Disaster relief must switch from global to local – Oxfam

LONDON (AlertNet) - The international humanitarian system will fail to cope with an expected rise in emergencies unless more is done to bolster the capacity of local organisations to respond to disasters, Oxfam said on Tuesday.

Like AlertNet's recent poll on the future of humanitarian aid, Oxfam's report, Crises in a New World Order, suggests aid workers will face an ever-growing caseload in the years to come due to rising weather-related disasters, ongoing conflicts and the failure to turn around fragile states.

"Coping with the expected strains on the humanitarian system will mean a shift from global to local," Oxfam's humanitarian director Jane Cocking said in a statement.

"International aid agencies cannot just pitch up, patch up and push-off, they also have to ensure that people and countries are better prepared to withstand future shocks."

The response to emergencies could be better, Oxfam said, adding that action by governments and aid agencies still remained "too little, too late".

It also criticised the response of the humanitarian system for often being determined by the "vagaries" of media and political interest rather than actual needs.

One way of ensuring more effective relief would be to equip local organisations to respond, Oxfam said.

It highlighted the work of 110 civil society groups helping disaster-prone communities across Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador as well as local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Darfur, which have provided vital relief and scaled-up their operations to fill some of the gaps created after a number of international NGOs were expelled in 2009.

Oxfam also called for more investment in reducing the risk of disasters in vulnerable communities. It said according to U.N. estimates, it would have cost $1 to save a malnourished child's life in Niger in 2005 compared to $80 once the food crisis was underway.

The charity said the vision of a new humanitarian world was fraught with challenges - not least upholding the sector's long cherished principles of delivering aid based on needs, and free of political interest.

With regards to the emergence of non-Western donors, Oxfam noted that Arab and Muslim countries focused much of their funding last year on Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

"These decisions reflect political and cultural affinities but also raise questions of how aid is to be targeted to human need," Oxfam said.

- AlertNet