected,” said Jonathan Glennie, author of The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment. “With Black Lives Matter and help with decolonization, there is a lot of pressure on the sector to change. People yearn for a significant shift. ”
Dividing countries into donors and recipients was ‘unhelpful and inaccurate’ as poor countries contribute a lot to sustainable development, he said.
“The aid system is irrevocably old-fashioned … but it’s 2021.”
Cash is still needed to tackle poverty, the climate crisis and Covid, and Glennie advocates a “global public investment (GPI)” fund paid in by all countries as a percentage of GDP, to be used for the ‘ general welfare ‘.
‘There’s the whole south-south collaboration. Countries like Colombia contribute and receive global funding for development. Even Sierra Leone should give 0.7% of its GDP to world development. If this sounds radical, look at the list of countries contributing to the Global Fund, including Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe. Nigeria contributes to global peacekeeping forces. China and India give large quantities.
‘We have set up a system where overseas development aid is aid and there is a group of 30 rich countries that provide aid. But a lot of south-south cooperation is not money, but time. Brazil’s health officials go to Mozambique. Cuba sends doctors around the world. In the UK we will deserve it. But it is called solidarity. ”
He added: “As we move away from the donor-recipient language, we see a shift.”
Sara Pantuliano, CEO of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), believes we are witnessing a “serious legitimacy crisis” of aid structures.
“What we are seeing is this lack of cooperation. This is what sharpened the crisis sharply. The need to work together has become increasingly clear. “The nearsightedness of governments that do not want to work more closely shows,” she said. “This is the moment to be reformed.”
Referring to post-crisis coalitions – the UN after World War II, the G7 after the Gulf War and the G20 after the financial collapse in 2008 – she said: ‘This will inevitably be a moment of rethinking multilateralism and one which has been outstanding for a long time. “
“We will only get better if there is enough social pressure to change. We saw social movement during the pandemic, around equality issues around racist issues. ”
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was at the heart of tackling banking resistance in 2008, urged world leaders to create a temporary form of world government to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.
And the current aid model means there is not enough money going to local and national respondents, said Harpinder Collacott, executive director of Development Initiatives.
An international target 25 years ago at the World Humanitarian Summit for 25% of aid to go to grassroots organizations by 2020 has failed, she said.
“Our analysis shows that about 2.1% of international aid goes to local NGOs,” Collacott said.
Jessica Neuwirth, co-founder of Equality Now and director of the women’s rights organization Donor Direct Action (DDA), which links activists to funding and political power, said direct funding to local organizations is the exception rather than the rule.
In the analysis of OECD data by DDA, it was found that only 8% of the billions in aid to civil society organizations they strive to ensure gender equality in the global south in 2018, to groups based in developing countries.
‘Many international non-governmental organizations are taking a piece from the middle and giving a fraction to these frontline groups. But if you give directly to frontline groups, you give them the chance to have their own ideas and the chance to grow. ”
Neuwirth, who convened DDA with feminist Gloria Steinem and former UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay, said: ‘Grassroots groups are a much more effective and efficient way of dealing with development and a million other issues. . They know what works and what does not, they are committed to change in a way that outsiders are not and it is much cheaper. ”
International NGOs, even if they hire locally, often act as ‘implementation agencies’ for their own agendas, she said.
‘There is a tendency for NGOs to employ a citizen to run a country office. But it creates a household brain drain, because then no one wants to work for a local group for less money. And international NGOs act as an implementation agency for the donors. You do not see the kind of change you get with local agencies. ”
According to data published by ODI researchers in November, ‘principled aid spending’ is found to fall under 29 governments. The three main reasons for the trend were: the pandemic, the chasm between China and the US that threatens ‘global consensus building’, and ‘nationalism in favor of distress’, which requires mutual benefits of aid.
Neuwirth’s organization seeks to change funding flows by linking donors directly to groups. It also encourages women leaders to speak to the UN Security Council and tell people, ‘You know what you are doing in my country, it does not work and that is why.’
Muthoni Wanyeki, Regional Director of Africa at Open Society Foundations, said she saw an impressive response to the African Union’s pandemic and the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in planning mitigation and surveillance strategies in January. 2020. as of communities themselves. The effect of locks, curfews and emergencies was extreme, she said, but it elicited a ‘wonderful’ response.
“It affects people’s livelihoods, their ability to move around and get food to markets,” Wanyeki said. “But Africans answered. We have seen incredible use of mobile money. Ordinary citizens set up their own small cash transfer programs for poor families. There was one in Kenya called Humanity Kenya, where one woman ended up supporting 4,000 families. You are not talking large amounts, but enough to get people right. People react to Afrikaans influencers and money flowing out of the diaspora. ”
The pandemic has given rise to debate on the continent about the need for social protection, and more informed interest in healthcare, pension systems and money-saving loans. chamas or tontins in West Africa, where it is traditionally used by women for school fees or to absorb financial shocks.
“There has been a debate about how states recognize, support and even co-finance these groups,” she said.
Simon O’Connell of SNV, a development group in the Netherlands and former executive director of Mercy Corps Europe, said the aid sector “must act and do more with less. Overseas development budgets are declining and it has been for a long time.”
The pandemic has already forced restructuring. Oxfam International fired 1,500 staff members last year and shut down operations in 18 countries following a series of crises, including the sexual abuse scandal in Haiti. A survey by Bond last October revealed that almost half of UK development organizations expect to shrink.
“The reality is that international NGOs are being forced to work and cooperate differently,” O’Connell said. “Some will reduce their international footprint, and some will want to work in different ways because they have no choice.”
According to him, there were too many small to medium-sized non-governmental organizations with similar objectives operating in the same geographical areas.
For example, there are about 100 NGOs in Sudan, and if each had its own country director, finance director and operations director, it would each amount to half a million dollars, he said. “When donors say they are committed to localization, and when we as a sector consolidate internationally, more money is released to go to local organizations.”
“We need to stop focusing on our brands, our identity, the acquisition of project financing and the delivery of projects, and move on to winning greater results, to ensure that no one falls further into extreme poverty.”
Arbie Baguios, founder of Aid Re-imagined, said change to date has been too dependent on internal reformers in positions of power. What was required was a “shift of power” from international to local.
“It is difficult for any organization to give up power,” Baguios said. “The first step is to recognize it and talk about it. They must ask, ‘What can my organization, based in the global north, do to work with local actors to devise their own solutions to their own problems?’ ‘
• This article was amended on 5 February 2021 to update the figure in a quote on the percentage of international aid allocated to local NGOs. An earlier version gave the 2018 figure; it has now been updated to show the 2019 figure.