Q&A: Inside OCHA's growing focus on prevention

UNITED NATIONS — Mark Lowcock, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, says it is “easy” to describe the solution to many ongoing humanitarian crises. “Humanitarian agencies don't have the solutions to the problems causing these crises. What we can do is save lives and buy time.” --— Mark Lowcock, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, U.N. “It's a cease-fire. I don't think there is another solution,” Lowcock said in a recent sit-down interview with Devex in his U.N. headquarters office. In the absence of a cease-fire in places such as Syria and Libya, though, Lowcock is looking to new models of humanitarian response that would make OCHA faster and better at delivering assistance in conflict situations and beyond— even before a potential crisis breaks out. Lowcock spoke with Devex about how OCHA’s internal reforms are progressing and why they are necessary. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Last year, OCHA anticipated that 2020 is going to be one of the most challenging years in terms of humanitarian responses. How have these expectations matched reality so far? Well, I'm sorry to have been proven so right, so quickly. If you just run through the things we've been dealing with the last six weeks or so — we've seen a huge assault on Idlib [in Syria], with 700,000 people moving since the beginning of December. The relief operation in Idlib is overwhelmed. We've got this big locust problem, where again, we provided some money to try to anticipate it. It's not that people are dying because of the locusts now, but unless we get on top of it, all the experts tell us there's a potential for a huge impact on pastures and food crops. And then we've got what we've seen in Libya, which is that despite two big high-level meetings in Moscow and Berlin, the fighting in Libya is continuing. Humanitarian organizations continue to do the best they can. Our fundraising expectation for 2019 was $16 billion. In fact, we got $16.8 [billion] for 2019. And that is, by a good margin, more than we've ever had before. But there are other challenges: The first is access, and the second is that the world doesn't have an infinite capacity of humanitarian organizations to work in them. So all the agencies are really quite stretched. I understand that OCHA is trying to stress a preventive approach to its work, responding to crises before they escalate. What have been the most important steps OCHA has taken to adopt this new approach? A really interesting example relates to cholera risk, because scientists now think they have, in lots of places, maybe four weeks’ notice of a cholera epidemic before the first case arises. And that's to do with weather conditions, water availability, and so on. And they think within an area of 250 meters by 250 meters — i.e., quite a small area — you can spot that maybe a month from now, there'll be cholera cases. You can then start to intervene and try and clean up the water sources, get going with hand-washing campaigns, and help keep the sanitation system under control. And maybe you cannot prevent the outbreak happening, but certainly you can contain it more easily. So we're looking at places where cholera epidemics repeatedly occur, whether we can use these models to trigger the release of funds much earlier. Basically, if you want to deal with a predictable problem, you only need three things. You need the data on the problem. You need money in place before a problem arises. If the money's already in place when you get the trigger, then if you've thought about the response plan, you can start the response plan already. It's not every humanitarian problem you can deal with in that way, but quite a few you can. And then you get a faster, cheaper response, which also involves less suffering. So, to what extent is OCHA aiming to shift its approach overall to become more focused on preventive work, less on reactive emergency response? Well, we are trying to do that where it's feasible to do it. And particularly with using the Central Emergency Response Fund, as we've raised — in the first 10 years of the fund's life — roughly about $450 million dollars a year. Last year, we raised short of $850 million. We've got more money in it, so we can act a bit more systematically in anticipation. The World Bank is also doing the same thing — trying to build models to predict problems and then act earlier on them. What you need is a combination of earlier action, but also faster action. You need to spot the problem earlier. And then once you decide to do something about it, you need to do it really fast. And that includes fast decisions, for example, in releasing money from the CERF, but it also includes pre-positioning materials, having procurement pipelines in place, and having staff you can surge in to deal with a problem. How does this approach fall in line with reforms at OCHA, like the recent move of some staffers away from Geneva? Most of what we've been doing in the last two years has been implementing that plan. The secretary-general has a broader vision for United Nations agencies to be more focused in the countries which need our help. And most humanitarian organizations have more of their staff in the countries where the problem is, as a proportion of their total staff, than OCHA does. So, for a variety of reasons, we've been going down that line, as well. The agency’s staff has been growing since 2018. Donors had confidence in our reform plan and the way we were implementing it. That growth has been in our field operations. And we're also doing things to provide the services to our field operations closer to the people who consume them. OCHA gets asked a lot for help with collaboration between civil and military capabilities and negotiating access. So we're putting more of our capacity closer to the countries where we're getting asked for help with it. So that means, you know, less headquarters, more field, basically. You have been in the job for about three years now. What about the job has surprised you? I wasn't expecting such a significant and dramatic increase in humanitarian problems. I am constantly amazed and really humbled, actually, by the courage and professionalism, commitment, and expertise and creativity of people who work on humanitarian challenges. There were 800 attacks last year on health workers and health facilities. I see lots of opportunities to further improve the way humanitarian organizations operate. But the problems that are making things worse at the moment — say, geopolitics and the way that's driving conflict, climate change, and pandemics — I don't see those changing. It's hard to come to a conclusion that there's going to be a dramatic reduction of the needs. Now, the paradox, of course, is that it is still the case that, year after year, for most people on the planet, life is getting a little bit better. Millions of people are getting electricity the first time every year, millions of people can take food the first time every year. But that's not happening everywhere. The loss of life in these crises is much lower than it used to be when I was first doing this work 30 years ago. But humanitarian agencies don't have the solutions to the problems causing these crises. What we can do is save lives and buy time.