Issues with Humanitarian Aid Organizations

 

Haitians wait in line for UN aid after earthquake

               When a country experiences a crisis, many across the world are quick to jump on the help bandwagon. People donate money, food, clothes, or any other goods they believe might help the victims of a crisis, or that they simply don’t need. However, this may not be the best approach to the problem. As Linda Polman points out, there are many issues that can arise with the humanitarian response to crises around the globe. Most aid organizations must cooperate with violent regimes, many of which are causing the crisis, just for access to the area in which the victims reside. Once they are there, the organizations often create issues themselves, whether it is by bringing an overabundance of certain items that aren’t needed as badly as anticipated, like clothes, by bringing items that are entirely useless for the local population, such as winter coats in tropical regions, or even by providing inadequate medical care that causes lingering issues for the recipients. These organizations operate under a belief that any help is worth giving, although a more effective belief might be that any help is worth giving, as long as that help is also needed.

In her book, Linda Polman says “aid organizations are businesses dressed up like Mother Teresa, but that’s not how reporters see them”. When she says this, I believe she means that aid organizations operate just like any other business, but masquerade as these entities who can do no harm. Humanitarian organizations are rarely questioned about their activities, funding, or effectiveness, and are allowed to operate mostly free of regulations. But just because their purpose is to help those who need it most, it doesn’t mean they cannot be corrupt, make mistakes, or cause problems. Linda Polman mentions an experience in her book at what was essentially a resort in Sierra Leone where herself and other humanitarian aid workers were staying where they drank expensive wine and ate steak, at a cost of about two months’ salary for the local employees serving them, with other aid workers. For an organization whose basic business plan is to gather donations from people the world over, and to use that income to help bring relief to those in areas in dire need of it, it seems rather counterintuitive to use those funds to pamper their own workers while they’re staying in the grief stricken country. In any other sector of business, they would face harsh scrutiny of what they use those funds for, yet in the humanitarian aid sector, they face relatively no scrutiny. No one questions their efficacy or efficiency because as a humanitarian aid organization, people automatically assume they can do no harm, only good.

               Humanitarian aid organizations need their actions monitored and scrutinized by the public, the government, and the journalists who cover their operations. They need accountability in their work to keep them on mission. The public needs to ask where their donations are going, and will they actually be helpful there. Governments need to ask if the personnel are qualified to do the work they do. This is especially true for the organizations who travel the world providing medical procedures in regions that lack medical infrastructures. Journalists need to ask the important questions when they visit these aid organizations on site. Instead of reporting on the disasters alone, they should also be investigating the organizations providing aid for those disasters, and finding out whether they are actually improving the situation, if they are spending their funding in an effective and helpful manner, or if they are treating themselves to vacation style amenities. After all, humanitarian aid organizations are ran by human beings, and human beings, especially those raised in western cultures, are prone to look out for themselves first, and all others second.

A refugee camp set up by the UN in Syria