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The continuum of humanitarian crises management: Multiple approaches and the challenge of convergence
Get PDFThe notion that “relief alone is not enough” is common to all actors involved in humanitarian
crises and their management. This notion was officially framed at the United Nations (UN) in
1991 as a “continuum from relief to rehabilitation and development” and today remains a
challenging task in the agenda of international assistance. Despite periodic efforts to understand
the problem and to put forward solutions, reviews report a lack of conceptual clarity and little
progress. We suggest that one of the reasons is the paucity of efforts to clarify the meaning of
the continuum in a way that leads to an understanding that covers crisis-specific settings as well
as humanitarian crises in general. Thus, the present paper aims to contribute to advancing this
conceptual front by comparing general approaches to the continuum of humanitarian crisis
management with those that can be found through the work on two emblematic types of crises:
disaster risk reduction and peacebuilding. We show that parallel understandings of the
continuum as a matter of actors and as a matter of phases coexist and are in need of
disambiguation; there is difficulty internalizing the non-linearity of the process and a lack of
clarity on the position of prevention within humanitarian crisis management. We put forward a
multi-layered activities model as the most basic understanding of the continuum to which all
actors can converge, and describe its strengths and weaknesses. Local ownership is the most
important limiting factor, and the alternative to realizing the continuum of pursuing approaches
internal to or among foreign actors is not a substitute.boo
Intrageneration Poverty Dynamics in Indonesia: Households’ Welfare Mobility Before, During, and After the Asian Financial Crisis
Get PDFWhen the economic crisis hit in 1998, and economic growth dropped by 13.7 percent; exacerbated by domestic political turbulence, poverty figures sharply rose from 17.47 percent to 24.20 percent. It began to decline again as the economy quickly recovered from the crisis. The above details demonstrate that poverty is not a pure static phenomenon, but rather is dependent on dynamic characteristics that easily change over time. Households could move into (or out of) poverty in response to fluctuations in the economy. This study then aims to analyze the determinants of households’ shifting welfare during the periods before, during and after the Asian financial crisis in Indonesia. Applying the spell approach of poverty experience and observing four waves of IFLS (Indonesian Family Life Survey) balanced panel datasets, we find that during 1993-1997 (pre-crisis) households could be classified as chronically poor (6.14 percent), transient poor (-) (6.31 percent), transient poor (+) (10.58 percent) and never poor (76.96 percent). However, during 1997-2000 (crisis), the probability of being transient poor (-) had jumped drastically from 5 percent (pre-crisis) to 14 percent (during the crisis). In the post crisis period, roughly 86 percent of the previously poor households could move out of poverty. This study also confirmed that the probability of being poor in the next period highly depends on past experiences with poverty. Moreover, reducing probability of being chronically poor by about half from 4.6 percent to 2.2 percent needs almost fifteen years. Furthermore, our estimations using the ordered logit model confirm that determinants of poverty dynamics include educational attainment, size of the household, share of education expenditure, distance to public transportation, ownership of livestock and liquid assets, and the impact suffered from earthquakes.research repor
Outsourced Technical Cooperation Reconsidered: Agency Problems in the Support of Decentralized Public Service Delivery in Sierra Leone
Get PDFTechnical cooperation at the implementation stage is indispensable for translating the effects of fund flows by way of budgetary support into the actual delivery of public services on the ground. An increasing demand for the streamlining of development aid, however, dictates that donors should contract out technical cooperation to local technical assistants in the name of efficiency and ownership. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that outsourced technical cooperation tends to be ineffective due to the structured corruption embedded in the culture of the recipient countries. This paper tries to reveal the agency problems in aid implementation by qualitatively and quantitatively examining records and outputs of public financial management by local governments in Sierra Leone - a fragile and conflict-affected state with a dire need for improved public service delivery. Partial, if not definitive, evidence of the ineffectiveness of outsourced technical cooperation in comparison to directly administered technical cooperation has been found; this warrants further investigation.research repor
Election, Implementation, and Social Capital in SchoolBased Management: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on the COGES Project in Burkina Faso
Get PDFIn this paper, we investigate the role of School Management Committees (COGES) in Burkina Faso. These committees include elected members of each community, and are tasked with setting and implementing annual school plans. The study adopted a hybrid evaluation method incorporating a randomized controlled trial and a large-scale artefactual field experiment a la Levitt and List (2007) on public goods with monetary rewards, to closely examine unexplored issues impacting on the sustainability of community-driven projects, and to identify at least partially the mechanisms of this sustainability. We found that the COGES project significantly increased social capital in the form of voluntary contributions to public goods, especially by linking those that people can be connected to vertically. On average, the direct increase in voluntary contributions to public goods from the implementation of the COGES project was between 8.0 and 10.2%. For groups composed of school principals, teachers, and parents, the average contribution increased by between 12.7 and 24.1% through the democratic election of school management committee members, and by between 11.0 and 17.2% through the implementation of the COGES project. These results suggest that community management projects can improve local cost recovery by increasing local contributions of public goods, potentially leading to better fiscal sustainability in community-driven projects. Moreover, the results based on our hybrid experiments are largely in line with real-world decisions observed in the schools under our investigation. As a byproduct, our findings are supportive of models of other-regarding preferences.research repor
Youth Employment and NGOs: Evidence from Bangladesh
Get PDFYouth unemployment remains significant labor market and social challenges in many emerging and developing countries. Among others, high rates of unemployment among educated youth are one of growing global issues. This is the case for educated youth in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the increase of NGOs has played a decisive role not only in reducing poverty and improving social indicators like education and health, but in building a platform for young people to develop careers. Despite the increasing job opportunities, the NGO sector experiences high turnover rates and increasing difficulty in attracting qualified youth. This study uses interviews with university students and young NGO staff in Bangladesh to analyze the determinants of youth job preferences and job satisfaction. Empirical analyses reveal that job satisfaction is positively correlated with wages, gender, employment status, work location, and NGO size with statistical significance. Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE), we also gauge youth job preferences and examine the extent to which each job attribute influences job choice, as well as how adjusting these attributes could improve job attractiveness in the NGO sector. We find that the provisions of support for education and upgrading qualifications, and support for health insurance can increase the job uptake rates by more than 30 percentage points and more than 20 percentage points, respectively. We also find that providing housing benefits is not an effective fringe benefit. Particularly, this benefit is provided by small-sized NGOs. Requiring less overtime work increases retention rates by 10 percentage points for female employees, whereas it raises the rates by 4 percentage points for males. Our results suggest that, given that many NGOs are confronted by hard budget constraints, they can reduce high turnover rates by efficiently allocating their limited budget for staff welfare. This better understanding of the needs and desires of their employees can help Bangladeshi NGOs recruit and retain qualified young people.research repor
Perceptions and Practice of Human Security in Malaysia
Get PDFThis paper discusses the understanding of human security in Malaysia. As the country prepares to achieve its vision of becoming a developed nation by 2020, exposure to the forces of globalization and integration into the international economy and the ASEAN community have on the one hand improved the economic standing of the country and its people while on the other hand exposed Malaysian society to a range of downside risks or threats that could undermine the past achievements of programs for human development. The paper covers three main areas. Firstly, we deliberate on the notion of human security from international and regional standpoints before explaining differential interpretations and understandings of the term at national and local levels. Secondly, we examine the multiple issues and threats viewed as imperative by various stakeholders. Thirdly, we identify some of the approaches taken in mitigating human insecurities and discuss the lack of measures in further improving the level of human security in the country. The term human security remains lodged at the periphery, and propelling it to the center will require a higher awareness level of its significance. Greater commitment from all stakeholders—particularly the government—is indispensable in order to prioritize policies that actually empower individuals and communities not only to free themselves of their insecurities but more importantly to enable them to live their lives in dignity.research repor
