India tsunami response tests international NGOs

Anna Jefferys of Save the Children UK says the challenge for international non-governmental organisations responding to the tsunami in India is figuring out how to fit themselves into the bigger aid puzzle.

The most critical immediate challenge facing international NGOs (INGOs) responding to the effects of the tsunami in India is coordinating their activities with other relief players.

With high numbers of national and international NGOs - 370 and counting - sporting unprecedented levels of funding, coordination is bound to be complicated.

It hasn't been easy for INGOs to find their niche in light of the Indian government's strong capacity and the extensive efforts of powerful and proactive civil society groups, but gradually their role is starting to take shape.

Immediately after the tsunami, the Indian government announced that, as a donor nation itself, it had no need of international donors to commit funds to relief efforts in southern India, though it later amended this to welcome aid aimed at longer-term projects.

This, in a sense, gave the bulk of INGOs the freedom to bypass immediate relief and focus on planning a longer-term response, while filling in delivery gaps from the government operation.

Some agencies, for instance, supplemented government rations of food, equipment and clothing. Others focused specifically on delivering child-focused relief.

But identifying and filling gaps in a coordinated fashion was difficult when working alongside a government that wanted to control and run the relief process but was not setting up the information-sharing mechanisms that are key to making this work.

CIVIL SOCIETY NETWORKS
Meanwhile, INGOs have struggled to identify their role amidst the powerful network of civil society organisations - from volunteer groups to established unions - that are uniting to shape the relief and rehabilitation process.

At the last civil society coordination meeting that I attended - a meeting set up by civil society representatives to challenge the Tamil Nadu government's shelter rehabilitation policy - there were over 300 participants.

They included representatives from the fisherman and agriculturist unions, human rights and child rights groups, numerous national and local NGOs, engineers, architects, land-reform lawyers, software specialists and scores of volunteers from all over the country.

Many NGOs have sent staff from Gujarat to lend expertise and try to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated. In Nagipattanum, the hardest hit district in Tamil Nadu with over 6,000 reported deaths, 370 NGOs have now registered with the NGO coordination cell.

In one hour alone I witnessed four NGOs register - a Delhi-based NGO that has been providing meals to thousands of volunteers, a group of engineers offering dredging equipment for agricultural land, a partnership of architects and child protection specialists keen to ensure orphaned children are kept in their communities.

Saji Thomas, programme coordinator for Save the Children, noted the different challenges that this responses has highlighted.

"Coordination in Gujarat was much easier - there were far fewer agencies involved, and UNDP took on the immediate coordination role," he said. "Here because of the media, there has been a huge local response, which is commendable, but has made things more complicated."

LACK OF LEADERSHIP
One of the things that has made this so hard is the lack of leadership in the coordination process, meaning different coordination bodies spring up each week, each with overlapping remits.

The government is engaged in some, the United Nations is catalysing others. Meanwhile, INGOs are trying to shape coordination in specific sectors such as children or shelter. Local organisations such as the Bhoomika Trust have initiated information-sharing networks and NGO-INGO coordination cells continue to be formed at the district level.

The phrase "Nagipattinam cell" is held up as an example of excellent coordination at meetings all over southern India, and other districts in Tamil Nadu are busily trying to replicate its model.

This is partly because it is so grassroots based and focuses on ensuring information from villagers about their needs reaches those who can address these needs.

For instance, a village coordination group has been set up whereby volunteers daily gather information from each of the affected villages, which they transmit to the government district relief officer each day via the coordination cell.

Meanwhile, sectoral coordination groups in and around Nagiapatinam were set up at the early stages of the process. These groups go beyond coordination - they are actively engaged in collectively shaping government policy.

To take one example, the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies, has been mobilising fishing communities all along the coast to collectively position their response to the government's housing policy, identifying representatives to launch sustained attacks on proposed government rehousing plans.

LESSONS LEARNED
So what is the role of international NGOs in this response environment?
Firstly, we must apply some of the lessons learnt over the past decade of humanitarian response - notably, the value of consultation.

Unless beneficiaries actively participate in shaping the rehabilitation response, it will be irrelevant and ineffectual. We can only do this by building up and strengthening our partnerships with effective national NGOs so that together we can give civil society representatives the leverage to ensure their voices consistently aired at the highest levels.

As we learned in Gujarat, and as those involved in building temporary shelter in Tamil Nadu are now learning, if people are not consulted as to the design and placement of their new homes, they will remain empty.

Secondly, an immediate challenge is to ensure that our response does not reinforce existing societal inequalities, as occurred in some cases in Gujarat. We must identify and support partners who will address needs impartially, and not along partisan lines.

Finally, we must set our own coordination standards, pushing for greater clarity in the roles of these various groups and ensuring that all INGO coordination cells that are formed effectively channel the voices of civil society.

In crises around the world, INGOs push donors for better coordination in planning their strategic responses. In the case of the India tsunami response, we are in some ways the donors and, as such, this time the onus is on us.

Source: AlertNet