Q&A: Head of GOAL on how to manage a charity in crisis

This time last year, Ireland’s largest charity was just coming to terms with allegations of bid rigging and collusion in its humanitarian programs. GOAL’s biggest donor, the United States Agency for International Development, said it had uncovered misconduct in Turkey, from where GOAL and most other humanitarian agencies operate their Syria programs. GOAL’s other main donors — including Irish Aid and the United Kingdom Department for International Development — followed suit, halting procurement and plunging GOAL, its programs and beneficiaries into uncertainty. As a result, the charity laid off 25 employees, mostly in London and Dublin; closed its 10-person office in Washington, D.C.; and fired two staff members in Turkey, culling the alleged source of its supply chain irregularities. Chief Executive Officer Barry Andrews stepped down, citing the organization’s “need for change” in the wake of the crisis. GOAL commissioned a consultancy, BDO, to conduct an assessment of its operations, and from there began to build a blueprint for reform. A little over a year later, GOAL is now “on a path to recovery,” claims General Manager Celine Fitzgerald. USAID rescinded its threat of suspension in April 2017, and Irish Aid and DFID have also reinstated funding. Despite a slated merger with Ireland’s second largest charity, Oxfam Ireland, it pulled back from negotiations last week after financial assessments revealed it could remain independent. “The challenge was to convince donors that the reform was, first of all, significant and, second of all, sustainable.” --— Celine Fitzgerald, general manager at GOAL Fitzgerald told Devex that the charity’s programs in war-torn South Sudan have endured the most devastating cuts as a result of the investigation; the potential damage to recipients is a “source of great regret,” she said. But elsewhere, the charity is back up and running, and has even expanded its operations in some places. Fitzgerald, who joined GOAL from the private sector in November 2016 to replace Andrews on a one-year, fixed-term contract, has a history of “turning around” multinational corporations after misconduct allegations. Three-quarters of the way through her term with GOAL, she spoke to Devex about what happened, the reform process and the importance of coming clean when misconduct strikes. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You joined GOAL at a very tumultuous time for the organization. Why did you choose to take the role? It was hard to resist, because GOAL is a very important organization, in the [Irish] national context and internationally. I volunteered in the sector for maybe 10 years, and more recently had done work with Trócaire, so I had been coming closer to the sector and was very familiar with GOAL and the issues it was facing. I suppose that given my private sector background, and given that I had done “turnarounds” in the private sector, I thought — gosh, maybe I can help here in a significant way. What happened to GOAL involved a very small number of people, and yet the impact was so far reaching. I felt it was not only possible but also necessary to fix what had gone wrong, and to set GOAL back on a path of recovery. Whatever the recovery looked like I wasn’t really sure [laughs] but I felt there was a way out and there was a way to save the organization. I took the chance when it came, and met with members of the board. I started in November and it was very intense from the start. We were in a difficult situation at that stage from a donor perspective. Donors had confidence issues — there’s no putting it any other way. They had trust issues. What were the challenges you foresaw when you took the role, and what surprised you? What do you wish you had known then that you know now? By the time I joined, a number of reform had already taken place — new procurement reform in particular, because that was at the heart of our issues. We’d taken a lot of the procurement procedures out of local decision making processes and put them back in the head office. We also put new safeguards and checks and balances in, so a lot of this had taken place by the time I joined. The challenge was to convince donors that the reform was, first of all, significant and, second of all, sustainable. That involved a lot of face-to-face meetings with donors in the U.S., in London, Brussels and Dublin. Obviously we had to work with Irish Aid first and foremost, then move on to the U.S. because they were significant donors as well, and they were at the heart of the difficulties we had, so the challenge was really around rebuilding that trust. I suppose I wish I knew at the beginning that these things take time. Whatever you do, it does take time for relationships to rebuild. It took maybe slightly longer than I anticipated. I also feel that beneficiaries got lost in the whole process, to be honest, from everybody’s perspective. We were focusing on internal procedures, improving governance, adding a lot of rigor, but I’m not sure beneficiaries were at the center in the way they should’ve been. I think initially we did miss that. I had that conversation with our board early on. It was important that GOAL survived because in many cases there was nobody else going to step into our shoes. In Darfur, for example, there’s nobody else around. In Idlib, in northern Syria, there’s nobody else doing what we’re doing. In South Sudan, in Gambella in the south of Ethiopia — in a sector that sometimes can be quite crowded, GOAL has often been the only player in a particular region. So the survival of GOAL was about the survival of beneficiary support. You could say — well, look, does it matter if it’s Oxfam, or Concern or Save [the Children] doing it? As long as somebody’s doing the work. But when we looked at our programs, for so many of them we were just not replaceable, because of the infrastructure we had set up, the way we were working with either governments or local councils. If we weren’t doing it, nobody else would be. Can you talk about the challenges of keeping staff morale high during the suspension and uncertainty? What worked? GOAL will be 40 years old this year, and for people who have worked here a long time, I just think they were so motivated by protecting the organization and keeping it going. When you look back at GOAL’s history, back to 1977, there hasn’t been a single humanitarian crisis of note around the world that GOAL hasn’t participated in. Back to Bangladesh in the 70s, right up to Pakistan’s floods in the early 2000s. For staff here, it was clear: We cannot lose that. We cannot let that go now. When I came in, people were tired; people were working really, really hard to turn things around. And that was the motivation: GOAL is such an important organization, we have to protect it and keep it going. I don’t think there was a lot of rational thought; it was just people doing everything they could to keep things functioning. There were people working 12-13 hours a day for months, managing the investigation and queries, just to keep the day job going of managing all our programs. And we did keep the vast majority going, so that’s motivational. If you’re in the field, working with your beneficiaries, it’s very difficult to turn your back on that, and our staff have demonstrated their commitment to the organization and beneficiaries throughout this crisis. GOAL has achieved a pretty rapid turnaround. What concerns do you have going forward and what are your biggest priorities now that the suspension is behind you? We were concerned about the potential of a suspension, and we were lucky in the end that USAID didn’t go down that route. We committed to a series of reforms, training and monitoring as part of our agreement with USAID, and that’s our priority now. We have very intense training around wrongdoing policies. Every employee around the world — over 3,000 people — has been trained face-to-face in a suite of policies that include conflict of interest, whistleblowing and so on. We’ve also put in place a number of new roles, including a head of ethics and compliance. It’s a new role and it’s been one of the most interesting things for me. The lady that’s taken that role had been with GOAL for a number of years. She’s really taken to this role with enormous enthusiasm, she’s taken to compliance — which can be a dry enough topic — and turned it into something that has really energized people. We all now talk about a “speak out” culture in the organization, where all members of staff feel empowered to call out any kind of wrongdoing. We’re trying to turn compliance into something positive. So rather than see it as a kind of overhead and a burden, see it as something that makes us better at what we do, that lifts the load off people going about their day-to-day job. Because if you feel like you’re doing the right things, it has that effect of making everybody feel much more freed up in their roles. We’ve revamped some of our board structures, too. We have a number of people reporting not only to me but also to the audit and risk committee. It’s typical in financial institutions, it’s not unusual in the private sector — but it’s slightly unusual in this sector. There’s the head of ethics and compliance, a head of investigation, a head of internal audits, all of whom report directly to the board. We want to become a really stand-out NGO from a compliance and governance perspective. We have a long way to go, but we’ve learned so much in the last year that we have a head start on that. I think within the next two to three years, GOAL will have a reputation for being best in its class for compliance. The other area of focus is completely different — it’s about innovation and resilience. We’re looking specifically at programs in Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, and a couple others. Speaking to donors regularly, they are saying that we need solutions to fix problems in a sustainable way, so we’re not back doing the same thing every year. We’re at the start of that now. It’s very well developed in some places, and now we want to export that best practice to other places. If you work in any multinational, there’s a huge focus on best practice, and I haven’t really seen that here, I haven’t seen us taking what’s really good in one country and putting it into another. What advice do you have for leadership at organisations facing similar circumstances? What role did the BDO report play in turning it around? The BDO report did a very rigorous review of our procedures. Out of that came an action plan, which is still guiding us. We’re at about 91 percent complete in terms of the actions that were identified in that report. Some of them are recurring; you’ll never get to 100 percent in some ways. But that was a blueprint for our reform. In times of crisis, being honest with your staff is really important, communicating strongly the bad news and the good news, too — even if at times it looks like there’s never going to be good news ever again [laughs]. If you’re in trouble, people aren’t going to help you and support you if you’re not being 100 percent honest. Donors and stakeholders also recognize that you’re not trying to duck your responsibilities. Donors want you to put your hand up. What in your view needs to change in the sector to help organisations respond and adapt quickly when problems arise, particularly humanitarian organisations working in fragile situations? “If you’re in trouble, people aren’t going to … support you if you’re not being 100 percent honest. Donors and stakeholders also recognize that you’re not trying to duck your responsibilities. Donors want you to put your hand up.” --— There’s a lot of talk about risk sharing, and the sector has to have a conversation with its donors. If we’re in a high-risk region and difficulties arise, there has to be a way to manage that risk on a partnership basis. The difficulties that we ran into were isolated. Let’s be clear: It was a very small number of individuals; it’s not like it was a widespread, endemic problem in GOAL. So I think in the sector we need recognition that these things happen, and to have arrangements agreed in advance about how to keep beneficiaries from being impacted when they do, because that’s the [thing that should be] first and foremost — that beneficiaries are protected, then that donor money is protected, then the agency needs protection as well. There needs to be a preagreed set up, that in the event of x or y happening, this is how we deal with it. I would never claim that we shouldn’t have suffered. We needed to learn lessons and we have learned lessons. But I think there has to be proportionality to these things as well. We have to be proportionate in our responses and we have to protect the beneficiaries. Now that we’ve come out largely on the other side of it, we would be looking to have mature discussions with donors, recognizing that we work in risky environments. Fraud happens. It happens everywhere — here in Dublin, in the Middle East, in Africa, everywhere. Nobody can say they’re exempt from it, because it’s not true. So if we know this, surely it can’t be beyond the balance of possibility that we can agree how it should be addressed in the event. GOAL has learned an awful lot in the last year. I think it was somebody in DFID who said to us — look, in many ways you’ve leapt up the learning curve in terms of governance, and good process, way ahead of many other agencies. You might have done it for reasons you preferred not to have encountered, but that has been one of the outcomes. Having adult-to-adult relationships with donors, where we identify risk is really important; not having kind of parent-to-child relationships. It can feel a little bit like that sometimes. Donors get a little bit cross if they think you’re not recognizing you were wrong, and I don’t have a problem with that. I have always put my hand up: We were wrong. Donors have very high levels of accountability and that’s absolutely right — that’s what we would all want — but it’s just about having those safety nets in place when it does go wrong. How do you manage the scenario? Compared with your experience in the private sector, what kind of unique challenges did this present? The private sector experience was invaluable. I approach things in a very process-related way: We have an input and an output, we work through the stages and process, taking a very systematic approach to our problems. But I’ve never worked in an organization where people’s security or maybe even survival was at stake. Maybe I have worked in an organization where a shareholder could have lost a lot of money, or your consumer had an unsatisfactory experience, but nobody’s existence was ever at stake. So there just isn’t room to make mistakes here. If we didn’t get the funding from donors, it’s not an exaggeration to say that some people could have died. I’m thinking of South Sudan, where our funding was at risk, and we really needed the funding to continue programming. We’ve had to downsize our programs in South Sudan, which is a source of huge sadness to me because that country is such a chaotic place and people’s lives are so difficult. The little bit of help we were giving was something — it wasn’t everything, but it was making life somewhat better. That is a program that has suffered as a result of this crisis. We’re still in South Sudan and we’re still working very hard there, but we’re not covering the same kind of populations that we were before. That is a source of great regret to me. In the private sector, if I did a great job or did a bad job, what difference did it make really? Not a lot. So I think here, that’s what makes this job so different. Where is GOAL now compared to its previous capacity? How much of a scale-down has there been? South Sudan was the major scale-down. Most others have been maintained. Syria has grown actually over this period; our work in Iraq has also expanded. But a number of grants weren’t renewed in South Sudan. We also closed in India and came out of Kenya, but those were already on the cards. We had a very minor program in Ukraine which we stepped back from as well. 2017 has been a year of consolidation and getting back on track. We’re looking at 2018 as a time to look at how we can be more innovative in our programs. We’re not looking to grow, we’re looking to be smarter. Update, July 31: This article was amended to clarify that GOAL laid off 25 employees, mostly in London and Dublin, following its misconduct crisis Devex delivers cutting-edge insights and analysis to the leaders shaping and innovating the business of development. Make sure you don't miss out. Become a Devex Executive Member today.