Twenty-five years after the world was gripped by harrowing scenes of starvation and death in Ethiopia, chronic hunger has returned to the Horn of Africa. Last month the Ethiopian government called for urgent international assistance to help feed 6,2-million people. Across the region an estimated 23-million people cannot access sufficient food.
Again, as happened 25 years ago, aid organisations are appealing for millions of dollars in a desperate attempt to provide succour.
Yet in the middle of this humanitarian crisis, there appears some cynicism about the role or even the efficacy of aid. At the end of October, for example, The Times of London ran an article that urged Britons to stifle their empathy. The piece called on readers to ”sit on their hands” lest they misguidedly reach for their chequebooks. The crux of the argument was that aid was the cause of all African evils. Instead of food, the article called for development and a focus on funding education.
This argument is not new. Similar charges against aid have been filed in recent years, crystallising for many in the book, Dead Aid, by Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo. Again, charity was labelled the primary cause of African suffering. The answer? Free markets: trade, earned wealth and the trickle-down theory of economics.
These frustrations are understandable. Draw a straight line through the famines of the mid-1980s and today’s urgent appeals and you can see why ”aid” is pilloried by some. Given all the money that has been donated and spent, how can so little have changed?
The answer is not that aid is wrong; it’s that it could be better. This form of aid does little to build a community’s resilience. Once the food runs out communities are left in the precarious state that contributed to their suffering in the first place.
A key issue at play here is often the relationship between humanitarian organisations, civil society and governments. Put simply: civil society is about empowering people, whereas governments are often about power. The focus on governments is on building strong economies that can support their population en masse. This approach is necessarily broad.
The focus of civil society is much more intimate. It is about supporting families and communities to achieve their own goals, helping them to do what they want with their own lives.
A report released this week by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies calls for a rethink on how humanitarian assistance is funded and administered.
It calls for communities to be included in the assistance that is given to them. Too often aid is imposed on communities. It is up to all of us — humanitarian agencies, African governments, institutions and donors — to support them.
In our estimate there is far too much focus on reactive, emergency aid. So much more could be done to address the root causes of hunger or of suffering inflicted by disasters. As the report says: ”Continued overreliance on reactive disaster response will contribute less and less to lasting solutions as, partly as a result of climate change, financial crisis and population growth, aid organisations will require more and more money to meet just the basic needs of affected communities.”
Today only a fraction of 1% of total aid money goes towards disaster risk reduction; activities that seek out and address the often predictable factors that turn challenges into catastrophe. This needs to change.
The good news? There are already examples of how effective this approach can be. For communities who live in dry and infertile regions, investments in irrigation and diversification of agricultural crops and techniques can yield extraordinary results.
Take Malawi, for example. Five years ago this small Southern African country was in the grip of a food crisis. Today it is growing a surplus.
Government investment in subsidising fertilisers, tools and seeds has meant that families previously dependent on aid are now reaching a level of self-sufficiency.
So, yes: let’s move away, where possible, from addressing crises only after the fact. The solutions exist and they are cheaper than the alternative of emergency appeals.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Today in the Horn of Africa 23-million people are food insecure. Some of them are starving. Many will die unless they receive food assistance. The answer is not to do away with relief. The truth is that we can and should do both. The humanitarian imperative demands that we give food to people who are starving and provide relief to communities that have been battered by disasters.
Let’s avoid politicising or theorising the suffering of people. Let’s spend the acute initial months ensuring that people don’t die. And then, once the situation has stabilised, let’s spend time and money attacking the root causes of this despair and let’s try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
Bekele Geleta is secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies