Pardon me. No problem. They also have a copy of this.
This is from my vantage point as a protection and child protection expert working the front lines of major humanitarian responses over 12 years for UNICEF and UNHCR.
There are three prime drivers of IDP and refugee flows. First, deleterious socio-economic conditions and poor overall governance in countries across sub-Saharan Africa, MENA and Asia are causing people to seek economic betterment, which in turn is tied to seeking asylum and refugee status in favourable host countries like Canada, western Europe and Scandinavia.
Crisis protraction is another cause of internal and external movement, as most crises on the global map are human-driven, lasting years, decades or even generations. Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen are prime examples of these conflicts.
Climate change is an ever-increasing driver. Desertification, longer and harsher heat waves, and a paucity of water infrastructure are motivators in this regard and will continue to be as climate change worsens. The Lake Chad basin crisis is emblematic of this.
Migration, as I have stated, is an “event horizon” upon us, a term borrowed to describe the point when nothing escapes the gravitational pull of a black hole. Similarly, a plurality of crises will worsen from unaddressed socio-economic change in vulnerable nations alongside climate deterioration, driving more to be on the move. The ability to respond with agility to movements will be lost with the economic burden increasingly placed on countries like ours.
Humanitarian funding for UN agencies is an annual one that is known as the “humanitarian programme cycle”, or HPC, which donor countries like ours fund. It is as outmoded as the post-war documents that created many UN agencies. Nearly all crises today are protracted. Durable funding streams need to be deployed with expert staff to enforce structural change aimed at handing over responses, especially IDP situations, to local authorities to manage. Too often, local governments do little on the response side, leaving humanitarian feeding, shelter, protection, etc., up to the UN and international NGOs.
The nature of the HPC cycle means that technical experts are hired once funding is secured, and then deployed in-country after months of bureaucracy worthy of Franz Kafka. If one is lucky, we get six or eight months to respond to the crisis on the ground. This leads local actors and government to view UN agencies as fickle. Meanwhile, UN agencies use half-started or poorly conceived projects as statistical successes in terms of the numbers they reach to justify further funding extensions.
The same goes for international and local NGO vassals on the ground who execute the grunt work of UN projects. Most of them are poorly staffed or managed and wait to see if they will get funds from UN agencies to retain staff or not. Cooking the books—excuse the term—to make it seem like there are large needs is an incentive to ensure contract extensions.
Strategies for changing this paradigm, such as the grand bargain localization strategy, are highly problematic, as they favour direct funding to local NGOs, so-called LONGOs. These LONGOs are managed by persons with little to no financial acumen, staff who constantly turn over and staff who are not well trained in international humanitarian practices. The risk of wasted donor money is high in this regard.
There are major—major—mandate replications inside the UN system. I will use child protection as a singular example. Just one subset of child protection, called family tracing and reunification, is mandated to UNICEF, UNHCR, the IOM and ICRC simultaneously. Each agency has its own internal database of cases and does not share it with others, citing data privacy. In reality, each is trying to maintain domain dominance to justify continued funding. On the ground, this means that families and children are often confused as to who is handling a case. The tracing process gets gummed up in UN bureaucracy and inter-agency rivalry. Families and children turn to informal channels, such as smugglers, as a solution, making them more vulnerable.
There are major flaws in UN human resourcing, especially at UNHCR and UNICEF. At UNHCR, RSD adjudicators—refugee status determination, that is—in the field often have no law degrees, yet they are assessing asylum or resettlement claims that ultimately come to our shores based on flimsy interview work, out-of-date country-of-origin research and little oversight.
