Dara - HRI

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

Joining Forces to Respond to Urgent Needs

Toby Lanzer, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Central African Republic, explains how collaborative mechanisms are being implemented. According to Lanzer, although changing behaviour takes time, they are making progress.

What has been done in terms of trying to assess the needs of the country?

When I arrived here and was in need of money, Jan Egeland provided it quickly via the CERF. This was good because most UN Agencies were entrenched in Bangui and I wanted to get them into the field. The CERF was very helpful to kick start operations. Then I said, “let UNDP ask for the money from the CERF and give it to the NGOs.” By 2007, I realized I needed something else to help: 1) invite NGOs to a country that is very nice; and 2) invite NGOs to the country and say I will pay for you to open your office in this country, which is better than very nice. So I created a fund with two functions: first, to help NGOs establish offices and second, to respond to breaking emergencies. Our initial target was one million dollars and we raised 5.7 million. By the middle of 2007, when it was approved by the Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC), I went to the clusters and said, “remember we have the ERF; in your cluster you should have an analysis of what is happening, you should know what the priorities are.” And we have clusters as a central element to decide which projects will be funded. Last year the ERF was funded by Ireland, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. By the end of 2007, the ERF was empty, except for 150,000 dollars that we kept for emergencies. Then there were meningitis outbreaks in Kaga Bandoro during the first week of January, so I used the ERF to respond to that. So basically, the ERF was empty. And this year, we already have 5.6 million dollars pledged by Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We also have news that they want to create a pooled fund here - just a few weeks ago, donors decided to continue with pooled funds in DRC and Sudan and start pooled funds in Ethiopia and in CAR.

Where did you lobby for that?

First of all, I know which countries are interested in pooled funding, so whenever I went to Sweden, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, or the Netherlands, I pushed the pooled fund button. I think the pooled fund is very useful here because there are no donor embassies, and donors have trusted the Humanitarian Coordinator and the cluster system. So why not have a pooled fund? In the terms of the CAP here, there are a couple of positive things. If you compare the CAP for 2007 with the CAP for 2008, you can see that the 2008 CAP has more substance. It is not just a document you write and stick on the shelf. We filled it with helpful annexes. The CAP is exclusive in terms of references: it has lists of population by province, who is working in the country and their contact information. I think the two most interesting things about it are that all the NGOs and UN Agencies participated in the thinking behind it. And the easiest way to get the main organisations in the room to think together, to analyse together, to plan together, to decide together, is if the Humanitarian Coordinator says, “I am participating in the meeting.” So, the head of ICRC says, “well, if he is going, I should go,” and the same with the head of UNICEF. In the end it had a real knock-on effect and everyone went. So we had the people with decision making capacity in a room for three days thinking together, working together, doing group work together - and that was helpful. The second thing that is interesting about our CAP is that we came up with six criteria to prioritise our projects. So if a project meets each criterion, it gets six points and is immediately a priority. A project that meets five criteria is a high priority, one meeting three or four criteria is a medium priority and a project with zero, one or two criteria is eliminated.

Were there a lot who got zero, one or two?

We kept 76 projects and originally had something like 97 - then we gave the option to rewrite them. What I will do with donors this year is that if they do not fund the immediate priority projects, they will hear about it. Because donors have to fund priority projects if they are serious about prioritisation. Usually the kick off of the CAP is at the end of the year. Then we wait several weeks to allow the donors to see the documents and finally, in January, hold as second event where the donors are supposed to say what they are going to do. I started this event with Jan Egeland in 2004, and everybody said that it would never work, that donors would never come and indicate in January what they will give for the year. And the first time we held this meeting Sweden came and said how much it would give to the CAP. This year I was amazed – there were about six countries saying, “here is all this information.” So it is starting to improve but changing behaviour takes a long time.

Do you have any way of rewarding organisations that are better performers with the CAP monitoring and evaluation?

Number one, I was only in charge of the CAP for three years and during that time we always spoke about this. Actually, I never did anything about it, but I gave the task to someone and she is still working on it. When I was in Ottawa, the Canadians asked about this and the honest answer was that here in CAR, we haven’t done anything about it because 2007 was very much a “get going” mode. For me, 2008 is “consolidating” mode. I spoke to the OCHA office about it this year, and I speak to the clusters about it regularly. I have a meeting every month with the directors of the clusters and tell them to get things rolling, but at some stage they have to tell me what the situation was in January, what it was in June, and the situation we have now in December. They need to explain what the trend is and give some kind of qualitative or quantitative assessment or evaluation of where things are going. I’m not asking for a prediction of the future. I think that the protection cluster, which was not going well, but is a lot better than it was, will be able to give some data.

Did you struggle setting the baseline?

It’s complicated. That’s why I asked them to focus on the clusters. Everybody who comes here asks me about the political situation and human rights. I explain that it’s getting better. When I got here, the army and the presidential guard were burning villages in the North, and that no longer occurs. If you have a couple of indicators you can combine things like that - obviously burning villages is a pretty simple visible indicator. And I think there should be some simple indicators at every cluster level that enable you to show some type of trend. Before I managed the CAP, I was in the North Caucasus managing the Chechnya operation. There was a lot of interest in that operation and people always asked me for the number of people that live in Chechnya. What I used in the CAP for the North Caucasus, from 1999 to 2003, was the word bestimate. It wasn’t an estimate. It wasn’t a guesstimate. It was a bestimate. And I used to look at: the number of people that used to live there, according to the 1999 census; the number of people we think have died; the number of people who would have been born; the number of displaced; and the number of economic migrants. Finally, you come up with a bestimate – we can’t prove it but it is what we think. I think even journalists respond well if you make statements like that. So one thing that is important to do is to look at donor behaviour, analyse the indicators and show the evolution. In a country like CAR where you do not have hundreds of commitments, a small study on this can be very interesting.

DARA looked at that for the Tsunami, donors tried to prioritise that. But it is very interesting to see the difference between donors.

That was not a good time in my life. Jan Egeland called me early in the morning on the 27th of December. I was in Sweden at the time and he called me at six in the morning (midnight in New York) and said to me, “could you get me a Flash Appeal?” And I said, “yes, but it’s going to take about ten days.” “You have three days,” he said. “Well,” I said, “then I can’t do it.” But we got people on the ground very quickly, and it was launched on the 8th of January. And Kofi Annan in Jakarta and the ICRC Director General called my office that day and said, “I have never done this before, I am calling you unofficially to congratulate you for the speed. I hope I broke a record.

What are the challenges here in terms of the humanitarian response?

Some people would say security, access – that’s not it. Based on my 15 years of experience, the biggest challenge here is logistics. It is difficult to get things into the country. It is almost impossible to buy things in the country and it is very hard to move things from one part of the country to another. So costs are rising. At one point, in 2006, there was only one truck available for the north-western part of the country. How you can respond to anything if there is only one truck available? So logistics is number one. The second challenge here is that the displaced population is spread out. I hate camps. I never want to create camps. This is a country that is bigger than France and we have 200,000 IDPs very far away. You can distribute aid to three people and then have to drive 50 minutes to reach five more people. I mean, it is very complicated to operate here. It would be much easier if the displaced population were concentrated, but I am not going to do that - it would be unethical to move people like that. We have been very lucky here. In theory, this is a very dangerous place to work because of diseases and accidents. And actually, last year, which was the first operational year in this country, we lost one aid worker in an accident - a lady working for UNFPA was killed in an accident. We lost about 5 people to disease - they work in the field, get sick and die. I think that controlling this is a major challenge. This is not a safe context but it is more manageable than other places.