Q&A: Funding imbalance threatens Yemen's recovery, UNDP expert says

WASHINGTON — Yemen is widely cited as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. But Auke Lootsma, UNDP’s resident representative for the country, says it is also the worst development crisis. “The figures show that in four years of war, the development setback has already amounted to 20 years,” Lootsma said. “Basically 20 years of development have been wiped out by four years of conflict.” “This is becoming a generational conflict that will affect generations of Yemenis to come.” --— Auke Lootsma, resident representative, UNDP Yemen While 24 million people — 80% of the country’s population — still need humanitarian assistance, overall violence in the country has been decreasing. Lootsma, who began his career with UNDP 25 years ago working in Rwanda during the genocide, said he’s optimistic that a peace agreement may be coming in Yemen. This means the agency is currently considering how it can meet Yemen’s future development needs and how UNDP will be able to help create and maintain conditions for permanent peace. “Stabilization of pockets of unstable areas is going to be very important. There are certain areas in Yemen that are going to be contested, I think,” Lootsma said, adding that ensuring the provision of services such as electricity will be key to maintaining peace. During his recent trip to Washington, D.C., to brief U.S. policymakers on the current situation on the ground in Yemen, Devex sat down with Lootsma to discuss the humanitarian-development nexus and why development funding for Yemen is coming up short. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The movements of all international actors are severely restricted across Yemen. How does UNDP operate in this environment? When the Houthis overran Sanaa, basically the whole international system shut down. All embassies are closed, most aid workers left. INGOs left as well. After things stabilized a little bit, at least U.N. agencies and some INGOs came back to Sanaa, but the rest has stayed the way it was just after the overtake of Sanaa. We’re pretty lonely on the ground. It also means that we are kind of the eyes and ears of the international community, especially in the areas controlled by the Houthi. It’s a pretty isolated area. Yemen is under a blockade by the Saudi-led coalition. There are no commercial flights that go to Sanaa, so the only way in and out is by U.N. flight. For almost any kind of interaction with aid donors or constituencies, we have to fly out of Yemen to meet in Amman. Our movement is fairly limited as well, both for security reasons and also because the de facto authorities, the Houthis, are limiting our movements in many ways. We move around in armored vehicles. If we want to go visit a project, it means that we’ll leave in a convoy and at least have to ask permission to move 72 hours or more in advance. And we need to ask permission from both sides. We send a notification to Riyadh to ensure they know our coordinates, which route we take — at least to be sure that we’re not becoming a target. In general, it works OK. It’s not like every mission gets approved. Sometimes approval comes too late or it doesn’t come at all. Is all UNDP staff so restricted in their movements? We work in different ways. Right now as UNDP, I think we have about 30 international staff and about 120 or so national staff. It is not true that international staff have less freedom of movement than national staff. It’s equal — we all move in the same vehicles and convoys. Since we have problems with access, we do use other mechanisms to achieve our objectives. We have hired a firm as a third-party monitoring agent. What [the firm] does is goes, checks on your project sites — particularly the ones that, for U.N. security or other reasons, you can’t reach. They have another way of reaching it, so they can see what’s happening and report back on that particular project site. They don’t have to comply with the same stringent U.N. security measures that we have to do, so they have a bit more flexibility of moving around. How does UNDP think about the humanitarian-development nexus as a development agency amid a massive humanitarian crisis? Yemen is not only the worst humanitarian crisis in the world; Yemen is also the worst development crisis in the world. If the war would continue to 2030, which [is] the measuring point of the SDGs, I think development would be set back by 40 years. This is becoming a generational conflict that will affect generations of Yemenis to come. Population growth is set to double in 2030 to 40 million Yemenis, so many more people will need basic social services at that point in time. Yemen is on track to become the poorest country in two years’ time. It’s as much a development crisis as it as a humanitarian crisis. Do you ever find your work in conflict with that of your humanitarian colleagues? I’ll give you an example of how that works for famine. Not so long ago, we were talking about a caseload of 10 million Yemenis on the brink of a famine. With the help of [the World Food Program], this has at least been stemmed to a certain degree — people are still being fed, but they’re not yet in the stage of acute famine. But our job has been to make sure people get income, so they can buy food, stimulate local food production. Due to the blockade, Yemen is 90% dependent on food imports, which is, aside from a logistical problem, also a national security issue. So by stimulating local food production, you get people income in their pocket, but also it means that you’re shifting this imbalance to a more proportional way of dealing with the problem. How could you coordinate more effectively? It’s not only a question of coordination, but it’s also an issue of funding. This year, we proposed to the international humanitarian community a budget of $4 billion, which is a reflection of the needs. That appeal, of course, is not fully funded — it’s about half. And to a large degree, it’s funded by the Gulf countries. What is lacking, to a large degree, is countries still having their development budgets in place to fund the same. Because many of the embassies have shut down, they’ve also suspended their development relationship with Yemen as a country. The only thing that is available is that humanitarian funding, which is reinforcing the imbalance of the two. Automatically more money goes to WFP, which means that more food rations are going to be handed out, which means that more local farmers are being undermined in terms of making an income from their own local food production — just a very simple example here. The only exception to this equation is funding that has been made available by the World Bank. Yemen is one of those exception countries where IDA funding is going through U.N. agencies. They, together with the EU, are the only ones who are actually allocating development funding to Yemen at the moment — the rest is all humanitarian. As much as we have the brightest ideas and the best intentions, if you don’t have your dollar in the pocket at the end of the day, it’s hard to make it real. This is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to nexus issues. How are you planning for the future in Yemen? All the signs are that the war is coming to an end. We’re very optimistic of the fact that the special envoy on the political side of the U.N. is always somehow pulling a rabbit out of the hat and gets the parties to agree. It is clear that all the parties to the conflict are tired. You can just sense it that somehow the war is coming to an end. The question is when. We’re starting to work on implementing the Stockholm Agreement. We are also therefore preparing for future peace agreement in Yemen. One thing I can say with some sort of confidence is that the Yemen we knew from before the war is a Yemen that we will never see back. Whatever will be emerging out of the peace talks will be a different Yemen; it will probably be a different setup rather than a very centralized state in terms of the political side, the security side, the financial side. We will probably end up with a Yemen which will give more room for aspirations in different localities, where local authorities have more say in terms of provision of basic services, taxation, even provision of security in those regions. The point I’m making here is that the role of local government in Yemen will become much more important than it was before. That also means that as we are waiting for a final agreement to come, we already can start providing support to these local authorities. We can provide a foundation for the peace agreement.