Why are international aid agencies having difficulty reaching drought victims and large parts of famine-hit regions in Somalia? A U.K.-based expert suggests the answer lies in the current make up of the international humanitarian aid system.
“What really strikes me when discussing with humanitarian organizations, is that there’s a tendency to pinpoint everything on the external, so it’s U.N. integration, it’s counter-terrorism laws, it’s the actions of the belligerents,” Overseas Development Institute researcher Samir Elhawary said at a recent discussion about relief efforts in Somalia, according to Reuters. “But there’s very little reflection on the internal … what is it about the nature of humanitarian assistance that might be impacting access in Somalia?”
Elhawary notes that the current humanitarian system can be viewed as a “form of competing sovereignty” where aid organizations consider refugee camps as territories and the refugees or internally displaced people living in those camps as citizens. And in this setup, local non-governmental organizations are not always treated as equal partners by international NGOs, despite the rhetoric, Elhawary suggests.
International NGOs have the tendency to “assimilate partners and co-opt local NGOs” such that “when you talk to local NGOs they often adopt the language of the international agency rather than vice versa,” he explains
Elhawary says international NGOs’ practice of housing their staff in guarded aid compounds is another possible reason they are not well-received in Somalia and some other countries.
“You can sympathise with people maybe standing on the outside of these compounds and seeing the high walls, the barbed wire, … seeing it is quite an exclusive system and not one that is based on the principle of humanity and solidarity with people in need,” he said.
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