GENEVA — On April 17, Start Network received an urgent alert from two of its 42 member organizations, asking for rapid funding to combat a cholera outbreak in northeast Nigeria. The other members of the United Kingdom-based humanitarian network were quickly consulted, but they were divided over whether, of all the world’s pressing humanitarian needs, this one deserved some of the network’s precious funds.
By the following day, however, the independent organization ACAPS had completed the rapid assessment of the crisis requested by Start as soon as the appeal came in. It added a crucial new perspective: There was a large population of internally displaced people in the area, whose lack of safe drinking water and sanitation made them particularly vulnerable to the disease.
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A one-year report on the Grand Bargain’s implementation published last year by the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute found that even where increased assessments were being done, they often suffered from a particular weakness: When carried out by aid organizations, they “tend to focus on the services supplied by these same organizations, at the expense of providing a more objective overview of needs.”
In other words, a food aid organization will tend to find that many of the needs are dietary; a medical charity will discover large unmet health needs, and so forth. Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said this is a common problem. Such assessment often “doesn't tell you a great deal about relative priorities and the urgency of different types of needs,” he said.
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