Following on the heels of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, the editorial in The Lancet of January 23 is headlined “Growth of aid and the decline of humanitarianism”.  It acknowledges that aid agencies and humanitarian organizations “do exceptional work in difficult circumstances”.  But the editorial also asserts that the aid sector, now “an industry in its own right”, has “largely escaped public scrutiny”. 

The Lancet goes on to state that large aid organizations, in particular, have taken on the “unsavory characteristics” of many big corporations.  They can be “polluted” with internal power politics, “obsessed” with raising money, and pursue media coverage as an “end in itself”.  Worst of all, the editorial claims that relief efforts in the field are “sometimes competitive” to the detriment of collaboration that could better serve people in need.

While The Lancet offers no specific evidence for any of these allegations, I suspect that one could find instances in which all organizations of any appreciable size lose their way and need to be exposed and reprimanded.  Humanitarian NGOs should be scrutinized by outsiders, who have a right to expect them to be driven first and foremost to save lives and relieve suffering and to pursue those purposes in accord with such humanitarian principles as independence and impartiality. 

Like The Lancet, I find the competitiveness among some NGOs for the media limelight and donor contributions in the midst of humanitarian crises to be unsavory.  But The Lancet and other watch dogs need to understand that NGOs must raise money to pay for their life-saving services.  And media access has helped NGOs to transmit messages about the importance of donors giving cash rather than used clothes and other supplies that clog airports.  Media access has also helped NGOs to inform the public about the special vulnerability of poor people to so-called “natural” disasters and the need ultimately to reduce poverty if the human toll of earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis is to be reduced.

Whether or not the allegations in The Lancet are well founded, I would be delighted if the response to the Haitian disaster prompted some soul-searching among NGOs that leads to serious exploration in the U.S. of a joint inter-agency appeal for private fundraising for major emergencies (in the spirit of the Disasters Emergency Committee, better known as the DEC, in the U.K.).  When a major emergency strikes, it should be easier for people who are not already donors to a particular NGO to give with confidence, without having to sort through a multitude of organizations with shared missions. 

Even more crucial, it is past time for NGOs with overlapping missions to engage in more collaborative programming in vulnerable countries not only to respond to humanitarian emergencies, as they often do, but also to prevent them. 

Peter D. Bell is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.

Many European countries and others like Japan, Australia, and Canada have what are termed “joint appeals,” which promote one unified fundraising campaign for a particular emergency and then share the proceeds among a consortium of organizations. A donor makes a contribution to one place, secure in the knowledge that she is supporting organizations with the capacity to respond effectively and that those organizations are cooperating – not competing – for gifts.  The donor can be confident that her gift will be deployed fairly, in accord with pre-agreed criteria.  For the donor, the focus is on efficiency rather than choice.

The Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK is the oldest and arguably most successful of the joint appeals. Through significant partnerships with the BBC, ITV, and British Telecom, the DEC has become a known and trusted brand in the UK. It has raised approximately $750 million since 2004 just for the southeast Asia tsunami.

There have been serious conversations within the NGO community about creating something similar in the U.S., but the challenges are compounded by the larger number of NGOs that provide international relief and our fragmented media market. Most joint appeals consist of no more than a dozen organizations, making it reasonable to manage governance and fund allocations.  The mechanics and politics of who’s in, who’s out, by what standards, and how to share the money get complicated when 30-40 organizations might stake a reasonable claim.

Most joint appeals also have one or two media companies that provide instant access to the majority of their public. In the U.S., four (five?) national networks and myriad cable channels make it difficult to line up enough media support to ensure it would be value-added – and that’s just television.

There is no hard research that shows U.S. donors would give up choice to reward cooperation and efficiency in a crisis situation, though the Bush-Clinton fund raising in the wake of hurricane Katrina (more on that in the next post) seems to support the notion. But it’s an attractive proposition to have a centralized mechanism, with high levels of transparency and accountability for the use of funds and with the capacity to distribute the money quickly to organizations with the capacity and reach to provide relief effectively. This would seem advantageous to having multiple companies like Google choose and promote their own recommendations, which – while providing a bit more direction – doesn’t necessarily make donors’ choices easier, especially if different companies are recommending different organizations.

NGOs have been working to coordinate the delivery of their services on the ground and develop best practices through efforts like the Emergency Capacity-Building Project. Working together on fund raising would bring them together on the other side of the proverbial “coin.”