Recaudación de Impuestos y su composición

The original concept note for the Humanitarian Financing research programme states that:

no one is in overall control of humanitarian assistance.The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) is important for co-ordinating the UN Agencies, NGOs and the Red Cross.The IASC has encouraged reform of the UN’s Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP). However, an increasing share of humanitarian assistance – possibly more than one third, according to OCHA data – now flows bilaterally. No fora exist formally to co-ordinate how these bilateral inputs are allocated across crises. Co- ordination within crises is often ad hoc.The problem is thus far wider than the CAP. It is a feature of the humanitarian system that there is no collective responsibility among agencies and donors for overall outcomes; nor is there accountability for the relative success or failure of the total humanitarian response to a given situation. Arguably, the result is that there is no particular incentive to coordinate decision-making or operational responses. In part, the lack of collective accountability and effective coordination reflects the lack of explicit overarching targets and objectives, together with a limited ability to measure outcomes and to gauge the impact of interventions.

BOX 4.3: Needs analysis and decision-making in Afghanistan post-9/11

A personal reflection written by the former head of the UN Strategic Monitoring Unit for Afghanistan

The bombing campaign that followed the events of 11 September 2001 turned the international political and media spotlight on Afghanistan and the plight of its people. Here was a war fought in part on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, which demanded a commensurate post-war humanitarian response. World leaders promised that this time they would not desert Afghanistan, but would help to rebuild the country. The need for a more systematic approach was acknowledged, and the UNDP/World Bank/Asia Development Bank (ADB) Preliminary Needs Assessment exercise began in December 2001, immediately after the conference on the reconstruction of Afghanistan held in Islamabad by those same organisations. The timetable was dictated by the donor conference to be held in Tokyo in January 2002, and this led to a number of problems, particularly lack of consultation with Afghans at all levels. Issues of agency profile drove the process, rather than the needs of Afghanistan, and little real ‘needs assessment’ was involved in what essentially became a packaging exercise.

Team leaders were appointed from the three organisations, although most of the ADB delegation (including the team leader) left shortly after the conference, and the first part of the exercise was conducted largely by the World Bank and UNDP. A series of working groups were set up in areas such as health, education and governance, comprising a mixture of local staff (largely international) and foreign experts from headquarters. The World Bank, with little previous involvement in the country,12_{brought in a team of people who set up}

base for several weeks in Islamabad. The UN largely fielded local staff, but UNICEF augmented its team by bringing in sector experts in both health and education. The contribution of these groups was variable, but some did an enormous amount of work over a very tight time span and produced some high-quality inputs. All inputs were dogged by problems of lack of accurate, up-to-date information, although some sectors suffered far more than others in this regard. Source material was of very variable quality. The mixture of tight timetable and extremely high flight costs meant that it was not possible to hold consultations inside Afghanistan, although a meeting was held with Afghans from the NGO community in Peshawar. There was also a meeting in Kabul after the initial draft.

A working group of the World Bank and UNDP pulled the information together and agreed a structure for the final report, which moved away from a sectoral approach to an integrated approach to needs analysis and programming. Two UNDP consultants, both with extensive experience of working in the country, were then given the task of writing a first draft of the report for the beginning of January. The plan was that the three team leaders would then meet in Manila in early January to finish the work on the report. Alongside them would be a small Afghan ‘reference group’, which would go some way to making up for the lack of consultation and give at least some level of Afghan ownership.

At some point, and by what process it is not clear, the meeting of team leaders in Manila changed into a large meeting of some 15 people, most of whom had had no involvement in the earlier part of the exercise. Because of the timescale, by the beginning of January there still had been no consultation with the authorities in Kabul. This was clearly not an acceptable situation, and the World Bank and UNDP team leaders therefore visited Kabul in early January. The ADB team leader was invited but did not go, instead assembling a writing team in Manila. This team was largely independent of the team that had done the work in Islamabad, it had no representation from UNDP and, with the exception of the facilitator (who had no development experience), the entire Bank team was new. None of the team knew Afghanistan. The Bank team leader and the UNDP team only joined several days later, by which time a completely new structure had been agreed for the writing, reverting to a sector-based report. Team members changed frequently over the following week, with some very senior staff coming for a couple of days before leaving again; but with the exception of the UNDP team (largely non-UNDP staff drafted in) there was little experience of Afghanistan. Of the proposed Afghan reference group, only one member was able to come, and she arrived late and was very underused. Team leader meetings appeared often to be a trade-off between organisations, and it was hard not to come to the conclusion that the whole exercise was more about agency positioning than real needs assessment. As a result, the report was ‘a set of broad principles that could apply to any number of countries, without a strategic framework to guide implementation of specifically-identified priorities of Afghan communities’ (CESR, May 2002). Agencies quite rightly criticised the top-down nature of the process.

The UNDP consultants who wrote the original draft pushed hard for the lack of consultation to be remedied in the next round of the needs assessment process, but this never happened; instead, it was decided that there would be a set of sector needs assessment missions, thus allowing little scope for Afghans to input into the overall setting of priorities. There seemed to be more concern over agency positioning than adequately ensuring that expertise was drawn upon and this, along with battles between UNDP and UNOCHA which led to confusion over how this process related to the CAP (ITAP), meant that an opportunity for a real examination of the needs of the country, and a much-needed discussion on the best way forward, was squandered. Since then, a number of inter-agency missions have taken place. A major Joint Donor Mission, for example, has looked at health, and in highlighting the lack of good information has noted how even information on the physical state of facilities is not known. This is perhaps not surprising since most ministries have no way of communicating with their provincial offices, and most missions do not get far from Kabul, and certainly not far from those provincial centres accessible by air. The main problem with the recommendations is not in their content as such, but in the lack of sufficient prioritisation, which results in a list of things to be done which far exceeds available capacity in the country.

Just as decisions tend to be unconnected, so analysis tends to be fragmentary. In a typical OCHA field office, a map will show who is doing what, and where.The map does not reflect the results of a strategy or a set of linked decisions; rather, it reflects the myriad judgements and decisions that individual organisations make, using a multiplicity of criteria. Such a map, showing a preponderance of agency activity in some areas and little in others, does not necessarily reflect relative priorities or levels of need – areas with little or no activity may be inaccessible or insecure; needs in these areas may be unassessed, and may indeed be higher than elsewhere. In terms of achieving consensus on priorities, a map which shows (for example) areas of relative food insecurity is of greater value for comparative risk analysis than one that charts agency activity. Progress has been made in recent years, particularly through the Humanitarian Information Centres, in achieving a more effective synthesis of available information as a basis for prioritisation. But while HICs or their equivalent may have a role in facilitating the closer coordination of decision-making, based on agreement about relative priorities, they cannot set those priorities.

Expert consensus, feeding into the CHAP/CAP process, is the best basis for achieving such a comparative overview of risk in a given sector. This is related to, but distinct from, the question of who is doing what, where. The specialists concerned are normally caught up in agency programmes, and secondment of the staff members concerned (UN and INGO) to an inter-agency ‘task force’ charged with rapid needs assessment should be prioritised by agencies and encouraged by donors. The development of an assessment strategy, agreed and coordinated between the heads of sectoral working groups, should be seen as the basis for this activity. The case studies conducted during the course of this research revealed a variety of coordination mechanisms and frameworks adapted to particular contexts. Depending on whether a ‘heavy’ or a ‘light’ model is adopted, coordination is more or less strategic as opposed to simply operational – including agreement on common goals and priorities. In Afghanistan before 11 September 2001, under the umbrella of the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan, Principled Common Programming (PCP) was introduced as a mechanism for ‘establishing the assistance community’s priorities, programmes and projects, based upon agreed goals, principles and the expressed needs of Afghans.’The aim was to achieve ‘coherent, principled and cost-effective programmes’.The PCP is generally thought to have been more successful in achieving its aims than the Strategic Framework taken as a whole, and was perhaps a more natural mechanism than the CAP for coordinating the responses of UN and non- governmental agencies. The extent to which it resulted in appropriate prioritisation by the international community as a whole is hard to determine.

In Southern Africa in 2002, the UN established the Regional Inter Agency Coordination Support Office (RIACSO), a relatively ‘light’ model of coordination. Staff interviewed at RIASCO felt that such a light structure was paramount to

ensuring that the UNDP Resident Representative retained primary responsibility for country coordination and the implementation of the emergency response – and that development programmes were not unnecessarily disrupted by the humanitarian interventions. OCHA does not play its usual (mandated) role in the region, and instead supports WFP as the lead agency. A more integrated approach to assessment might have been achieved had OCHA played a more decisive part early on in coordinating the efforts of UN agencies at all levels. This might have prevented the evident schism that developed between the food and health sectors, and led to a more balanced set of responses from the outset.

Donors expressed the view that a light coordination structure at a regional level has a number of drawbacks, especially in the initial phases of a humanitarian response. In particular, donors were looking for regional leadership from the UN, in order to achieve a more coherent understanding of the ‘scale and severity of the crisis’13_{. This required the development of}

better information flows between countries, and between agencies, donors and NGOs – a function that the SAHIMS system was designed to perform. It appears that, in the early months of the response, there was a particular focus on logistics coordination for food aid, and very little attention to providing information and/or coordinating the response in other sectors, particularly health.

In Malawi, the unique ‘consortium’ model of coordination among NGOs involved in food distribution has enabled information-sharing – both between donors and NGOs and among NGOs themselves. Donors also note the benefits of a system of devolved decision-making and a decentralised approach: ‘Imperfect decision-making at the local level is

better than imperfect decision-making in Lilongwe’14_{. The}

NGOs concerned believe that the consortium lessens the level of competition for donor funding. One UN agency staff member noted that leadership of the consortium is ‘very democratic, and prey to being weak, with no single institution taking the necessary strategic or budgetary control’. Some of the concerns in relation to the VAC process, about creating false consensus (and discouraging dissent), might also apply to this model.

In this and other contexts, agencies complain of a lack of coordination and coherent policy between donors. In Southern Africa, donor coordination has been limited – in part because the larger donors, such as USAID and DFID, tend

towards bilateral decision-making15_{. The Somalia Aid}

Coordination Body (SACB) provides a specific mechanism for donor coordination, though again it is hampered by bilateral and uncoordinated approaches among some donors.Where no such arrangement exists, the CAP represents the best available donor coordination mechanism.

13

Interview, humanitarian adviser, DFID, November 2002. 14

Interview, senior donor official, USAID, November 2002. 15

At the time the case study was conducted, there were moves to establish a regional Stakeholders Group, comprising donors, UN agencies and NGOs.

Chapter 5