We are all as vulnerable as the NGOs we neglect
In every airplane announcement, the safety instructions say “put your own mask on before helping others”. The immense pressure on in-country organizations to deliver immediate relief and support to displaced populations and refugees leaves them more and more vulnerable with each new intervention.
In a time of multi-crises with environmental catastrophes emerging all around the globe, long lasting conflict, increasing levels of poverty in already struggling communities and climate change’s severe effects, national and local NGOs are battling a crisis of their own, generated by a lack of strategic intervention on capacity building, designed to be sustainable and scalable.
Having their beneficiaries as the core focus, it is often that the internal health of these organizations has been severely neglected and deprioritized in the face of more and more complex challenges. The effects of this constant postponing already weakened the response capacity migrants and refugees need from their transit or destination countries.
Another factor that has contributed to the current internal crisis of local actors is the lack of dedicated long-term funding addressing exclusively internal needs, and outside mission-oriented projects. This forced NGOs to make do with the available information, little expertise, and limited resources. On top of all this, the ever-changing landscape of threats and new types of vulnerabilities affecting refugees as well as local communities require a high capacity to adapt and adjust to ensure all the services, information and safety their beneficiaries need.
While most of the issues identified above refer to the entirety of the nonprofit sector across the world, we must be aware of the particularities of organizations working in humanitarian intervention, disaster relief management and in general attending to refugees and displaced populations. The pressure is even greater in this case as they need to ensure an immense flexibility in growing capacity overnight when crises peak and they also need to have the capacity to follow the highest standards in terms of service provision, security and care.
Unfortunately, the current humanitarian intervention model is very damaging to any attempt organizations have to lead a sustainable capacity growth process. The large international actors infuse funds almost instantaneously, sometimes growing a local organization up to 100 times its size overnight, but without ensuring the necessary digital and analog instruments and expertise to manage such growth. Once the crisis is starting to apparently go down in scale, resources are pulled out, deflating the balloon and leaving local actors way more vulnerable than when it all started. Struggling with high personnel turnover, recurring expenses that cannot be supported anymore, and exhausted, while still having to tend to the refugees to support them with further integration help.
In a world characterized by escalating displacement due to conflicts, persecution, and environmental factors, the urgency of addressing the needs of refugees and displaced populations cannot be overstated. This crisis has particularly impacted nations like Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, each hosting substantial refugee and displaced populations: Egypt (around 300,000 refugees) Jordan (3,062,851.00 refugees), Lebanon (over 1.5 million refugees), and Turkey (3.9 million refugees) according to the latest data available provided by UNHCR.
Zooming outside each individual country, we notice that while crises have become very quickly global in nature, the response we keep on designing to them is led in isolation within the borders of each national unit, without much learning from one another and without focus on the transfer of good practices, instruments and following the same standards. Just one or two kilometers away at times we can find two shelters for refugees, one where the response and support is flawless, and another one that struggles with ensuring basic needs. In most of the cases the issue is not the lack of resources available, but lack of capacity to deploy them effectively.
As we are looking at the solutions’ landscape we have seen repeatedly an attempt to “dropship” predefined methodologies in order to address the struggles of local organizations. It is often that “localization” equals translation, be it a training programme, a digital platform or guides and instructions, deaf and blind to the particularities of each refugee, country or individual non-profit. This forces NGOs in workflows and planning that ignores its needs and makes its work much harder. With every drop in capacity of local organizations, there are hundreds and thousands of refugees more vulnerable by the day.
Despite its effectiveness and immense scaling power, technology is severely underused in capacity building and in intervention due to low literacy, to lack of adequate products for NGOs and lack of long-term maintenance power.
At the end of the intervention, when crunching the reports, the indicators are always about the impact and almost never about the damage. We never really measure what went wrong, and yet we see a decrease in capacity of local NGOs from one crisis to another, and more and more burnout among their employees and volunteers.
We need to implement long term solutions for capacity strengthening among local actors through a sustainable strategy designed with, not for them. More importantly, designed directly in the field, with the right expertise at hand, not in echo chambers. It is a major responsibility we carry, as capacity builders, to ensure that we are prepared to leave no refugee behind and to use the resources we have to help reach and maintain the real potential of in-country organizations for the long run.