IKEA and MSF tackle 'underreported' crises with new partnership model

LONDON — The Global Peace Index puts the cost of current humanitarian conflicts on the world economy at $14.2 trillion and rising, with a growing funding gap of about $2 trillion per year. At the same time, the world’s biggest national donor, the United States, is weighing potential cuts of more than 30 percent. Thus many are increasingly looking to the private sector for help. While it’s mathematically impossible to fill the huge gap with private donors and philanthropy alone, many in that sector are giving more and beginning to look into providing more nuanced, strategic resources, in addition to cash, development experts say. These evolving models of funding and cooperation offer potential new ways to provide humanitarian aid more effectively, and experts are watching them closely for their impact. As mounting crises in Yemen, Syria, Northern Nigeria and elsewhere squeeze the budgets of humanitarian agencies, the 142 million euro, 30-staff philanthropic arm of the Swedish furniture company IKEA last year noticed that its nonprofit partner, Médecins Sans Frontière, was less and less able to afford the kind of advocacy and communications operations needed to raise the profile of its work. This was particularly true in the most fragile contexts where media attention was lacking. Making matters more difficult, MSF had recently renounced institutional funding from the European Union in protest of its controversial migration policies, putting more pressure on its private donors, who now fund all of MSF’s humanitarian work. Having partnered with MSF for five years providing emergency, multi-year funding for humanitarian crises, the IKEA Foundation and MSF decided to add a caveat to their agreements. “For a year now we’ve been operating under the [10 million euro] Unseen Emergency Framework, geared toward funding those emergencies that are just as big and devastating in human loss and suffering as those you see in the media, but that just don’t get the attention,” Annemieke Tsike-Sossah de Jong, head of the IKEA Foundation’s humanitarian portfolio, told Devex in a phone interview. Founded only eight years ago, the IKEA Foundation started with only 10 staff and focused on ridding global supply chains of child labor, providing multi-year grants to its two partners, UNICEF and Save the Children. As capacity grew, the foundation ventured into humanitarian response, and began offering more flexible, emergency funding to new donors, such as U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and MSF. But early in its partnership with MSF, Tsike-Sossah de Jong said she and her colleagues felt they could be more strategic, and give MSF even more control over the responses the foundation chose to fund. “When MSF had a certain emergency they wanted to respond to, they could draw from that funding. But it was still very much on a case-by-case basis, and that also meant certain decision-making moments were very much with us as a foundation,” she said. “It would happen that they would propose two or three emergencies at the same time, and we would choose one. As it sounds it’s probably not the best way of deciding, because increasingly we were seeing that we are not the best ones to decide when and how we react to crises,” she said. The 10 million euro framework is now only a year old — still in its infancy — but Tsike-Sossah de Jong said the foundation is hoping to continue to improve and increase MSF’s independence in the process. For starters, the framework allows IKEA to serve as an “extended arm” of MSF when it comes to advocacy and raising the profile of these underserved crises. “We knew we needed to include a very specific communications strategy to help them talk about the issue — both in their conversations with partners or potential donors — to help persuade those other donors to step on board with IKEA,” Tsike-Sossah de Jong said. While MSF is busy doing “what they are best at doing,” IKEA compliments its funding contributions with help on the networking and advocacy side. Bruno Jochum, head of MSF Switzerland, told Devex the partnership with IKEA is unique in their portfolio because IKEA has “worked towards sensitizing other actors in the private sector, to raise awareness and try to trigger more financial support,” he said in a phone interview. “They’ve notably actively talked to several other private corporations and donors, and I would say, done their work toward solidarity with displaced people and refugees in these neglected crises,” he said. IKEA put in place a protocol that allows for quick release of media articles, Tsike-Sossah de Jong explained, through both IKEA channels and externally. “On the one hand it’s trying to talk about the fact that there’s an unseen emergency and there’s a need for attention, but it also speaks to a call to action for other structured organizations like ours associated to a live brand, or government,” she said. “We’re agnostic to the type of organization, but it’s a call to action for others to take notice in terms of funding.” While both partners say the arrangement is working well, Tsike-Sossah de Jong admits it’s been difficult to quantify the impact of the initiative, although she said IKEA entered into the agreement understanding it would be a challenge. “What we have learned — and it’s more through dialogue and networking — is that there’s increase in funding and interest because we’ve tried to raise the visibility,” she said, adding that the “first official moment” for reflection and potential evaluation will take place “toward the end of the year, when we’ll get more information about how our support has leveraged the opportunity for MSF to engage better and more.” The arrangement, Jochum explained, offers “a lot of merits” at a time when “there is typically quite a lot of aid bureaucracy, both in the public and the private sector,” he said. Still, Tsike-Sossah de Jong said she and her staff hope to provide even greater agency to MSF in the process going forward. “As of now some decision-making still happens at our end, to decide whether or not we’re OK under the framework to respond to an unseen crisis,” she said. “I think we can still find more efficiency, because we’re knowledgeable, but we’re not the ones reacting, so we want to see if we can optimize that moment of decision-making even better.” Asked about the broader future of the foundation’s humanitarian strategy, Tsike-Sossah de Jong said her team is considering doing more with unearmarked funding and is looking at the effectiveness of pooled mechanisms. “More broadly, going back to preparedness, we are looking for how to contribute to that continuum of helping individuals be better prepared for disaster. We’re looking to strengthen our narratives and our grant-making around exactly that: both those facing longer-term disaster threats like climate change and those at risk for sudden shocks, how do we help them prepare?” she said. Update, August 21, 2017: This article has been updated to clarify that IKEA was founded in Sweden. Read more international development news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive the latest from the world’s leading donors and decision-makers — emailed to you free every business day.