In his article in the Kenya Daily Nation, of today with a title “

My belated kudos to the valiant man called Ruto”……,

Clay Muganda fires bullets directed against the Kenya media for ignoring Honourable William Ruto this last weekend when he launched the United Republican Party that will now be his vehicle to State House after 2012 elections if he wins the party nominations to become the flag-bearer and also win the Presidential elections.

It is a well-written article that depicts Ruto as real hardworking man, a person who can lead the country. The writer is questioning the absence of good coverage by the Kenya media and he says he cannot understand why they did not give the event a huge LIVE coverage. Who was the media listening to?

Ruto has had times that could have killed many politicians’ interests to fight on in the political field. Yet he has stood firm and when things according to him seems dictatorial, he moves on as he did this last weekend. Ruto says he wants to see the Youth of Kenya succeed and prosper. He thinks some leaders competing with him would like to have voters idolising them: Ruto says leaders should be good servants of the people.

End

AID POLICY: Cash catches up*

Photo: The Cash Learning Partnership

Smart cards…cash transfers are deemed more efficient and flexible than in-kind aid…

NAIROBI, 6 December 2011 (IRIN) – Cash and voucher transfers are being scaled up and increasingly integrated into humanitarian relief efforts across the Horn of Africa, particularly in areas of insecurity, where access issues have led to a rethink of traditional ways of delivering aid.

“We have to criticize our programming decisions and formulate better ways to get assistance to the people in need,” said consultant Nick Maunder at a recent workshop he facilitated in Nairobi, where the private sector, NGOs, UN agencies and donors met to debate, share experiences and develop ways to improve and increase the use of cash transfer programming during emergencies.

Across the Horn, more than four million people are now receiving assistance via cash or vouchers, according to the Cash Learning Partnership (CaLP), which organized the workshop.

“Cash for assets has also started going to scale in Kenya, targeting just under half a million beneficiaries at KSh3,000 [$33] per household per month,” said Sheryl Harrison of WFP.

Most humanitarian assistance in the Horn of Africa has so far been provided in-kind, through the distribution of food, shelter, tools and seeds. In many areas, relief efforts have been beset by delays, high delivery costs, and in some areas, high taxation. There is a growing body of experience in the region that is using cash or vouchers as a critical complement, or at times an alternative to in-kind assistance.

“Cash is less visible, more dignified, uses fewer intermediaries, is in transit for less time and a more flexible resource to meet needs beyond food,” said Degan Ali, Executive Director of Horn Relief, an NGO.

When food is available in local markets, or can be supplied quickly through market mechanisms, cash and voucher transfers are perceived to be the most efficient and cost-effective way of delivering humanitarian aid. Once the implementing agency has conducted an in-depth market assessment of the area, and the context is deemed suitable, money can transferred directly to beneficiaries, with or without conditions.

“The reason why there is so much momentum around cash is because the humanitarian world is starting to recognize that more and more people are living in a market economy, taking that into account and beginning to work in it rather than in isolation from it,” explained Breanna Ridsdel, communications and advocacy officer at CaLP.

Concerns have been raised about whether injecting cash can disrupt local economies and cause inflation but implementing agencies believe the amount of money being transferred to households is too small to have a detrimental impact on markets; according to a recent report by CaLP, the fear of inflation is disproportionately applied to cash rather than in-kind programmes, which can also have a massive influence on markets.

Breanna Ridsdel of CaLP explains “Its all context specific, if you are looking at going into a very remote area and setting up a financial system, then that may not be the most appropriate intervention but if you are looking at a financially insecure community, living in urban area, in a developed financial system, then cash is likely to be more appropriate then food distribution which is working against the market… It’s all about good programming”.

Going private

The challenging environment in which relief agencies are operating in the Horn of Africa, characterized by insecurity and corruption, has led the aid community to create partnerships with the private sector and adopt new technologies to deliver cash safely to hard-to-reach areas.

Representatives from Visa, Equity Bank and Safaricom, a mobile phone operator, attended the workshop to lobby implementing agencies to use their products, saying it would be more efficient.

Photo: Jaspreet Kindra/IRIN

…and help preserve the dignity of those caught up in emergencies

“Exciting new partnerships are being forged between the private sector and humanitarian community to improve the delivery of cash,” said Ginger Baker of Emerging Market Solutions at Visa.

Money is being transferred electronically through mobile-phone service providers, such as MPesa in Kenya, and through traditional remittance networks in other countries.

“In Kenya, 21 percent of the population has bank accounts and 87 percent have mobile phones… MPesa can be used as a poverty eradication tool,” according to Safaricom.

With increasing scrutiny from the media, public, and donor governments over the cost-effectiveness of aid and at times, inefficiency of traditional distribution mechanisms, emerging partnerships between the banking and humanitarian sector are being welcomed. “Partnerships with the private sector will encourage more efficient and effective ways of delivering humanitarian assistance,” said head of International Federation of the Red Cross Regional Office, Alexander Matheou.

“The profit motive is not a bad thing. Safaricom and Visa may take a nominal fee for sending cash to impoverished households but at least it will be done quickly in a cost effective manner” said an independent aid consultant at the event.

Over the past few years, the private sector has played an important role in facilitating cash transfer programming yet the engagement of humanitarian actors still appears to be limited.

Some worry that the pursuit of profit sits uncomfortably with humanitarianism.

“The private sector are concerned with the rich, we are concerned with the poor… We need to be careful, but also respectful of each other’s motivations, and meet somewhere in between, ” said the chair of the CaLP steering committee, Austin Davis.

Another challenge is introducing electronic payments in low-income countries which need existing financial institutions and wide mobile-phone network coverage. Safaricom admitted that large parts of the Horn of Africa were still not covered and a proportion of vulnerable populations did not have access to mobile phones. However, according to a recent report on the impacts of mobile cash transfer programmes, the widespread growth of mobile-phone coverage, cheaper handsets and mobile-money services in developing countries suggests these constraints could be easily overcome.

Reservations and recent progress

“The momentum is building but any change happens slowly, any adoption of new techniques meets resistance at first, it has to go through the process of building evidence, proving itself, making mistakes, correcting itself and building systems; this is the biggest obstacle to adoption at scale,” explained Ridsdel.

According to the Oversees Development Institute’s (ODI) Good Practice Review for Cash Transfers in Emergencies, “Experience in very uncongenial environments such as Afghanistan, Somalia and the DRC shows that cash or vouchers are a possible response even where states have collapsed, conflict is ongoing and banking systems are weak or non-existent.”

One of the main challenges is a negative institutional mindset that can be overcome with an increase in such programming, according to advocates.

Sarah Bailey of the ODI said: “Transferring cash directly takes the power away from the humanitarian community and puts it into the hands of the beneficiaries, a notion that people still remain uncomfortable with.”

Experience of cash-based programming is largely based on recovery operations, with less experience at the very early stages of a relief or emergency response phase.

“We should have begun transferring cash much earlier in Somalia where the markets are very important and continue to function despite collapsing livelihoods and weak purchasing power,” said Grainne Moloney, nutrition technical manager at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU).

In January, FSNAU began assessing 44 markets across Somalia, monitoring the prices of about 40 commodities every week. “In some markets, it became clear that cash transfers at scale were a valid option early on. Unfortunately, there was a lot of hesitation and concerns over inflation, insecurity and cash diversion. Donors were hesitating as the crisis deepened.”

Britain’s Department for International Development “is successfully using transfers to reach particularly impoverished populations in challenging places in Ethiopia and Kenya. Transfers reach their recipients more quickly and transparently than more widely prevalent ways of delivering aid,” according to the UK’s National Audit Office.

*This is a revised version of a story first published on 5 December.

tl/am/mw
source www.irinnews.org

AID POLICY: UN Integration under the spotlight

Photo: John Ndiku/OCHA

UN humanitarian, political and military missions in Somalia were uncomfortable bedfellows (file photo)

LONDON,  – Putting all UN operations in a country under a single management structure is not as simple as it might sound. In some countries, different parts of the UN may be negotiating with rebels to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid, while their colleagues might be involved in planning military assaults against the very same groups.

Neutrality, impartiality and independence are regarded as humanitarian principles, but are not the priorities of UN political or peacekeeping missions, and many humanitarian staff believe integration helps to erode them, hampering their ability to help people in need.

Given ongoing tensions between UN agencies, the UK’s Overseas Development Institute and US-based public policy group The Stimson Center have carried out an independent study exploring the impact of integration on humanitarian response, finding that the new coordination model has drawbacks and some surprising benefits.

Coordination, or the lack of it, became an issue in the 1990s, as UN peacekeepers, political missions and humanitarian agencies found themselves working side-by-side in conflict-affected countries. (See Box I) The report’s authors detail UN operations in three countries – Afghanistan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – as they struggled to comply with a policy of greater integration in various forms. (See Box II).

Afghanistan, Somalia and DRC

In all three countries a UN peacekeeping force was trying to stop armed groups threatening a peace process, while a UN political mission was trying to build capacity and support a recognized national government, and humanitarian agencies were trying to provide non-partisan help to all who needed it, regardless of their political affiliation. All three wings of the UN found it difficult when they were told to integrate their operations.

Although the information is presented anonymously, the rawness of interviewees’ emotions shines through the ODI/Stimson report. When it comes to engaging with non-state armed actors researchers found no evidence that the UN barred contact with such groups, but in some cases individual UN mission leaders created obstacles to contact. In Somalia, where the UN political mission tried to discourage humanitarian agencies from engaging with the Al-Shabab militant group, the overall UN mission head at the time went so far as to say: “Those who claim neutrality can also be complicit. The Somali government needs support – moral and financial – and Somalis as well as the international community have an obligation to provide both.”

Even where the local UN leadership accepted that the humanitarian agencies had to work with both sides in order to reach people in need, the relationship could be uncomfortable.

In DRC agencies could and did work in rebel controlled areas, but one interviewee told the authors: “It’s difficult to create a relationship with the FDLR [anti government forces] when MONUSCO [the UN peacekeeping force] is partnering with the Congolese army to hit them on the same day!”

One of the report’s authors, Alison Giffen from the Stimson Center, told IRIN they found the issue raised strong emotions among all stakeholders. “We found that despite quite a few reforms in the last five or six years, the debate remains very polarized,” she said. “The challenges and risks facing humanitarian actors are very considerable and this raises the stakes.”

Access and security

The report addresses the issue of whether a closer relationship with military and political operations puts aid workers in greater danger of attack. Encouragingly – and to the surprise of some – the authors concluded: “There is no evidence to suggest that attacks against humanitarian workers are more likely to occur in a UN integrated mission context.” Even in Afghanistan, they say, they could identify no case where there was a clear link between a security incident affecting an NGO and UN integration arrangements.

But Marit Glad of NGO Norwegian Refugee Council, who has written a paper on the implications of integration for the UN’s relationship with other NGOs does not find this particularly reassuring.

“Tying a single incident to integration is very difficult,” she told IRIN. “In some cases, as many as 10-15 different factors could potentially have contributed to a security incident, and it is in many cases impossible to pin down one single reason which caused it.”

Afghanistan has posed some of the starkest dilemmas, with UN agency staff having to relocate to military bases belonging to the NATO-led ISAF force during major security incidents. Some NGOs then stopped coming to meetings in their offices, because they felt that being seen going to the bases would compromise them. Glad says: “Integration brings a clear risk of jeopardizing cooperation between the UN and the NGO community. You have to ask what the benefits are. Is forcing integration worth the risk?”

Pragmatism

In DRC things seem to have been less fraught; a good working relationship with MONUSCO brought benefits to both sides in terms of information sharing, and aid workers benefited from MONUSCO’s help with security and transport arrangements.

Even so, some humanitarian workers worried about the two sides’ different attitude to risk – the military’s only concern was safety, and they felt this tended to make the whole operation too risk-averse, hampering their ability to access populations in need.

Ross Mountain wore the “triple hat” as humanitarian and resident coordinator, and deputy representative of the Secretary-General in DRC. He says his way of working was to try to be pragmatic, and focus on the needs of the victims of the conflict. “There were problems of perception,” he told IRIN, “but we tried to minimize the downside. For instance, as the DSRSG [Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General], I was never personally directly involved in negotiations with rebel groups. We got OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] to do that directly.

“On the plus side, I was very concerned about civilian protection, and being inside the mission, I was able to work closely with the Force Commander, placing the military in areas where the humanitarians had identified concentrations of displaced people so that the peacekeepers’ presence dissuaded militias and other armed groups from attacking them.

“Over time I think integrated missions have become more concerned with the humanitarian dimension… Civilian protection eventually became the number one priority for the UN force in the Congo. What started off at the beginning as an add-on has become the raison d’être of peacekeeping missions.

While the report includes instances where humanitarian advocacy is undermined by integration, Mountain says in DRC in some cases it smoothed his advocacy role with the government. “When linked to the peacekeeping mission, one tended to be rather better listened to by those who didn’t always like what one was saying.”

Clearer guidance needed

The report says it found the reasons for more integration to be poorly understood, and the policy inconsistently implemented. On the whole the political/military side were happier with the outcomes than the humanitarian agencies, but the authors remark that the political/military wings of the mission often did not really understand humanitarian principles or the imperative need for neutral humanitarian space in which to work.

Clearer guidance, they conclude, is needed from headquarters, including advice on how potential disagreements can be resolved, as well as better planning and training of staff before they take up their posts. And, says Giffen, “confidence-building really needs to happen across all stakeholders, for shared goals to be reached, but also for specific goals to be reached.”

For better or worse, integration is here to stay, and UN humanitarian agency heads understand they must try to make it work, if possible. As UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos said at the study launch: “Integration is a UN-mandated policy. Withdrawing from (it) is not an option… At the same time, we cannot allow integration to impede the effective provision of humanitarian assistance to people in need.”

But form must follow function, stresses Mountain – with mission objectives leading the way: “You have to ask yourself, `Integration for what?’ It is vital to focus on what you are trying to do, and never to confuse the tools with the objective.”

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source www.irinnews.org