Three Things

Some time ago I was asked to contribute to a discussion about improving the Humanitarian sector. If there were any three things I could magically change about our industry, what would it be?

Well, better late than never I guess.

I had intended to have this post written up for World Humanitarian Day on August 19^th, but unfortunately in the days leading up, I found myself flat on my back with a neck injury and found it hard enough to get to the toilet, never mind write for the interwebs. So, sorry about that. And also my total lack of engagement around the whole WHD online campaign. Now I feel like the guy who didn’t wish anybody a Merry Christmas.

[Full disclosure: this year, I hardly wished anybody a Merry Christmas]

If I could snap my fingers and change three things about the Humanitarian Industry, these are they:

1. The Right People in the Field (and lose the dross)

Humanitarian work (whether emergency or long-term development focused) happens at the field level. It is, above all else, a service industry that revolves around support provided to community members by staff mobilized through our programs. The guys who operate at that level are essentially the fingertips of our agency. They are the face that communities see and they are the ones who ultimately make the decisions on a day-to-day basis that affect whether or not programs see success.

They are also the bottom rung on the organizational ladder.

*WRONG*

We have this crazy idea that there’s a hierarchy of importance in the aid industry. The field pleb who carries out community mobilzation meetings to talk about how to go to the toilet without getting cholera is at the bottom. Then there’s the program manager who reports on the daily activities to their boss, an area manager of some kind. Most likely, these guys are locally hired, maybe even national staff from somewhere else in the country if they’re in management roles. Some of them are totally awesome. Some of them haven’t finished high school, or are useless. Some of them haven’t finished high school and are still totally awesome.

At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got headquarters office in some European nation where white guys (and increasingly, I’m happy to say, non-white guys and non-guys) with thirty years’ experience in the industry have desk-jobs where they make decisions on how best to do our work. Some of these guys even started working as field plebs in some country office and ‘worked their way up’ to become senior managers, or technical experts, or sectoral advisors, or whatever it is they’ve become. Some of them are totally awesome. Some of them are a complete waste of space.

The thing is, we’ve got it topsy-turvy. We’ve assumed that our field works like a corporate model, and the further you get from the field, the more of an expert you are, and the better contribution you can make to the organization. When the fact is, when you’re stuck at some lofty level in a dysfunctional bureaucracy, your contribution gets watered down until, at the field level, it mixes with the hundreds of contributions from hundreds of other technical experts, and comes to pretty much zilch. Meanwhile, some local kid hired last year is running field activities and has never even heard of your innovative collaborative cross-cutting approach, and is just getting on with business.

I know some awesome field guys stranded in head offices, men and women who really know how to interact with and inspire a community. In fact, I know people like that at pretty much every level in the industry. I can list off passionate local field coordinators who really know how to communicate with their own people. Dynamic expat area managers who have an amazing and inspirational connection to their staff and the programs they’re responsible for. Maybe the best community engagement field worker I’ve ever met was a Latina expat who ran a multi-country disaster preparedness program in Central America. Man, she had communities eating out of her hand- they loved her.

I’ve also known a lot of space-wasters. People who’ve been promoted simply because they’ve put in the time, or because their brother works in the right ministry. Expat experts who’ve been around too long and are keeping a desk warm until their long-service-leave matures. Field workers who are ignorant, don’t care, or are abusive to the communities they’re supposed to be serving, and local area managers who’ve set up their own kingdom and are skimming off the top. Internationals who once upon a time made good field staff, but have had to return to home-base offices to raise a family, and are drying up inside and getting too cynical to be of much use.

This is due partly to an inherent trend to favour a corporate model, and partly due to perceptions of financial restrictions. Why would we pay an expat ten times what we can pay a local to mobilize at the community level, especially when the expat wants a place for their kids and the local has a better connection with the community.

Well, there is some truth to these constraints, but it’s not complete. You see, we need the right people in the right places. Sometimes, that’s gonna mean we need somebody from that community to be the face of our organization. Other times, it might be a national from somewhere else. In some circumstances, there might be an expatriate who is just the right person for that particular job- they have a way of interacting that inspires and provides leadership, and they have the right technical skill-set to really make a difference.

Basically, we stick some of our best field staff behind desks where they can’t be effective, and pay our lowest salaries to the men and women who represent the organization and are ultimately going to operationalize our plans.

Think about this. Our reputation, our impact, our very humanitarian imperative rests on the people we invest least in. Is this good business? No.

The industry needs to put its best people in positions where they can have direct operational control over field activities and staff, where they can represent the organization to our most important stakeholders- the community themselves. People who have the capacity to simultaneously implement best practice in gender, accountability, disaster risk reduction and complexity management.

We wouldn’t expect a high-school graduate in some western nation to be able to get up and run at this level. Why would we expect it of our field-staff? And yet this is the level we should be operating at.

So you need to pay an expatriate wage for a ‘low-level’ program manager sometimes? Okay, so what? I realise it will raise a few awkward issues around pay equity between national and expat staff members, but are you really going to let that stand in the way of maximising impact? Besides, it won’t always be the case- sometimes you’ll find the right staff member locally, too- but make sure they’re fairly paid for what they’re offering (not to get all communist on you here). But let’s have a career progression that sees our best staff encouraged and supported to operate at the field level, not some lofty height where they’re effectively useless, while staff who are not-yet-competent (or in some cases, simply lack the will or capacity to do any better) do our most important work and aren’t paid, recognized or supported accordingly.

Oh, and all those middle layers of bureaucracy, expertise and hamster-wheel box-ticking management? Plebs like me? Send ‘em back to the field or sack ‘em.

[Full disclosure: Since writing this, I've been sent closer to the field- yay]

2. Downward Accountability & Complete Transparency

A reminder that seems to need to be pushed out time and again in this industry: We’re here for the communities first, and everybody else second. None of this dual-citizenship where we have to treat our donors as equal stakeholders in the process. I’m sorry. You’re a donor. You’re not why we’re here, so get over it, and if you don’t like it, then don’t give. We exist to serve our communities. Period.

As such we have to not just talk accountability- we have to be accountable. Get our communities running their own assessments. None of this seeds-in-a-pile stuff, either. I mean, sure, if it’s the most appropriate way to get information and connect with the communities, by all means run with it. But please, half these guys have smart-phones now. You’re telling me you can’t involve them in your assessment process in a more sophisticated way? And if they’re not there yet? Invest in them so they can be.

How about getting them to help write your project designs? Contribute to discussions on how the project will be managed, and what indicators and outputs they want to see in their communities. Not just , “I want a well”. How about things like flow-rate, water quality, how to set up the distribution network, and safety issues? How about bringing them to meet the donor when you negotiate the project terms? Let them see your budget- including management costs. Do they see your reports? How about letting them write the reports? Do your communities lack the capacity to do that? Really? Do they? If so, you’d better put education at the top of your to-do list, cos take it from somebody who views reports for a living: It ain’t rocket science.

HAP International has a fantastic tool that prescribes the appropriate levels of accountability for a program to be truly answerable to the community it purports to serve, but like most systems it can become a tick-the-box exercise and be paid nothing more than lip-service. “Yes, we’re HAP compliant. There’s a little wooden box they can put complaints into if they want to.”

Let’s make it actually happen so that communities get to call the shots. I bet our programs would look pretty different.

On the same topic (and not wanting to be cheating too much here by adding extra things to my list), let’s be totally transparent and accountable to all our stakeholders, not just communities. Let’s let our budgets and reports be uploaded onto central publically-accessible databases. We bear in mind the need to protect certain information for the safety of staff, beneficiaries, or the organization- but we don’t hide behind this. Let our donor public see what we’re up to. Let communities and host governments see what we’re up to. Partner agencies. The UN. Donor governments.

It makes you squirm. And it would hurt at first. There’d be a lot of re-aligning of expectations on behalf of donors. A lot of re-aligning of employment on behalf of NGOs, for sure. But it’d settle. And we’d all be better off for it. And a lot more honest.

Of course, implicit in this assumption is intelligent donorship. Donors need to be able to look at what NGOs do, and what they are, and how they work, and within the context of this transparency, make appropriate decisions about how to invest in supporting communities in need- for goodness sake stop talking about ‘overheads’. We don’t have that yet. A part of that is due to the lack of transparency and the partial-honesty with which we treat our constituents. There are other factors in there too- particularly politics- which are harder to overcome.

3. Action Fitted to Context

Wow. We’re here again. Needs oriented! Make your programs appropriate to the context you’re operating in! Humanitarian imperative first! How many times do we have to have the same conversation? I guess as many times as we keep making decisions to prioritize things other than the needs context of the people we’re supposed to be serving. Do I really need to say very much more about this one? I sincerely hope not. Suffice to say, this isn’t happening. Not yet. If there was one thing I could change with a snap of my fingers, it would be this one. Easy. Done.

Snapshots of Addis

It’s 6pm. I sit on the deck on the 6th floor of the hotel while my camera perches on its tripod, taking time-lapse shots of the traffic on Road 22. The sun’s gone down, just a burnt smudge on the sky where its fleeing rays catch in the city smog. Sunday evening traffic rumbles, steady but not chaotic. The air is cool, refreshing. I’ve an Amber Beer on the table beside me, the latest release from the local St George brewery, just a few months old, and with its sweeter notes of burnt caramel and hops, one of the continents better brews. As I look out over the city skyline, it’s a muddled jumble of mid-rise towers, basilica domes and construction scaffolding, all backed by the lurking hills that ring the city basin.

The two weeks I’ve been here since starting my contract feel like two months. At least. I’ve stepped- finally- into a senior role in an HRI-affiliate (Coming to a Community Near You™). The mental overload of learning the ropes of a new job have been overlaid with learning a new city, a new country, and the nuances of a new culture.

To say nothing of memorizing Ethiopian names.

It’s November. The rainy season has been, and the skies are blue. All day, every day. A few clouds lurk in the evenings behind the hilltops, but that’s about it. One morning a smog so thick it recalls a winter fog in the home counties chokes the city. Rush hour traffic tumbles from the murk, darkened silhouettes dashing from the throat-burning, eye-tearing fug, until a brisk midday breeze sweeps the air clean. The wind is cool and fresh and fidgets with plastic bags and the airborne detritus of the city.

Poor is layered on rich here. There aren’t clearly deliniated quartiers split between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here, a hotel backs onto unpaved tracks and run-down alotments. There, street children gather outside an expat-frequented supermarket stocked with Malaysian imports with Arabic scrawls and stamped حلال‎. I join new friends and eat at a fancy French restaurant that sets us back forty bucks a head- a pricey night out here where you can buy lunch for a dollar and a dead-jarring coffee for fifty cents. Through the cracked windshield of my taxi heading back, I see the homeless lying in rows beneath the overpass fifty paces from my hotel.

I spend a morning getting my medical checks done, a part of the work permit application process. It’s a slow, bureaucratic tedium that involves drifting from one department’s waiting line to the next. When I get my ECG done, I’m one part amused, one part appauled by the contraption, all crocodile clips and vacuum-bulbs wired up to a device like the electro-shock therapy machine in Return to Oz. As the doctor smears a conductive jelly over my bare torso, I’m just impressed they have an ECG machine. Three days later I still have the bruises from the suction cups beneath my nipples.

A Kenyan, a Ugandan, a German, an American and I sound like the start to a bad joke, but we head out to dinner at Face of Addis, a restaurant perched halfway up one of the hills overlooking the city. The little blue taxi of Eastern European design fails to scramble up the angle of the crushed rock street and we get out to alleviate its weight, wherein its tinny motor wails and eventually convinces it up the ascent. A glass frontage gives a magnificent view over the blooming metropolis. We watch plane after plane land at Bole International, one of Africa’s busiest airports and a hub for European access. Ethiopian Airlines is the newest member of Star Alliance, and we watch five jets come in to land in no more than ten minutes, their starlike landing lights queued out to the horizon one behind the other.

Our conversation is banter, periodically dark. We’re mostly emergency response folk. With us is the manager for one of our refugee camp responses, and three of the staff are based in Nairobi, where tensions run high ahead of the upcoming elections. Our Kenyan colleague, half Kikuyu (infamous for their business acumen), bears the brunt of our humour. We promise to hold her a spot in our Ethiopian refugee camp when she has to flee her country next March.

“How can you tell if a Kikuyu is dead?” Jokes the Ugandan. “You take a ten cent coin…” He mimes dropping it in front of the presumedly-deceased.

Growth is constant here. As with elsewhere in Africa, the Chinese are huge investors. They can be seen throughout the city. Another night we eat at a cultural restaurant, popular here as they showcase local food, music and dancing. Over a meal of tibs and gitfo (cooked), we watch a Chinese businessman lose his inhibitions over beer and tej, the local honey wine. When one of the lithe dancers invites him to dance, he gives a performance worthy of a YouTube phenomenon, one part jitterbug and one part funky-chicken. He lurches onto the stage and after embracing a drummer who goodnaturedly surrenders his instrument, animates the drum with much flailing of the arms. The dancers subsequently adopt his movement into their routine, to much appreciation from the crowd, but our table is torn between laughing at the smooth adaptation of the performers, and the cubit-lengthed rat that has emerged from the straw roof and is now picking its way along the top of a wall at the back of the stage.

The people are understated, gracious, and quietly proud. Ethiopians speak of how they have never been colonized, quietly brushing over the brief period of occupation by Mussolini’s forces that has left pasta an almost national dish and named the Mercato, the city’s market district and a national monument. I walk a tightrope, trying to build relationship and trust, while following my own instructions of pushing through change faster than any of us are comfortable with. After some meetings I come away with my head spinning from the concentration of trying to maintain a dynamic of respect, while at the same moment having to implement an unpopular decision.

I’m shown round an apartment. It’s spacious, clean, and has a beautiful view of the city. It costs a fraction of what a similar place would cost in Australia. Afterwards I sit down with two colleagues and share a cup of tea. One explains to me how he ‘adopted’ two boys, one off the streets of Addis who used to sell him cigarettes, the other from an impoverished regional town. Both are adults now, one a teacher, the other a scientist. In his own humble way, his pride both at the boys, and the difference he has made in his own country, shines in his eyes. Apparently such an undertaking- to financially sponsor and support the less fortunate in their community- is fairly commonplace among middle-class Ethiopians.

I hurtle along in one of the little blue taxis. They’re ancient, decrepit vehicles, clearly from the Communist era. Sitting in the front seat, safety belt unavailable as we hare down an empty avenue late in the evening, I’m twitchingly sensitive to a sense of my own mortality. The time of the Derg is evident here in the charmless concrete tower-block apartments and the deep respect for government authority. Posters of the late Meles Zenawi, President and then Prime Minister since the overthrow of the communist government and the war with Eritrea, are everywhere. He passed away of natural causes a few months ago, and is revered as a saint and national treasure.

An LED screen is mounted outside Edna Mall. At night time it is garish, blasting colour and movement over the gridlocked roundabout as people hustle beneath its glow, neon-tinted music videos lending a Blade-Runner-esque atmosphere to the crowd. Glass-fronted restaurants and fashion boutiques overlook the avenue. On a Sunday afternoon, Amhara youth in spray-on jeans and designer tops lounge together in cafes and browse their iPhones. I step onto the street with a friend and across the avenue, golden sunlight from the settling dusk paints the domes of the Orthodox cathedral while prayers sing from the loudspeakers. As we pull away, an old man hobbles across the street on makeshift crutches, head weighed down by a vast, grubby turban, a gold cross dangling at his neck.

The food here is good, the coffee better. I read an accurately descriptive quote in a travel article the other day: “The prefered caffeine delivery mechanism here is the macchiato.” It comes at morning-tea time without fail in a shot-sized glass, rich black coffee with milky froth on top. I watch my Ethiopian colleagues spoon two, three, even four shovels of sugar into their brew and suck it down, and feel saintly for my half-spoon concession. I buzz for the rest of the morning and half the afternoon. At lunch I join them in the canteen and pay sixty-five cents for shiro wat and injera- a tasty red sauce poured onto a bed of the spongy teff-based bread that is a national institution. The fingernails of my right hand are already stained yellow with the remnants of spice.

It’s dark now, and the traffic is steady but thinning. Come tomorrow morning, it will be a choked grind up and down the clogged arteries of Ethiopia’s throbbing heart. My commute- a brief walk from the hotel to the office- reaches its climax trying to cross the four-to-six lanes of moving metal, waiting for the right moment when I can step out and not be pulverised. A dead bitch lies swelling in the sun in the lane across from the hotel. In my brief time here I’ve already seen one man hit by a car, but fortunately not seriously.

My waiter comes round with another Amber. He sees me working away on the computer, next to my constantly-snapping camera.

“You make movies with that one?” he asks me. “What software you are using?”

I try to explain the concept of time-lapse photography and fail to find an example on my hard drive. He tells me that in his free time he does video-editting for weddings and likes to integrate photographs into the process. A short while later he brings me a plate of toasted grain, on the house because he wants me to try some. It tastes like roasted corn kernels, and keeps great company with beer.

There’s a lot up in the air here. I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to stay. Hopefully, a long time. I’m desperate to follow through some of the changes that are already happening, and have a chance to put my experience in this industry to the test, hopefully make a difference in this office and in this program. Some things are out of my control. If there’s one positive in the limbo I’m currently in, it’s that I’m determined to make the most of every minute this place gives me. Ethiopia is fascinating. It’s enriching, invigorating, inspiring. I’m delighted to be here, despite knowing that challenges doubtless lie ahead. So I’ll share what and when I can, and hope you enjoy the journey with me.

*PS- watch the bottom left corner of the time-lapse video to see the planes coming in to land at Bole International Airport, one after the other

Emergency Survival Tips: New Series

My parents tell a story from when I was six, which foreshadowed everything I was to become. At the time we lived in Wellington, and driving past the harbour one afternoon, we watched a waterskier towed behind a speedboat. I called forward to my parents,

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do.”

“Why is that?” they asked. No doubt they thought I was weighing up the risks of a high-speed crash, an accident leading to drowning, even something as obscure as a shark attack.

Said I, “Because a seaplane might land on your head.”

It was no great surprise to them when I became a disaster response professional.

*

I am the Worst Case Scenario guy. I was in the Boy Scouts less than two years, but Be Prepared has been my motto, before and ever since. My heroes are MacGyver and Bear Grylls. I travel with three first aid kits, perpetually have a pocket knife in pocket, know my escape route from pretty much any room I’m in, and have a constantly updating list of contingency plans in my head.

I suspect I may take my survival just a little too seriously.

But not as seriously as this guy.

However I wanted to throw together a few posts on simple survival tips. This was inspired by a couple of recent events. About a week ago, Melbourne was struck by a minor earthquake. Minor, in geological terms, but at 5.3 on the Richter scale, it was bigger than most Melburnians had ever experienced. After the excitement of the shaking had subdued, my wife (Madam Inside Out) turned to me and said,

“What should you do to survive an earthquake?”

Needless to say, I had an answer for her, and it wasn’t short.

Today I watched friends post images of the wildfires burning out of control near Colorado Springs. It’s been more than three years since the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged the outskirts of Melbourne, but reading about the conditions in Colorado- high temperatures, dessicating humidity and gusting winds- it was impossible not to be reminded of that day, and the grief it brought so many people here. I found myself thinking I really hope somebody is giving those families the right advice right now.

So I figured I’d put together a few of the bits and bobs I’ve picked up over the years that improve your chances of not becoming a statistic on a news ticker. Some of this I’ve picked up in my career as an emergency response professional and as a trained wilderness first responder. Some of it is stuff I’ve looked into out of curiosity. And some of it’s just plain sensible.

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Before I go any further, a disclaimer or two. I’m not professionally or legally qualified to be giving you survival tips, so if you have genuine questions or concerns about your own safety or that of loved ones, please check with a qualified source. This series will be much more about sharing tidbits of information, discussing disaster and survival trends as I’ve come across them in my own experience, and hopefully triggering some dialogue.

If you’re living in a shack somewhere in Montana, convinced the UN is trying to hunt you down, and you’re looking for information that will help you survive the coming apocalypse, this series isn’t for you either. Not much conspiracy going on over here.

You know who you are.

I’m an emergency management professional with direct and indirect experience in disaster response, a generalist’s overview of the sector, and a knack for making information interesting (or so I’m told). I’m not an expert in any one given area of emergency response, and therefore I really welcome anybody reading this post who is an expert to share their advice and correct my mistakes.

And finally, if you have any questions ask them, and if you have any suggestions about what disaster scenarios you’d like to see discussed here, suggest them! I haven’t decided precisely what topics I’ll cover, though I’m  thinking earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes will be onboard, as a starter.

If you’re very, very good, I may even include something on zombies.

Better safe than disembowelled alive by a horde of the ravenous undead.

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Before I launch into subsequent posts, however, I want to share a three key pointers to surviving any type of disaster. They’re quite simple.

1. Know the threats.

2. Have a plan.

3. Rehearse that plan.

1. Know the Threats. To be prepared to survive an emergency, any emergency, you have to have some idea of what the threats you face are. These might be the threats you face in the home where you live, or the threats associated with a particular journey you’re making that takes you someplace different, or the threats associated with a work deployment. Identify what those risks might be. Nine times out of ten, the biggest risks we face are the mundane things we write off- things like vehicle accidents.

Another time I’ll put up a more technical post on risk management and familiarise you with some of the concepts and vocabulary. But for now, I just want to encourage you to think of the things in your space that could possibly cause you harm. Do you live in an earthquake-prone region? Somewhere that has a hurricane season? Near a river bed that could flood? Does your commute to work take you through a high-crime district of your city? Do you frequently have to travel on unsafe public transportation? Is your office well prepared for a fire?

Ask yourself critical questions about the places you and your loved ones spend time or pass through. Find out from local councils or emergency services what threats they are aware of and plan for. Talk to friends, neighbours, colleagues or other locals who are familiar with the area. Arm yourself with a knowledge base.

Knowing what threats could affect you is the critical first step in being ready to survive them. Without this information, you can be blindsided by something that you might otherwise have been able to survive.

2. Have a Plan. Once you’ve identified what threats you might face in a given context, you need to ask yourself, so what? If this threat becomes a reality, what will I do? What will I want others under my care to do? How will I do this? What resources might I need to make this happen?

Your plan needs to be realistic. And appropriately scaled. Ultimately, survival can be a bit of a selfish thing. We’re talking about how you’re going to survive here. If you’re at home or in your car, then you’re thinking about how you’ll help your family make it through in one piece. At the office, then perhaps it’s the members of your team. At this stage I’m not priming you to be Action Man and carry the weight of responsibility for your entire office or apartment block (although if you decide you can see some major holes in an organization’s disaster preparedness, by all means raise it with the right people).

Think about escape routes. What’s the quickest or safest way out of here under circumstance X? Does that hold up for circumstance Y? Safe zones.Where do I need to get to before I can consider myself safe? What if I can’t get there? Behaviour. Should I be yelling instructions at people? Keeping a low profile? How will I keep my head clear? Equipment. Is there anything I should have on or near me that would help me in this situation? If an emergency arises, can I get to it in time to be of help? Other people. How am I going to help the people I care about? Do I have a moral or ethical obligation to help anybody else? Mobilising additional support. Who would I contact in this situation? How would I be able to reach them? What information would they need of me, and vice-versa? Longer-term survival. How long would I need to be able to cope for? What else might I need under these circumstances?

Make sure your plan is something you can actually do. It’s no good coming up with a plan that relies on the SAS showing up with a helicopter and a strike team to evacuate you off the top of your office tower. Likewise, don’t plan to rappel out of your 18^th storey window if you don’t have three hundred feet of rope, a harness, an ATC and several years’ climbing experience behind you. And keep it simple. In an emergency, you can expect to be running on adrenaline, to experience tunnel vision, and quite possibly to be scared out of your mind. You’ll be capable of basic physical responses, but not necessarily very much more, so don’t expect your plan to include a large amount of higher cerebral function activity, such as trying to calculate the load that a collapsing wall should be able to bear, while trying to decide whether you should scramble under it or not.

And make sure that plan is adequately resourced. If your plan calls for a first-aid kit to be on hand, it’s no good for that first-aid kit to be listed as a to-do on your kitchen whiteboard. It needs to be in your glove-box, or in your desk drawer at work, or within arm’s reach of your bed.

3. Rehearse that Plan. Having a plan is all very well and good, but you need to make sure you know that plan inside-out if you want to make use of it during a crisis. The reason being, firstly, as outlined above. In an emergency, there’s no guarantee you’ll have full control of your higher mental functions- adrenaline does funny things to us. The more you’ve rehearsed a plan, the more likely it is to be embedded deeper in the instinctive portions of your mind and memory, and the more likely you are to be able to carry it out.

Research has shown that in plane crashes, there is a tendency for passengers to retrace their steps to the exit through which they first entered the aircraft- even if that exit is all the way at the front of the aircraft, and they are at the back. This is due to very old cerebral coding that dates back to when our mammalian ancestors lived in caves, or in thick jungle, and when danger threatened (usually a predator) their best form of escape was almost certainly the way they had come in by. Of course, an airplane has multiple escape routes, one hopefully close by, but you need to conciously tell your brain to use this route in an emergency. If you leave it to the moment of the emergency itself, your lizard brain may well have taken over and kicked your cognitive functions upstairs to wait it out- which may unfortunately compromise your chances for survival.

This, incidentally, is why some airlines, during their safety brief, ask you to count the number of seats to your nearest exit. It’s a way of cognitively preparing the brain- even at a subconcious level- to record the pathway to the nearest exit. I do it every time I sit down in a new plane seat- forwards and backwards. If at all possible, it’s worth physically walking the emergency escape route, as this layers it even deeper into your mind and increases the likelihood that your brain will revert to it. That, and it helps you identify any weaknesses in your plan or threats you may have missed.

Finally, and closely related to this, visualize your actions. Studies have shown that people who are mentally prepared for an emergency have a higher likelihood of surviving it. Visualization is an incredibly powerful tool in this regard. If you can picture in your head how you’ll react in a given situation, you are essentially preparing your mind (and also your body) to do just that. As in the above-mentioned plane scenario, one thing I do in every aircraft I travel is not just count the rows to the exit, but to mentally picture myself walking down the aisle, and then running through in my head the step-by-step actions I need to take to open the emergency exit and leave the aircraft. Is it one of those hatches you need to pull inside the aircraft? Is there a latch I need to throw before pulling the handle? Do I have to climb onto a wing or jump down a slide?

Repetition is key. The more you go over something, the more likely you are to respond as you imagine. The better your knowledge of the threats you face, the better you can plan for them, and the more accurately your visualisation will respond to the circumstances you might face.

Hopefully, you’ll never, ever need it.

Know the Threats.

Make a Plan.

Rehearse that Plan.

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Of course, you can rely on a combination of dumb luck and your own spark of personal genius should an emergency arise on your doorstep- and you can never, of course, plan for every eventuality. But if it comes down to a choice between running through some common-sense preparatory steps for a possible crisis, or sitting back and hoping for the best, well, my parents have known all along which way I lean.

Further Reading:

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes- and Why, by Amanda Ripley

Handwashing, and other Epiphanies

The things of your daily existence inure you to the meaning behind them, becoming mundane and unremarkable, until they have little value beyond the objective. I think this is true for all of us, and why for many of us, we crave things like change, travel, newness- a job, a holiday, a relationship- to stay enthralled by life.

From an outside perspective, we often perceive something to be more attractive than it might feel from within. I suspect there are probably people who feel that about my life as an aid worker (although possibly not if they follow this blog for long…). I get to travel, I get to see interesting things the world over. But even for me, the things I experience, after a time, grow commonplace. So commonplace that I often fail to really see what they’re about.

Sometimes, though, you reconnect with something you’ve interacted with many times before and it strikes you in a new way. This happened to me a couple of days ago on a field visit in southern Kenya.

I’m no stranger to field visits. I’ve been variously taking part in them or hosting them for the better part of a decade. There’s a general formula to them, and while they can be stimulating and a real improvement over sitting at my laptop screen, sometimes they can be downright tedious. Courtesy visits, social obligations and awkward conversations where you try to avoid coming across as patronizing, all the while wondering whether these community groups actually want you showing up at all, and whether you’re doing anything useful in the first place.

So too you see the same old stuff. Ask the same old questions. Field the same old queries.

School buildings. Farmers’ associations. Community empowerment groups. Water management committees. Boreholes.

Not to say that some of these aren’t worthwhile interventions, that they don’t produce really positive results for communities, or to forget that they’re employed time and again because, in the right circumstances, they actually work.

Not to say also that you don’t sometimes come across something innovative and inspiring that makes you think again about the cynicism that often plagues this career after some time.

But when I was told that as part of a field trip we were visiting a school to see where we’d installed a water tank, some latrines and a couple of handwashing stations, I have to say my heart didn’t tumble in somersaults of glee. We’re going to get to drive 45 minutes along dirt trails (actually I don’t mind the driving bit, there’s stuff to look at) just to see a couple of concrete structures and some kids washing their hands. Awesome.

I’ve seen this stuff before. Ten bucks says I’ll see it again before very long.

And sure enough, we get to the school. A primary school in the middle of the bush, five hundred kids and change, milling about between classes, staring at the weird white guy and his entourage dismounting from the four-by-four to go look at a big concrete water tank.

It’s a big concrete water tank. And it’s got our logo on it.

Yup, there goes the white guy and his entourage. Looking at the water tank. Now crossing the school ground. Now going to check out the toilets.

Yeah. I don’t feel at all creepy. Checking out kids’ latrine blocks. They’ve got our logo on them too.

And look, they’re pretty nice latrine blocks. Well constructed. Our logo again. Much nicer than the old latrines. And clean inside. Doesn’t mean they don’t stink. They do stink. Pit latrines tend to stink, any way you build ‘em. And five hundred kids using a dozen dry-drop latrines, well, just be glad I can only use words to share my experience.

Outside the toilet blocks, the little portable handwashing stations. A blue plastic tub on a metal frame with a tap at the bottom. Not too different to something you’d take camping. Only the handwashing station has no water in it. It fits sixty litres, but right now it’s empty. On the ground, a damp patch where the sand has soaked up the runoff. Butterflies are flitting above the mud, sipping at the moisture like shimmering strips of windblown tin foil.

Not much use, handwashing stations with no water in them.

Not to worry, the teacher said, that was normal. It was lunch time, middle of the day. They usually run out of water by lunch time. And sure enough, along came a couple of the older girls with a jerry can filled up from the water-tank, to fill the hand-washing station back up again.

And I guess that’s when it all started to click for me.

You see, I know all this stuff. I write it in proposals, I see it reflected in purchase requisition forms, I approve the tender bids or I read about it in reports. Of course, hand washing stops disease from spreading. Sure, schools are nicer to go to when there’re decent latrines to use.

But no, really, stop and think about it for a moment. Five hundred kids, in a semi-arid, water-scarce landscape, spending eight hours of their day crammed together on this one property. That’s a lot of toilet breaks. That’s a lot of poo. That’s a lot of germs.

Maybe it’s because I’ve got a seven-year-old at primary school now. I found myself imagining her in that location. How would I feel if these were her facilities? Okay, I guess. They’re not the nicest, but they serve the purpose. They’re safe, they’re kept clean (by the kids themselves, no less), they work. Not as comfortable as the sit-down flush commodes we’re used to in Australia, for sure. It’d take some getting used to. But okay.

But how would I feel if she didn’t have these facilities? How would I feel if I was sending her off to school for the day, knowing that she had to use a dirty, stinking drop latrine or, worse, had to scurry off into the bush to go to the toilet? How would I feel if she couldn’t wash her hands when she’d finished going to the toilet- especially in a part of the world where toilet paper may not be used? And knowing that she was in that environment with five hundred other kids, all doing the same thing, none of them able to wash their hands, heading off to eat their lunch, sharing all those germs?

I’m not a germ freak. I’m not the kind of guy who has to use antiseptic wipes every time I shake someone’s hand. In fact I’m a big believer in letting kids get exposed to germs from the get-go. Build a good immune system. Don’t polish every surface in the house with disinfectant just so your child doesn’t get a sniffle, or you’re going to be buying hypoallergenic pets for the next twenty years. I believe one of the reasons I have a pretty rock-solid constitution when I travel is because my parents didn’t freak out if I put dirt in my mouth.

But we’re talking real germs here. Cholera. Escherichia Coli. Acute Watery Diarrhoea. Typhoid.

Stuff that kills kids. By the hundreds of thousands. Stuff that, in a water scarce environment, is even harder to treat and to avoid.

How would I feel sending my child into that environment?

And I figured it out. I mean, not just connected the dots in an analytical fashion. I mean, the work we’re doing here actually hit me, emotionally, in a way that meant something.

This is important.

We’re making a difference.

Something so simple: a little blue watertight container with a tap at the bottom. A few simple messages. Wash your hands. And kids can come to school without the threat of becoming infected. Parents can know that their childrens’ practical, physical needs of the most basic kind, are being met.

Health. Dignity. Simple stuff like that.

If I had to, I could send my child here and not be frightened for them.

It’s funny how you forget this stuff. Take it for granted. I guess I’m so used to seeing it in project designs, walking around villages and seeing these activities in place, they’re almost invisible now. So normal.

We take for granted the ability to turn on a tap and get clean water out of it. That doesn’t make it any less a blessing. So too I take for granted that we do things like put water tanks and latrine blocks in schools. Shrug it off.

Yawn. It’s just what we do.

Walking back down to the Land Cruisers, I was still the weird white guy with an entourage, checking out the kids as they queued up at the little blue wash stations to rinse their hands before lunch. But it made sense in a different kind of way. I was actually glad I came. Glad I came to see a concrete water tank with our logo on it, and a little blue bucket on a stand, and a bunch of kids staring at me wondering what I was doing in their school. I’ve seen it dozens of times before. But this time it actually meant something. Refreshing. Like a nice cool glass of water.

I wonder what else we’re doing every day that we’re not seeing, that’s hiding something precious.

Dear Santa…

It’s Christmas tomorrow. Cue M. bursting into our bedroom at 7am (not unusual for a Saturday) to announce excitedly that Santa Claus would be visiting tonight. Santa & Mrs. Claus were less enthusiastic about the early morning announcement, but we get it. We were six once too. In the meantime, there’s fairy lights on the Christmas tree and draped all up the staircase, a small but growing pile of wrapped gifts on the living room floor, and the girls are planning on making a gingerbread house this afternoon.

Except for the tinsel and a reduced staff load, however, you wouldn’t know it’s Christmas at work. Humanitarian life goes on. If anything, this week’s been a doozy. I got back Monday night from a brief visit to Dili, Timor Leste, to do some planning ahead of next year’s elections, and my week hasn’t really stopped since.

In the West African countries of Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, there’s a growing food crisis. Really it’s just an extension of the chronic food insecurity and malnutrition that exists across much of the region. Fragile economies, unreliable rainfall, deteriorating soils, climate change, population pressure, feeding practices, access to clean water and health care- in brief, a whole host of reasons- all make rural populations highly vulnerable to any shocks in their livelihood production systems. While the indicators for the coming season across the region as a whole are not all bad, and while there isn’t the threat of widespread emergency or famine as in the Horn of Africa this year, but regardless millions of people (around 6 millions of them) in pockets in all five of those countries are going to struggle to feed themselves. The hunger season- traditionally beginning any time between February (in a bad year) and May and running until the harvest in September, has already begun in places, with some households out of food already, and some child deaths reported. Niger is still recovering from a difficult year in 2010, and 2012 is likely to see elevated rates of malnutrition and, realistically, the likelihood of significant numbers of child deaths if relief efforts are not stepped up.

The food security outlook for Sudan has been released this week by the USAID-sponsored Famine Early Warning System- the gospel when it comes to classifying global food shortages. It rates areas on a five-point scale (IPC- the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification)- No Food Insecurity, Stressed, Crisis, Emergency and Catastrophe. Large areas of western Sudan (Darfur) are forecast to be in Crisis (IPC level 3), while several areas- significantly those in ongoing conflict, particularly South Kordofan and Blue Nile- are anticipated to be at Emergency levels- levels similar to those seen across most of northern Kenya, Puntland and southern Somalia earlier this year.

And while on the subject of Sudan and conflict, tensions between Sudan and South Sudan (which earlier this year separated from Khartoum-led Sudan following a popular referendum) continue to escalate. Aerial bombardments of populations in disputed areas continue. Troop build-ups are reported. Pro-north militias in the south are allegedly forcibly recruiting southern Sudanese refugees in Khartoum and making them fight against the south. MSF reports large-scale displacements. While the food security outlook for South Sudan is less alarming than for Sudan, the combination of unpredictable population movement and the increasing indicators that large-scale conflict is likely are major concerns over the coming months.

If there’s good news to be found in sub-Saharan Africa right now, it is in the Horn of Africa, where rains have started to bring about an improvement in the drought and famine over the past couple of months. Grazing pasture is reported to be returning, which will support pastoralists, while wells are replenishing and food will soon be able to be grown in some areas. The UN has declassified some areas of Somalia from Famine (Catastrophe) to Emergency, and humanitarian support has been credited with having had a significant impact in this area. That said, huge portions of the Horn of Africa remain in very serious food crisis, and some populations still remain at Catastrophe (IPC Level 5) levels, particularly areas around Mogadishu and with high IDP populations. In addition, while the rains have improved some conditions, they have worsened others, making runways unusable by relief flights, bogging down overland trips which now take three days in place of one, and, most serious of all, spreading Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) which has been credited with hundreds of deaths in recent weeks among Somali IDPs. We won’t talk about the security situation, which continues to simmer at the very most unstable end of the spectrum, with troops from Kenya and Ethiopia engaged in de facto unilateral action against al Shabab militants, who in turn appear to be strengthening ties with global terror networks like al Qaeda, and continue to destabilize the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Africa Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). 3 Somali aid workers were killed in Somalia yesterday, motive as yet unreported.

Leaving the African continent, more than forty thousand people have been impacted by heavy rains in northern Sri Lanka this week. The districts of Kilinochchi, Mulaitivu and Jaffna have all been hit by moderate flooding, with the government calling on local NGOs to respond. The past eighteen months have seen northern Sri Lanka slowly being rebuilt in the wake of a thirty-year civil war that saw twenty thousand reportedly die in the early months of 2009 alone, and as such is an immensely fragile area. More heavy rain is forecast.

Heavy rain this week in the Philippines also triggered tragedy in Mindinao, in the southern Philippines, when flash floods tore through several areas during the night. A thousand dead have been recovered, and the government reports another thousand remain unaccounted for. The Philippines sees death and destruction on an annual basis at the hands of powerful storm systems, like Typhoon Ketsana in 2009 that caused extensive damage in Manila. This however remains one of the deadliest events in recent years.

Even closer to home, a storm system is building off the north coast of Australia and is due to make landfall on Boxing Day some hundred kilometres east of Darwin as a Category Two tropical cyclone, with the potential for damage. And yesterday, two large, shallow aftershocks struck Christchurch- where nearly 200 people lost their lives earlier this year and large portions of the city were destroyed- triggering fear and distressing memories for many folks living there.

Papua New Guinea’s government remains in a state of considerable uncertainty as two senior politicians- Sir Michael Somare and Peter O’Neill- face off over disputed leadership, with the threat of unrest and violence a major concern. President Laurent Kabila’s victory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s polls has been confirmed by the courts, but criticized by international observers and denounced by political rivals. Police action in that country has lead to the deaths of over two dozen people in recent days, and the country remains under scrutiny to see whether further political violence will spiral out. Iraq has experienced a massive series of coordinated terror attacks in the wake of the US pullout of troops, with its government split along sectarian lines as Vice President al-Hashemi is accused of ties with terrorism and a looming threat of spiralling civil violence. Syria’s internal conflict has stepped up a notch, with a powerful and sophisticated car bomb targeting security forces and civilians in Damascus killing 44 people and injuring scores more. Drug-related violence continues in Mexico at a rate rivalling that of many civil wars, while concerns over insecurity in Afghanistan in the face of a US troop drawdown there in 2012 are increasing, given ongoing levels of insurgency across the country and a fragile, divided state government. A recent leak claims that Pakistan’s government fears a coup by the military is on the cards.

You could say things are busy right now.

I don’t write this to be a downer, or guilt you out, or anything else. Christmas is a time for celebration, for remembering those people and values in your life that are important, for those of us with faith to celebrate what we believe to be a pivotal gift to human kind, and to be close to the ones you love. For me, however, the values of being a humanitarian- remembering those people who are in need in a wide range of ways- is central to reflecting on this season which can be so materialistic, shallow and self-focused. It’s an opportunity for me to take a look around, take a breath, get some perspective, and reflect on what I can do to make the world around me a better place- starting with my family and working outwards from there.

Friend, fellow humanitarian & social media-ite @richendag, who works for INGO World Vision, posted this letter that the Grade 2 daughter of one of their supporters wrote in class for Santa Claus a couple of weeks ago.

If that’s a little unclear, it reads:

Dear Santa,

This year I have tried hard in school, helped mum clean the house tidy, and made new friends. All I really would like is the Kenya people to have a home and something to eat and drink please. Right now they are probably eating dirt. Thank you. Love from Lauren.

Nuff said really. She gets it. You go, Lauren.

Tonight, M. asked if Santa Claus was going to be visiting all the kids in the world, even the ones in places I go and visit when I travel for work. We had to tell her that no, Santa doesn’t visit all the kids in the world, that there are some kids who miss out at Christmas. At bed time, she reflected sadly that it wasn’t right that Santa didn’t visit some of the sick kids. With luck, she’s on her way to getting it too.

Merry Christmas all of you, and rich blessings to friends, family and loved ones for 2012.

 

Systems, Complexity, and Staff Realities

In a post last year (time flies) I discussed the application of a framework known as Cynefin to Humanitarian Response. The below post, which I plan to be the first of several, goes into more depth around some of the conclusions drawn from the earlier article, particularly as relates to how organizations manage their staff and operations in complex and chaotic contexts. I hope later articles will look at other aspects of complexity and aid work, and exploring more adaptive approaches to emergency management, and I look forward to discussions with various readers who, I know, are far more conversant in this stuff than I am.

I won’t go over the original framework in detail. Please see the article for more detail or if you’re not familiar with Cynefin. The framework was initially developed by Dave Snowden (@snowded) whose work and that of his associates can be followed on their blog “Cognitive Edge“

In brief, Cynefin assumes that contexts and systems fit into one of five realms- Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disordered.

In Simple systems, cause and effect are known and linked through direct, predictable causality. In Complicated systems, cause and effect again have a direct relationship, but this may be through several stages in a process which may require a level of investigation to understand. In Complex systems, cause and effect are related, but the influence of feedback mechanisms an external forcings mean that they are hard to perceive or predict. In Chaotic systems, cause and effect may not be perceptibly linked and the context is changing rapidly, with factors contributing to change often unknown and a high level of uncertainty. In Disorder, cause and effect are not linked at all.

As Humanitarian organizations, we can apply systems to contexts within these realms. However, systems must be applied to contexts in the same realm. If we apply Simple systems to a Chaotic context, or Complicated systems to a Complex context, we will end up with disfunction.

Most of the systems that we as NGOs utilize to do our work are either Simple (Finance systems, procurement processes, audit requirements) or Complicated (project designs, logical framework analysis, problem tree analysis). However the places that we work are either Complex (the majority of communities we work in in rural and urban areas) or Chaotic (rapid-onset disaster responses).

Take, for example, a Response Manager who has deployed into Port-au-Prince five days after the earthquake of January 2010. It is her job to ensure that assistance reaches affected communities as quickly as possible. To do this she requires supplies and equipment (which costs money) and people. To source supplies and equipment she must follow procurement procedures which state that 3 bids must be submitted in a transparent manner and then selected via a senior committee meeting, all of which must be documented and backed up with tender calls, invoices, receipts, bank statements and goods-received notes. To get people she must follow HR procedures which require posts to be open for a certain amount of time, a certain number of interviews, a selection panel and review process and careful documentation.

These are all Simple systems.

Her context is Chaotic. She can’t find 3 suppliers because many would-be suppliers have either been killed or injured in the earthquake, had their stores destroyed, or are looking after injured relatives. Communication networks have been destroyed so the only way to find suppliers is to travel around looking for them, but roads are blocked and there is insecurity. Her team is scattered all over the city doing assessments so there is not enough people for a committee meeting- nor is there time. The printer is not working properly because the generator keeps switching off, and they can’t buy paper yet. And there is no time to follow lengthy HR procedures because work can’t begin until they have local hires.

Our Response Manager has two options. The first is to do as the organization and its systems tell her, and comply. However if she does this, the response will choke to a halt for days, even weeks, while systems are fulfilled. There is a good chance she will not meet indicators for program success related to goods delivered and numbers of people helped, and her work will be judged a failure.

Her other option is to work around the systems. Go ahead and purchase from whichever supplier she can find. Let documentation lapse below expected standards. Hire staff who are recommended by other local staff or organizations without following full HR protocols. However if she takes this route, she will be deemed to be in breach of company policy. At best, she will have to spend time at a later date documenting her decisions and/or justifying to an audit panel why processes were flaunted, creating more work for herself and others, and in the eyes of some parts of the organization, failing in her workplace integrity. At worst she may face disciplinary action from the organization.

While this may appear to be an overly simplistic narrative (and indeed many organizations have a different set of expectations around some basic protocols such as finance and logistics, to ensure operations in emergencies can continue), the point is valid across most aid agencies. Staff are deployed into highly Complex or Chaotic situations, and are expected  largely to adhere to Simple or Complicated systems which do not match that context.

In this way we end up with a duality in how we operate and how we measure success. We talk about being ‘Humanitarian’ organizations and existing for the wellbeing of the communities we’re trying to support. But we actually measure our success through how well we comply to the systems we use to run operations- Have finance processes been followed? Have audit requirements been fulfilled? Have human resources protocols been engaged?

In the same vein: Have SMART indicators been reached? Have activities and outputs been acheived? Do gender audits measure up?

Systems that make sense in a Simple or Complicated paradigm, but which do not work in a Complex or Chaotic one.

What to do then?

Our Response Manager, as mentioned, has two choices. Which one you would pick probably depends on whether you are a field-based program manager operating largely in a Complex paradigm or an office-based grant accountant operating largely in a Simple paradigm; whether you see success as operational output, or system compliance; whether you (or your boss) understand your primary client to be the target community, an internal auditor, a donor, or a senior manager. Please note, in this comparison, there is no denegration implied in the use of the word ‘Simple’- it is an organizational context and nothing more or less in this discussion.

Most field practicioners have tales of when they or colleagues with them have ignored head-office regulations and bent or broken the rules to make something happen in the field. Generally they get away with it.

I remember working during the rainy season in a famine response as a junior field worker (but token expat) in the car with a local field manager. I took a call from our logistics officer. He could get 10,000 mosquito nets for the program today- an outlay of a very substantial amount of money- but if we didn’t make the purchase straight away, it would be four months before the stocks returned and we wouldn’t get any more before next year. What should he do?

Normal process required layers of approval for an item of this cost. The field manager and I held a brief conversation, agreed that the nets were crucial to helping slow the spread of malaria during the rainy season and which was killing children, and we then told the logistics officer to make the purchase.

It was a breach of organizational protocols. Way, way, way outside my level of authority. Or the field manager’s, for that matter. But it was also the right thing to do for the communities we were serving. Malaria wouldn’t care that we’d followed procedure.

That certainly isn’t the last time I’ve broken company policy- and I don’t expect it to be, as long as policy restricts my ability to do the work I need to.

Talking to other aid worker colleagues, I hear stories like this all the time. ‘The rules say this, but I ingored them and got the job done instead.’

Most aid workers out there reading this probably have your own stories- times you’ve broken the rules, or watched others do it. Please do share those stories in the comments section below.

I want to draw out three points from this:

1. Principle versus Protocol

An underlying tension here is that aid work is a principled industry. When I say that, I recognize the contradiction that implies. An industry is soulless- literally. It is a set of rules, regulations and institutions geared to a particular set of outcomes. It is amoral by nature.

The people who populate an industry, by contrast, are not. They are people with beliefs, experience, motivations and interests.

The people who make up the aid industry tend, on a whole, to be a principled bunch. Many work for organizations whose values they align with. Many work for less pay than they could earn elsewhere because they believe in the task they are working towards.

By operating in the manner we do, overlaying Simple-realm systems over a Complex- or Chaotic-realm situation, aid workers often have to choose between following protocol (what is the right thing to do according to Simple rules) or following principle (what is the right thing to do according to the Complex context). And, where you deal with principled people, you end up with people working around the protocols to fulfil those principles.

I’m serious. Ask any field aid worker and see how many stories they have about doing just that.

But in acknowledging this, we also have to acknowledge two truths:

a) We are making more work for our staff in the field- i.e. they have to circumnavigate the barriers we put in their way

b) Our systems are, apparently, not appropriate to context in Complex and Chaotic situations

2. Decision-Makers versus Compliers

If we put staff who are good at complying into a complex or chaotic context and give them simple or complicated systems to comply to, we will end up with a situation where the boxes are ticked, but the context is not responded to appropriately.

To avoid this, we need decision-makers who can work around compliance hurdles and still acheive organizational objectives.

And for this to happen, we need the right sort of decision-makers.

We don’t want to throw compliance issues out of the window here. These systems are there for a reason. To measure program effectiveness, or to prevent corruption, or to create accountability to donors and communities. All good things. Just done in an appropriate way.

We don’t want people who ignore the good intent behind inappropriate systems. We want people who can internalise these intentions, then base their decisions accordingly. Then we have people who don’t allow systems to prevent them from reaching the aims they’re trying to acheive, but who also ensure that the principles behind those systems are maintained. Such as transparency, integrity, accountability…

What we’re talking about is value-based decision-making. We need staff who can be trusted to make decisions based on principles (whether organizational or humanitarian- probably both).

What’s important is not the process which the decision-making follows, but the outcome. Does the decision reflect organizational and humanitarian values? Does it move the team towards acheiving goals that will benefit the communities we’re serving? If the answer to both questions is ‘yes’, does it matter whether or not the decision can be fitted into an organizational checkbox?

Of course, this is a risky proposition for an organization. I acknowledge that. And that’s why it’s so hard for organizations to move in this direction. Particularly risk-averse organizations such as NGOs, which are so dependent themselves on the trust of voluntary donors.

3. People versus Systems

What we need, as organizations, is to develop systems that are appropriate to the realms of operation. If we are operating in a Complex context, then we need to have a way of operating that is complex in nature. If we are operating in a Chaotic context, then we need to have an approach that is appropriate to chaos.

This requires a loss of direct control by removed decision-makers and those who hold political risk. It requires shifting from a mindset that risk can be controlled, to a mindset that risk can be managed, and from holding staff accountable to process, to holding them accountable to achievement. Box-tick systems assume that if the box is ticked, risk is eliminated. Chaotic realities acknowledge that risk is always present, and can never be completely discounted.

Instead of investing in systems that govern staff behaviour, we need to be investing in staff behaviour in such a way that the values that drive the systems are internalized. We’re talking about prioritizing behaviour over process. Values over procedures. People over systems.

The Red Cross Code of Conduct outlines 10 key values that agencies operating in humanitarian emergencies should exhibit. It’s very difficult to put measurements around these. You can try. But how do you truly put a numerical value around something like ‘impartiality’? And if you try, how do you avoid forcing frontline aid workers from having to jump through a series of organizational hoops to demonstrate on paper that they are running operations impartially, rather than just trusting them to be impartial? And if you do create such a system, how do you avoid the reality that some people will still flaunt it for their own ends and twist the system to only appear impartial? And how do you avoid adding the organizational cost and burden of subsequently measuring, auditing and reporting on that impartiality? And when you’ve successfully assured impartiality across all your programs, is it now time to do it with neutrality, accountability, dignity, respect, and a host of other values that we should all be abiding to?

Or should we be identifying staff who, by their actions, we already acknowledge as having strong impartiality in how they operate? Should we be trusting that, if we put person X into a relief response, she will by very nature strive for impartiality in her program? What does that cost an organization by comparison? Some risk? Sure. But it results in a lighter, freer response and a happier staff member who isn’t wasting time on internal protocols, who can instead focus on the complexity or chaos at hand and try and make a difference.

I close with the words of a friend on this topic, who summarizes far more succinctly than I can:

“It’s inappropriate to put a staff  member into a context, tell her to manage or lead, then prescribe how she must do-so. That assumes a consistency in the context which is not evident in Complex & Chaotic contexts. This results in wasted effort focused on system design which could and should be invested in staff development instead.”

We talked earlier about organizations which have exceptions for some of their systems for emergency contexts. This can shift systems from being simple to complicated, and even complex at times. Managing this shift can itself be challenging in organizations where staff are used to more rigid ways of operating. If staff are used to the perceived ‘safety’ in complying to a set of simple systems (assumption: risk can be controlled), then getting them to adopt a more complex or chaotic form of operating (principled action, decisions based on gut reaction, trust) can be very difficult.

This is where organizations need to do three things:

1. Ensure they have the right people in the right places. People who have appropriate experience, and appropriate training. Ensuring staff are trained in issues such as ethical decision-making and principled action (not just ‘these are the decisions that we make’ but also ‘this is the reason for those decisions’) is central to this. And here we’re not just talking about ‘training’ as a way of telling people what to do, but ‘developing’ staff, enabling them to get the experience they need so that they understand inherently how to apply their knowledge in a given context: that is, wisdom.

2. Invest in trust- trust by removed political risk-holders in their frontline operations staff, and trust by junior staff in on-the-ground leaders who may appear to flaunt ‘normal’ business practices to fit an evolving context.

3. Reconsider their notions of success in an operating environment. While Simple and Complicated realms assume success looks like ticked boxes and process-compliant action, Complex and Chaotic realms base success on change achieved- a results-based measure increasingly regardless of the process used to achieve that change (within the confines of the principles and ethos that guide the organization’s actions providing boundary conditions).

This conversation’s only just beginning. I’ve lots more to say on the matter- as do lots of others- and will hopefully have the space to do so over the coming weeks. Stay tuned. And I’d love to hear your feedback. As with any article of this nature, I can only present a narrow slice of what there is to say, and friends who have seen this article have already identified some room for development and some holes to plug, so input is most welcome.

Aid workers, share your stories: Please tell us about times you’ve had to work around rules to get the job done when you’ve been operating in the field.

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 5: Count the Cost

This is the last in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality. The forth is Where Do You Fit?

Following this post is a non-exhaustive list of web-based resources you may find helpful.

If it seems like I’m being a bit heavy on this profession so far, that’s because I’ve seen my fair share of damaged souls wandering along this particular career path. I’ve come close to the edge myself on more than one occasion, and would like to see fewer, rather than more, dysfunctional individuals working on field postings.

And with that said, hold on to your hats…

Aid work is an intoxicating, exciting and richly rewarding career. When it works. Often it doesn’t. Often things like politics, corruption, violence, interpersonal relationships, or sheer incompetence means that things fall apart. Things, like projects designed to save peoples lives. This can shake the strongest of people. When people are driven by values and a belief in the greater good of humankind, watching this sort of failure can leave them deeply wounded. I’ve known of it costing people their faith in humanity and in God. I’ve seen my fair share of cynics, and periodically count myself among them (though I still find myself drawn back, like a moth to a candle, to the hope that we can actually do something about this broken world). People become isolated. Some drop into depression.

They say three types of people are drawn to aid work. Missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits. Humour aside, it’s a fair description. You find a disproportionate number of people driven by values, by their thirst for experience or money, or people who just don’t know how to function in any other environment.

This can make the aid environment quite a dysfunctional one. Exotic, addictive, wonderfully unique, and utterly unhealthy. People jump from one emergency program to the next like it’s going out of fashion (Port-au-Prince? Ugh, that’s so 2010. It’s all Horn of Africa now darling.) They do the same with friendships, with relationships, with lovers. Work hard, play hard is the motto most employ when in the field. This might be the house-party scene, with drink or pills optional but frequently endorsed extras. It might be adrenaline sports. It might be risky travel options. Regardless, this line of work attracts the sort of person who thrives on an element of risk in most things they do. Not always the best approach to life.

I make all these statements with a healthy level of self-awareness.

Aid workers expose themselves to all manner of stresses. Some of us wander into life-threatening situations, which may sound great recanted in cavalier fashion over a couple of local brews, but in fact are anything but when you’re actually in them. Even those that don’t bear direct witness to terrible events are usually indirectly exposed to them on a routine basis. Reports suggest that above all of this, the single biggest cause of stress to aid workers is organizational dysfunction, where the pressures of a poorly managed response in a highly value-driven culture can be devastating, psychologically speaking.

These pressures lead to a whole range of stress reactions on the brain. I won’t go into too much detail, but this regular exposure to steady stress, which may or may not be coupled with repeated exposure to critical incident stress, results in physical changes to the makeup of the brain which cause long-term and in some cases irrepairable damage.

A lot of aid workers see psychologists (I am one). A lot more who don’t should.

The mobile and uncertain life of an aid worker takes a huge toll on the personal life. While the constant changing from one emergency-focused community to the next can be a lot of fun, it also means that forming deep, meaningful and stable relationships over time is very difficult. You meet a lot of single aid workers. You meet a lot of divorced aid workers. You meet a lot of aid workers who have significant marital problems, or who are disconnected from their children. And if you hang around long enough, you hear plenty of stories of married aid workers sleeping around on assignment too.

Even if that’s not the way you roll, finding and maintaining a relationship to a life partner is a challenge in this line of work. For all the negative stories I hear above, I also know plenty of men and women who make it work. But I’ll wager that they work at it a lot harder and more deliberately than their peers who don’t jet around the world at the drop of a seismograph.

It’s not just spouse and children you suffer disconnection from. Whether married or single, connecting to a stable group of friends in your home community becomes difficult as well. With you constantly on the move, you’ll find that most relationships start to slip, and you have to work hard to stay in touch with those you care about. It’s not uncommon to find that people simply stop inviting you to events because they never know when you’re around, or they’re tired of hearing you say that you’ll be overseas that weekend. I’ve found this has been one of my biggest struggles over the years, and I’ve spent long periods of time back at my home base feeling restless and lonely, struggling to maintain social networks, and wishing for my next overseas ‘fix’ instead- which ends up being just as lonely, in the long run.

If you’ve just read through the post this far and gone, “Heh heh, that sounds way cool,”, then you can sod off. Seriously. Stay at home. There are enough burned-out, dysfunctional and anti-social relief junkies out there. Some of them do a decent job at running a relief program, but most are a liability to themselves, and therefore to others as well. We have all of those we need. Don’t become another one.

If you’ve gotten this far and admitted, “You know what, that’s way more than I’m ready to cope with right now,” then no worries. Aid work isn’t for everyone. There are a zillion ways to help people in need in your local community, and there’s a lot of very wise argument that would say your efforts are best placed helping there anyway. It’s great that you care about the world enough to look into aid work, and make sure to keep connected to what’s happening in the world around us. Figure out the way you feel you’re best geared to give, then go do it.

If on the other hand you thought to yourself, “Man, I need to figure out a way to maintain my values in the face of contradicting experiences; I need to develop some good solid coping strategies that are going to hold me together when the pressure’s on; I need to really work on maintaining my relationships with the people in my life I care about if I’m going to do this work,” then congratulations. You may be ready to think about that career change after all.

I reiterate: I’m not saying aid work sucks. I’m not saying you’re destined to become a burned-out loner lurking in third-world bars preying on local prostitutes (though observational evidence suggests that if you’re going to become an aid worker, that’s still well within the realms of statistical probability…). Aid work is rewarding. If you take the effort to get yourself set up properly, work with a reputable agency, and work dilligently to minimize harm and improve the quality of assistance given to people in need, you can accomplish great things.

But if you walk into this line of work without the right mindset, you’re in trouble. You need to know what you’re getting yourself into. You need to understand that the aid industry is a profession, not just a hobby. You need to invest in getting the right set of skills, sufficient experience, and ensuring that your personality is going to gel with this line of work. You need to think through what it is you’re wanting to contribute to this line of work. And if you’re really serious about it, you need to have a plan to mitigate the highly destructive side-effects of the aid worker lifestyle.

***

This isn’t a comprehensive solution to becoming an aid worker. It is a handful of insights that I, as a professional aid worker, want to share with the significant number among you who are interested in this line of work and want to understand what it involves.

I know there are plenty of other aid workers out there who have other things they could add to this series, and possibly some varying opinions on some of what I’ve said. I’d welcome any comments, additions or disagreements you might have. Many of you may have specific resources that might help people interested in becoming aid workers find a starting point or move themselves ahead a little.

And to those of you out there who are seriously thinking about it, feel free to ask any more specific questions you might have that aren’t addressed here, and I’ll see if I can answer them. There are plenty of other very qualified, experienced and articulate aid workers who make themselves accessible via social media and the blogosphere, so do check out the people I’m interacting with on Twitter, follow them, and see what they have to say too.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace.

-MA

Resources:

Aid Workers

Tales From The Hood has a ream of material that catalogues, among other things, the perils of being an aid worker and some of the internal battles that this entails, in a highly entertaining, readable and often poignant style. His audience frequently includes students and would-be aid workers, and his blog should be required reading for anybody interested in the profession. He posted a couple of pieces specifically for students looking to become aid workers, which you can find here and here as a starting point.

Alanna Shaikh, another top-notch aid blogger, has a section of her home page dedicated to Jobs resources for wannabe aid workers (check the right hand column a few sections down)- I’ve linked a couple of them below. For two dollars a month you can subscribe to her newsletter ‘International Development Careers List‘ and get regular information and feedback on how to work in the aid industry.

Saundra, who runs Good Intentions Are Not Enough, has a page similarly dedicated to job resources, including a list of websites worth checking out and monitoring for job vacancies.

Web

A detailed pamphlet on how to find your first job as an aid worker can be found on Eldis, “Better Ways to find Humanitarian Employment“. Thanks to Alanna Shaikh for providing this link, and the next, on Change.org entitled “Finding a Job Overseas“.

Jobs4Development is another good gateway site to start browsing what’s out there.

Aid Agencies

Most agencies have clear links on their websites to where job availabilities can be browsed, although note that most of these are unlikely to be entry-level. Many NGOs have graduate or internship programs which enable young would-be aid professionals to get sector and field experience, but they are generally highly competitive and open to just a handful of applicants a year. The list below is not by any means exhaustive. There are hundreds of reputable agencies you could choose out there.

ADRA

CARE

MSF

Oxfam

Save the Children

UN Careers Portal

UN Volunteers

World Vision

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 4. Where Do You Fit?

This is the fourth in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality.

International NGOs are largely varied organizations, many of which are themselves large with extensively varied staff profiles.

The types of people who work in them often have vastly different skill sets and very different reasons for wanting to be there. Some are motivated by faith, others by guilt, others by experientialism, others (misguided fools) by money.

Think about how your vision, motivation and skillset would match with a particular organization.

First off, you have different types of organizations in the humantarian sector. You have development NGOs whose focus is on more stable context and looks at how to help alleviate structural poverty at a community level over many years. Their mandate differs from frontline aid agencies who work in unstable and often dangerous frontline conflict and disaster environments offering lifesaving assistance.

Some NGOs offer practical assistance- the delivery of goods and services directly to communities affected. Others offer less tangible support- focusing on human rights issues or policy change and development.

Some agencies have a very broad mandate, covering multiple sectors and who try and be everything to everyone. Others are highly specialised, and offer only one or two types of activitiy to their beneficiaries- water sources, perhaps, or emergency medical care. Still others are support agencies, which might offer services to other NGOs, such as logistics support, training or surge capacity. Some are local, or grassroots, agencies, with a very limited local mandate and extremely rooted in the communities which they serve. Some organizations don’t implement directly, but identify and work through partner agencies on the ground with whom they have relationships.

Some organizations are motivated by faith and carry out overt prosletysation as a part of their mission. Others are extremely secular and don’t appreciate any expression of religious identity.

There are not-for-profits, private development consultancies , fundraising and donor bodies, for-profit development contractors, corporations with corporate social responsibility programs. There are NGOs, government aid programs, UN organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement.

There are- quite literally- thousands of aid agencies out there of varying kinds. I can’t even begin to compile a list here- that’s where your own research has to begin, guided by your own interest and vision in this department- and what you feel you have to offer.

Think about where you fit and what you’re wanting to give. If you’re motivated by your faith, you may be inclined to source a faith-based organization or even a missionary organization. If you’ve got fifteen years professional experience as a trauma surgeon, then a frontline medical NGO could be up your street. If you’re trained as an agronomist and have a vision to see crop yields increase in marginal farming areas, you’re probably after a development organization with a mandate for food security.

Aid agencies, like any other organization out there, employ accountants, administrative staff, auditors, lawyers, HR personnel, media officers, marketers, communicators, IT gurus, managers and all manner of other support functions as well. Most of these posts are at headquarters level. Many exist at the field level as well, although they may well be filled by local staff (as they should be in most circumstances). So don’t let the fact that you don’t have training or experience in third world development stop you from commencing a career in aid work if that’s a shift you want to take. And don’t let the fact that you’re terrified of large spiders, get plane sick, and break out in a heat rash every time you look at a postcard with palm trees stop you from fulfilling your dream of contributing to the alleviation of poverty. Many of these roles never require you to leave your own suburb, and are little different in their accessibility than other similar roles in the for-profit corporate world.

Where you fit is going to be some combination of your personal vision, your experience and skillset, and your personality, the latter three discussed in my last post in this series. You alone are going to be best suited to decide on the starting-point for that journey, and from there see where you get to.

***

Two things to think about here with respect to selecting an organization. First, if your motivation is grounded in the genuine desire to help the less fortunate (and I hope that, by and large, it is), then please make sure you offer your time and services to an organization that takes these things seriously. As I’ve talked about earlier, there is a long list of professional standards and codes that aid organizations should embed their work in. Ensure that your organization takes these things seriously. A good starting point is ensuring that it has adopted the Red Cross Code of Conduct. Another, for your own sake, is that it adheres to the principles of People in Aid. The principle here is, do no harm. If this is an NGO that doesn’t take these things seriously and behaves unprofessionally, not only does this cast other NGOs into disrepute, but stands a very real risk of causing harm to the people it’s trying to help.

Professional standards alone aren’t the be-all and end-all of aid work, nor are they enough to guarantee good outcomes or avoid failures. But agencies which flaunt them have a much higher likelihood of creating harm, not good.

In the same vein, think very carefully before investing yourself in a startup NGO (or, indeed, in starting your own NGO). This is something that happens particularly around large disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake. People, often motivated by a genuine desire to help, look at the situation and figure, ‘Hey, I can do something to help there’. Then they grab a suitcase full of money, get on a plane, and start running around the streets of whatever afflicted country has taken their fancy spreading their do-goodness.

Every NGO has its starting point, and I’m not going to say that these (hopefully) well-meaning projects are universally awful. But generally, when you take somebody who has limited or no knowledge or experience of working in a disaster zone, they’re probably going to make mistakes. The sort of mistakes that more established organizations have made in the past and have measures in place to avoid. It’s a case of not knowing what they don’t know. They make coordination very difficult, they have little or no knowledge of international standards, and when they do a poor job, they cause headaches for other organizations.

I’m sure you’ll be able to find me examples of Mom & Pop NGOs which have accomplished great things in Port-au-Prince. That’s great. There were around 10,000 NGOs that registered to work in Haiti following the earthquake. You show me those examples, and I’ll ask you about the other 9,820 startups that descended en-masse into the chaos in January 2010.

As a professional aid worker (and knowing I speak for hundreds of other professional aid workers) I ask you to consider very carefully before getting involved with that particular aspect of the humanitarian industry. This has been discussed ad nauseum in other portions of the aid blogosphere, so I won’t go into further detail here. It’s not always a popular line to criticise peoples’ good intentions, but sometimes these things have to be said.

If I haven’t offended, disillusioned or generally knocked the stuffing out of you yet, check out Part 5 of this series, Counting the Cost.

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 3. Experience, Education and Personality

This is the third in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession.

There are a lot of people wanting to be aid workers. Far and away the most popular roles are those that are based out of western countries but with a healthy dose of travel. For example, in my own office, when we have a role such as mine come up, we generally have between one and two hundred applicants per position. This number tapers off a lot when we start hiring for full-time field positions, but that’s because the hiring criteria are a lot tougher.

In brief, aid agencies are looking for a mix of appropriate skills, relevant experience, and the right personality. It’s a bit of a nebulous mix and there’s no magic formula. However, if you’re lacking one of these three, you’re really going to struggle to get employed by an NGO.

a) Skills and Education

Once upon a time, people from a range of backgrounds could get sent to the field with charity groups. Today, NGOs are much more specific about the sorts of educational backgrounds. The room for vocational skills is relatively small now, as most skilled jobsets can be sourced locally (see above).

NGOs will generally be looking for a graduate degree of some sort that demonstrates that an applicant has a general overview of developing country contexts. This covers a pretty wide range of options and could be a degree in development studies, in economic development, in sociology or in demographics, as a handful of examples. NGOs want to know that you understand the implications of working in developing countries- fundamental principles such as participation, dependency, risk management, and a generalist’s knowledge of less developed countries.

For more technical skillsets and people interested in technical field work, there’s also a broad range of options. For those interested in long-term development work, things like agronomy, agriculture, economics and public health are all relevant degrees. Medical doctors and nurses, logisticians, civil engineers and nutrition specialists can all find technical roles in an emergency response team.

This sort of degree will not get you in the door. Most applicants will have this sort of educational background, and you not only won’t stand out, but will probably be surpassed by the very high number of people with two or more degrees- often a Bachelors and a Masters, and often one generalist degree with a second more specialised qualification.

An additional note for westerners looking for overseas roles: you’re also competing with expatriates from non-western countries. As global education levels rise, more and more people from countries that were once net receivers of expatriate aid workers are now net givers. East Africa and India both produce a huge portion of many NGOs’ expatriates. And not are they often willing to work for lower salaries than western expatriates, but they are often older, with more developed skillsets, more field experience, and a better knowledge of working in non-western cultural contexts, all making them very attractive as employees. So if you’re wanting to work for an international NGO as an expatriate, you really have to think very carefully about what it is that you have to offer over a graduate from the University of Nairobi with fifteen years of relevant experience.

b) Experience

Education alone is probably not going to get you in the door, but needs to be balanced with experience. There is a bit of a trade-off that happens here. People with the right field experience can often get in on that merit, even if they lack some educational qualifications (although most will find it more of a struggle to climb the career ladder in this instance, and I know a lot of people with 10 or more years of aid experience who are now doing part-time or distance learning to get a masters degree and make them more promotable). Likewise, younger hopefuls with limited field experience but the right attitude and a couple of solid degrees can get over the threshold and be given a shot at an NGO posting.

Experience is the one that gets most young would-be aid workers most frustrated. “How do I get the necessary experience to work with an NGO if no NGO will hire me until I have experience?”

I sympathise. I was in the same boat for a while too.

The flip-side, of course, is that from the perspective of an aid agency, the very last thing they want to do is send some untested junior staffer into a highly complex and possibly dangerous emergency response where mistakes cost lives, just to see whether they’re made of the right stuff. They want to have some assurance that this individual is going to be able to work in the team. Hence wanting to see experience.

For some NGOs, ‘experience’ doesn’t have to mean working in developing countries. If you have ten years of professional experience, this is going to count for something if you have a skill-set relevant to the sector. Medical NGOs, for example, may well send doctors and nurses to the front lines if they have a number of years demonstrated work in an emergency room. Likewise logisticians have valuable skillsets that are quite easily transfered. Men and women with military service can find that they slot quite easily into certain NGO roles- although not always with such ease into NGO culture.

Many smaller NGOs will be less choosy about the level of experience they expect from applicants. If they lack the budgets that larger agencies offer, they will be receiving fewer top-level candidates, and the competition for roles will be less fierce. However, remember that there are still a LOT of people chasing a small number of roles. It’s also worth ensuring that the organization offers the support you as a newbie need. Being chucked off the deep end into an unfamiliar context without the appropriate experience and support can be a great learning opportunity. Or it can wreck your career, and possibly your mental health in the process.

Local or grass-roots NGOs in-country are often the best way in. Of all the NGO types out there, not only will they likely be the least choosy in terms of qualifications (often only able to pay local wages, if that) but as a westerner, you will probably actually have something significant to offer that is different to the rest of their staff- for example, your language skills, your knowledge of donor cultures, your ability to network with other expatriates at coordination meetings, and an external perspective. Significant work with local NGOs will definitely start clocking up points on the experience meter, and will also provide some great learning opportunities and demonstrate cross-cultural skills. And if you’re sitting in-country with a local NGO, you have the opportunity to network with other larger agencies if you so wish. You’re much more likely to build the necessary relationships to get in to an NGO if you’re based out of Nairobi or Lusaka than you will in Toronto or Phoenix.

A respectful little note here. Some of what might pass for ‘experience’ of third world countries around the college bar won’t actually slice the Dijon where aid agencies are concerned. The three-week missions trip you took to Tijuana when you were 17, that voluntourism project at the Cambodian orphanage, or the gap-year you spent backpacking around South America where you worked for 2 months at a hostel in Cusco may all be great experiences which changed your life and from which you draw a lot of personal satisfaction, and that’s great. However if they’re the only thing on your resume, don’t expect to stand out from the pack, and don’t expect the HR staff to get too excited.

c) Personality

In addition to education and experience, you also need to have the right personality. Aid work is a highly stressful profession, and it brings out the very best and the very worst in peoples’ tempraments. Team leaders want to know that the staff they’re deploying are going to be able to work in that environment, and not just make more work for the rest of the team who have to tiptoe around their dysfunction.

This aspect is a little harder to quantify, and can be quite subjective. The je ne sais quoi of the aid world.

As a rule, though, when it comes to this side of things, I can ask myself, who would I want next to me when the proverbial is hitting the spinny thing? When I look at the context I described above (chaotic, rapidly changing, potentially dangerous, highly stressful, professionally rigorous), what characteristics are going to help somebody perform as part of a team?

In fact, one of the first things most aid workers (myself included) would put on that list would be ‘a good sense of humour’. Beyond that: adaptable, flexible, quick to learn new things, strong critical analysis skills, independant but also a good team player, good communicator, able to take and manage risks, demonstrated ability to work in a cross-cultural team, ability to manage stress over a prolonged period of time…

And more.

These aren’t the characteristics you find in every expat aid worker. They are ones you find in most of the good aid workers however. And they’re the ones I’d be looking for in any aid worker I’d want to take with me into an emergency response.

If you reckon you do a good job hitting a good balance of education, experience and personality, then think about how you can demonstrate these things to an NGO on your CV and in an interview. If you reckon there are some gaps, are they gaps that can be filled (e.g. by a graduate degree, a couple of years spent working with a grass-roots NGO in South Asia, the surgical implantation of a sense of humour…)?

There’s no hard and fast rule. You can tick all these boxes and still not get in the door with the NGO of your choice, because it’s a highly competitive sector and many others also have these criteria met. You can also miss out on some of them and still get yourself a position- being the right person at the right time to the right organization. But the above list should give you a starting point for what you should be presenting to an HR officer if you’re looking for a job with an NGO.

To be the right person at the right time for the right organization, consider what you actually want to do and read on with Part 4 of this series.

NB: For those wondering about my own track into the humanitarian world (and note this is now nearly 10 years ago, when the industry was at a much earlier stage of professionalisation):

I grew up overseas in the UN system, with a parent working for a UN humanitarian organization and me attending an international school. By the time I interviewed for my first NGO role, I had lived in 6 different countries and visited about 25. I was bilingual (French/English) with a decent grasp of Spanish, and had a lifetime of demonstrated cross-cultural communication and adaptability. I had a Bachelor’s degree in social science (with units focusing on issues in developing countries, on disasters, and on risk management) and a Masters degree in development and the environment, both from a respected University. I had spent time working with projects in a couple of different countries, one as a volunteer and one as part of my Masters thesis.

In all, I was definitely light-on in the experience side of things, but I was also one of the lucky ones who happened to show up on the doormat at just the right time. I also had a cultural/experiential background (through no skill of my own) that recommended me to this line of work. I got myself a desk-job which was largely project paperwork, and from there took several other office jobs over the next year and a half. Since then, I’ve had a bunch of different jobs, between which have taken me to a further 25-or-so countries and dozens of humanitarian projects. I consider myself a humanitarian professional and expect this line of work to be a part of my career for many years to come. It is also something that, despite it’s regular and often deep frustrations, is something I love doing and find richly satisfying (sometimes perversely-so).

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 2. Aid Work is a Profession

This is the second in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. Read the first, Know What You’re Getting Into.

Twenty years ago, you could have a pulse and some good intentions, and you could get youself shipped off to almost any war-zone in the world as an aid worker.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

While aid work is a relatively new profession (when compared to such golden oldies as politics or prostitution), it has been around for more than fifty years, and is caged in a growing body of professional standards and expectations which are continuing to develop.

As well as the core values which the aid community is expected to adhere to, there are the professional standards by which the work we do is judged. Some of these are sector specific (Sphere) while others are generic, cross-cutting or industry-wide, such as protection standards, or accountability to communities.

Aid work is a highly complex job. It involves being able to work to these professional standards, applying them in accordance with humanitarian principles, in a rapidly-changing and potentially chaotic or dangerous environment, with poor information about events or impact, in a time-critical manner, and often with limited resources available.

As such, the sorts of people that aid agencies are looking for are the sorts of people who can function well in these environments. Aid agencies aren’t looking for casual volunteers, or for well-meaning individuals whose skill-sets don’t add anything to the organization’s work, or for people who want to take a year out from their career or studies while they look for meaning in their life. They’re looking for dedicated professionals who have taken the time to learn the skills and soak in the body of knowledge that accompanies the sector.

Please think of aid work as you would any other professional sector. You would not want to go to the dentist with a cavity only to find that he had taken out time from her career as a lawyer three months ago and decided she’d try her hand at pulling teeth instead, which had always been a hobby of hers. You would not expect to walk into a bank without qualifications or experience and be offended when the manager turned you away despite your passion for balancing accounts. And you would be horrified to learn that your local emergency room was staffed by enthusiastic community volunteers.

In the aid industry (and yes, it is an industry) we deal with meeting the critical needs of hundreds of thousands of people at a time. If we get it right, we can prevent thousands of deaths. If we get it wrong, thousands can die. Please don’t think that because you watch world events on the news and have a strong feeling about what’s happening, that that qualifies you for aid work. The aid industry is profession, because it’s highly complex, and when people make bad decisions, even with the best of intentions, the ramifications can be terrible.

One thing that really upsets aid workers and HR staff is people who pop up when a huge emergency breaks, wanting to be an aid worker and sent to whichever location happens to be making dramatic and heart-wrenching headlines this week. You may think this is an excellent time to get sent to the field. The rest of us think this is a terrible time.

Firstly, very few reputable aid agencies will send volunteers to the field. Even to a stable context you won’t find that many opportunities to go outside the handful of volunteer-oriented organizations such as Peace Corps, Australian Volunteers or VSO, and of course UN Volunteers. Don’t offer, and if you don’t get a reply from us please don’t be offended, we simply don’t have time to turn down all the offers of well-meaning people wanting to get sent overseas in the midst of a crisis which has other priorities to manage.

Secondly, the onset of an emergency is not the right time to decide you want a career change. If you’ve been thinking about changing careers to be an aid worker (and I assume at some stage that’s the case if you’re reading this blog) that’s great! Make some structural decisions in your life, get some degrees and experience, then come back when you have what we need. If you show up at our door three days after a huge disaster saying you want to be an aid worker, we will assume that this is a flash-in-the-pan emotional response and not take you seriously. If you go out there and get yourself the right qualifications and experience, then come back to us, there are always places we can use you. They may not be in the headlines right now, but I assure you, there’s no shortage of humanitarian need worldwide, nor will there be any time soon.

Without wanting to sound harsh, I want to make something really clear. If you’re showing up full of good intentions but not a whole lot of professional backing, we don’t actually need you. When there’s a shortage of aid workers on the ground, it’s not a shortage of warm bodies that we’re talking about. We need the right person for whatever role it is we’re trying to fill. It might be a logistician. It might be an experienced operations manager with fifteen years of disaster relief experience. But it certainly isn’t somebody who means really well and who once took a vacation to Nicaragua.

I won’t belabour the point. This has been talked about plenty of places elsewhere. To understand more on why your desire to do good doesn’t necessarily equate to improving the plight of the poor and needy, please spend some time looking at the blog “Good Intentions are Not Enough” (start here, here and here).

I also recommend three books to anybody wanting to start off in the aid world as essential background reading to understanding some of the ways in which aid workers have, despite good intentions, ended up solving nothing and in some cases making bad situations worse.

War Hospital, by Sheri Fink- a staggering, chilling narrative of international intervention failing to prevent the massacre of Srebrenica.

Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins- the story of an idealistic but misguided young aid worker in Southern Sudan in the 80s and 90s.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch- a series of accounts written of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, highlighting some of the breathtaking failures of the international community

To understand more about what we are looking for and the sort of professionalism the aid industry embraces, please read Part 3 of this series, coming up.