Project Progress Report Number 1
 

Project Team  Nicholas Stockton  Chair,  Management Committee  Peter Walker  Project Co-ordinator  Susan Purdin  Project Manager  John Adams  Sector Manager,  Water Supply and Sanitation  Lola Gostelow  Sector Manager,  Nutrition  Harlan Hale  Sector Manager,  Food Aid  Joachim Kreysler  Jean Roy  Sector Managers,  Health Services  Philip Wijmans  Sector Manager,  Shelter and  Site Management  Project Office  Street Address:  17, chemin des Crêts  Petit Saconnex  Geneva  Postal Address:  P. O. Box 372  1211 Geneva 19  Switzerland

...4, 3, 2, 1 - Launch  The Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR) and InterAction launched the Sphere Project - minimum standards in humanitarian response - on 1 July 1997.   This one-year project involves front-line NGOs and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, interested donor governments, and UN agencies cooperating to develop a set of standards in core areas of humanitarian relief. These standards will help to improve the quality of assistance provided in emergencies, and the accountability of agencies to their beneficiaries, their membership and their donors. The standards will derive from a charter of humanitarian rights - drawn from existing international law - relevant to all with a legitimate claim to assistance in disaster situations.  While the SCHR and InterAction are the leaders of this effort, many other organisations are interested in the project as well. VOICE, a European consortium of agencies working in emergencies, holds observer status on the project management committee. UN agencies (including UNHCR, DHA, UNICEF, WFP) have stated their support and are contributing to the project.  Project Goals  Goal 1: To develop a humanitarian charter for people affected by disasters, in a style similar to the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGO Code of Conduct.  Goal 2: To compile, from existing material and current best-practices, a set of minimum standards covering essential goods and services, implementation of assistance, and stake-holder accountability. Where necessary, the project will draft new standards if no suitable ones presently exist.  Goal 3: To ensure that the resulting products are acceptable to the international humanitarian community and that a high degree of ownership is felt towards them. International networks of individuals and organisations will collaborate to develop the charter and implementation standards.  Goal 4: To formulate and embark upon a strategy for the widest possible dissemination and adoption of the charter and implementation standards throughout the international humanitarian community.

• The humanitarian charter will elaborate the rights of disaster victims based on international humanitarian law and human rights conventions.
• The technical standards and best practices will describe specifically what people need and how these needs should be provided.

• Recommendations for best practice in implementation of the technical standards will cover concerns such as techniques that improve equitable distribution, respect local culture, reduce risk of violence, minimize environmental impact.

To achieve inter-agency agreement, the consensus-building process includes:

• many agencies participating directly,
• networks of experts from a variety of agencies,
• review of materials from divers agencies,
• wide sharing of information as the project develops.

The project is actively seeking southern involvement.

• Many project agencies are federations of southern and northern membership.
• Descriptive material about the project is available in English, Spanish and French.
• Communication with ICVA staff and member agencies is on-going to disseminate project information and to promote dialogue.
• Sphere project material has been distributed directly to southern NGOs, and more will be forthcoming.
• Project agency field staff have been soliciting local partners for contributions to the project.

• The project is an effort at humanitarian agency self-regulation, a model which is likely to engender greater compliance.
• UN agencies (including UNHCR, DHA, UNICEF, WFP) have stated their support for the project and are contributing to the dialogue.
• In addition to funding provided by the agencies involved in the project, various donor governments are providing support as well.

A number of factors will contribute:

• There exists throughout the humanitarian system forward momentum towards greater accountability in practice.
• History shows that practice does change to adopt improvements as information is disseminated.
• Acceptance by the large number of agencies collaborating in the project will be a major step towards compliance.
• Dialogue is part of the process of the project to assure consistency among monitoring systems advocated by ECHO, OECD-DAC, OFDA/BPRM.
• There will be a dissemination process to incorporate other agencies into the system.
• A monitoring system will feed lessons learned from field evaluations back into the standards providing continuous quality improvement.
• There will also be a system for responding to complaints of non-compliance.

• While acknowledging that humanitarian actions often take place in a crisis of political dimensions, one must clarify that humanitarian relief is a process of addressing the effects rather that the causes - natural, economic or political - of disasters. The appropriate political consideration for a humanitarian programs is to plan project activities that reduce the risk of violence and future vulnerability to disaster. NGOs are also increasingly engaged in advocacy efforts to persuade political authorities to address the root causes of disasters, rather than just applying the bandaid of humanitarian assistance.

"This is not about food. It's about dignity."

A View from A Sector
by John Adams, Sector Manager, Water and Sanitation
 

The following is an excerpt from an exploratory paper as one sector manager thought about the issues involved in setting standards that are more than technical.

"I feel that setting the level of assistance in relation only to crude mortality rates or excess mortality, would not respond adequately to the call of humanitarianism to alleviate human suffering. We need to come up with standards which are measurable; but there is much human suffering which is not life threatening, and yet which demands a response from humanitarian agencies.

I think we should try to tackle some quality of life issues other than the straight public health ones, without getting diverted from hard standards, otherwise we risk ignoring much of the suffering which is the personal experience of many refugees and displaced people. Many of the disasters the Sphere Project is concerned with are conflict or resource-based, involving displacement or other loss of livelihood, and at a stage characterised by excessive mortality, - a population vulnerable due to malnutrition, infectious disease, fatigue and social and psychological disruption, crowded conditions, and significant lack in some or all of the following: food, shelter, sanitation, water, health services.

Objective of humanitarian intervention - To meet the overall aim of preventing and alleviating human suffering, protecting life and health and ensuring respect for the human being, humanitarian workers mobilize to provide, rapidly, the conditions, goods and services - complementing those already locally available - necessary to reduce vulnerability to disease and death and to establish a base on which to build interventions aimed at longer term maintenance of healthy life.

Context-specific needs / entitlement / rights - Regarding context-specific rights, it seems to me that if we define the overall aim in terms simply of limiting death rates to a certain level then, on the basis that all people have the same physiological needs, rights should not be context-specific. We could define a universal right to enough food to supply energy and protein needs and adequate shelter to protect from cold, sun, rain etc. But this may not translate into the same quantities of food or plastic sheeting for all situations.

Interventions do have to be context specific to account for differences in climate, vulnerability or resistance to specific diseases, nutritional status etc. What this suggests is that rights should perhaps be defined more universally, but that needs in terms of how much water, how much food etc. is likely to depend on a number of local factors. This does introduce an element of subtlety, but it is likely to produce standards which are better adapted to the range of situations in which they should be applied.

My suggestion is that we should be hard and fast about rights and needs, but should recognise that the goods and services people are entitled to in order to meet those needs depend on the context. For instance, we can say clearly that refugees are universally entitled to access to toilets, primarily to avoid the public health risks posed by inadequate sanitation. It is actually much more difficult to say that refugees the world over are entitled to one toilet for twenty people, or one hundred; that they should be entitled to a latrine or an area of bush in the desert, to a communal toilet or a family one. This does depend very much on the context.

For vector control, we may say that all refugees are entitled to protection from malaria. In some cases there are no malaria-bearing mosquitoes and therefore no need for inputs. In other cases there may be low level exposure to malaria but the refugee population has long been exposed to this level. During malaria peaks there may be the need for a mosquito control programme and / or malaria prophylaxis in certain parts of the camp.

In other cases still, the refugees may come from an upland area where malaria is not known and may be extremely vulnerable. In this case, they may need impregnated bednets and an intensive mosquito control programme to avoid a malaria epidemic. Clearly we can not say that all refugees are entitled to chloroquine or impregnated bednets or mosquito control programmes. Again, entitlement may be defined universally in terms of outcome (acceptable levels of malaria morbidity and mortality), but not so in terms of goods and services. A bednet is not a universal right, but protection from malaria is..."