Aid Groups Switch to Self-Help Approach

Mud-splattered men hack down tangled grass and scoop up handfuls of muck, clearing a canal that will bring badly needed water to their farms.

“We’ve lost our crops many seasons because of a lack of water,” says Daud Iidow Kuulow, a farmer who grows corn and sesame. “We talked several times about cleaning up the canal, but we didn’t have enough food stored to stop farming.”

Now, though, for a day’s work clearing two yards of fudgy earth from the Jiddo Canal, Iidow is earning $6 worth of food: 2 1/4 pounds of lentils, a pound of cooking oil, nearly eight pounds of wheat. It’s enough to feed his family of five, plus six relatives, for a day.

Once the canal is usable again, irrigation--the real bonus--will enable Iidow to double the size of his farm to five acres to better feed and support his extended family.

This small-scale, low-key, locally run project aimed at development rather than simple sustenance reflects a new approach to aid adopted by Atlanta-based CARE International and other humanitarian groups in Somalia and elsewhere.

“Aid will happen, but we ought to do it right instead of doing it wrong,” says Mary B. Anderson, an American economist whose study of aid and development led her to become a leading critic of traditional big-scale aid programs.

She advocates that aid workers “do no harm,” a policy named after a phrase taken from doctors’ Hippocratic Oath.

“The humanitarian assistance community now faces a growing realization that the consequences of its efforts are not all good,” says Anderson, who is president of a small consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

The traditional approach of delivering huge amounts of food and other necessities can undermine survival skills and create a dependent society, she says.

And the U.N. refugee agency and other aid groups have played a crucial if unintentional role in prolonging and worsening conflicts, she argues.

Rebels, warlords and failing governments have become adept at manipulating aid agencies--using their food to feed troops, entice supporters or control troublemakers; stealing aid groups’ vehicles, radios and fuel to conquer territories, Anderson says.

“The United Nations and others need to rethink their approach in light of how aid is being used to reinforce conflict,” she says.

Anderson advocates that aid be used to promote peace.

“Not only should aid achieve its intended goal--saving lives, supporting long-term development--not only should it avoid unintended harmful consequences, but it should also be provided so that it supports local peace-building processes,” she says.

Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, agrees that a community-based approach works well if numbers are small, but says that “if we have to deal with big numbers, we have to deal in a big way.”

But Anderson’s ideas have won important endorsements, particularly from donors weary of pouring money into persistent problem areas. The U.S. Agency for International Development has invited her to train the groups it finances.

“We realize it is not only important to save lives, but to promote livelihoods,” thereby lessening the need for assistance in the future, says Dina Esposito, leader of the USAID transition team for the Horn of Africa region.

Some criticize the approach, however, because humanitarian aid becomes conditional. Anderson suggests, for example, that if warlords cannot guarantee the safe delivery of food, aid groups should withdraw.

“It’s ‘do no good’ or ‘do nothing’ aid,” says James Fennell, an aid consultant based in Britain. The ideal, first articulated after World War II, that defenseless people have a right to food, shelter and health care is lost, he says.

“There is a new orthodoxy in international policy which says that the goal of aid is to create self-reliance and stability. It’s almost like aid has become a branch of foreign policy or security,” Fennell adds.

Mark Duffield, an aid expert at England’s University of Birmingham, finds merit in Anderson’s approach, but says it’s simplistic to think Somalis can resolve their differences just by being forced to work together on a project.

At best, it’s “an accommodation with violence,” and at worst racist, Duffield says. “It’s all based on an attitude of, ‘The natives have taken leave of their senses.’ ”

The debate about what works and what doesn’t is a multibillion-dollar question.

Twenty years ago, the total annual expenditures by disaster relief agencies totaled about $300 million. By 1994, that had soared to $8 billion.

But spending tumbled to $5.4 billion by last year because donors are less willing to put money into areas with problems they consider intractable, like Somalia.

World attention focused on Somalia in mid-1992 when clan warfare left the country without a national government and a devastating famine was at its height.

The United Nations launched a humanitarian and military rescue operation, spending more than $3.6 billion through 1995. Aid groups also helped. CARE, for example, spent $61 million on relief aid.

The help saved thousands of Somalis from starvation. But critics say the aid programs were ill conceived, insensitive to Somali opinion and embroiled the international community in a dangerous, disastrous experiment in post-Cold War nation-building.

Amid the chaos, CARE lost about 20% of its food supplies to looters. From March 1993 to March 1995, 143 foreign peacekeepers, three foreign civilians and one Somali working for aid groups were killed. Others were kidnapped for ransom. Dozens of vehicles were stolen.

Chastened by the experience, CARE changed its approach last year when it began planning to help some of the million Somalis suffering from the effects of a drought that was followed by the worst flooding in three decades.

Anxious to avoid giving Somalis so much food they would abandon their fields and again become dependent on aid, and not wanting to attract the armed bandits who once terrorized and sometimes killed for aid, CARE did away with big programs. Gone are the armed convoys of a dozen 10-ton trucks that disgorge grain in one-month allotments to the hungry.

“Keep it small; keep it controlled; keep it quiet--this is how to deliver relief in Somalia,” says David Neff, CARE program director for Somalia.

In fact, aid groups have been forced by donors to scale back. Last year, 13 U.N. agencies asked for more than $100 million to provide aid for Somalia, and got just over $20 million. U.N. agencies spend in a year what they spent in 19 days in the early 1990s.

CARE now runs small-scale, food-for-work programs in some of the country’s most vulnerable areas at a cost of $2.5 million for 1998.

The emphasis is on developing local skills. After a rigorous review, CARE has selected 17 Somali aid groups from hundreds of applicants to do fieldwork. CARE offers workshops in social management and community development, and it keeps an eye on the local groups’ operations.

“CARE’s job is simply to link the local groups to food and cash and to monitor their performance. But the people doing the work are Somalis, as they should be,” says Mustaque Ahmed, program manager for CARE’s Somalia Emergency Program.

CARE intentionally draws workers and contractors from many factions to avoid being allied with one clan--and making itself the target of others. In contrast to the past, no foreigners are in the field.

Food purchased at local markets or provided by the U.N. World Food Program and USAID is taken to villages in small, battered trucks driven by Somalis who know local roads and politics. None carry CARE logos, unlike in 1992.

All food is distributed quickly and quietly in exchange for work building canals, wells, reservoirs and other anti-drought projects.

The food-for-work program has won the support of the four villages around Jiddo that have settled old differences to join in cleaning up canals built by Italian banana growers in the 1940s.

“In 1991-92 we used to get free food. You eat, you finish it, and then you are hungry again,” says one villager, Abdalla Mursal Hassan. “It’s better being helped to feed ourselves.”

Already, the villagers have repaired 12 canals, each about 6 miles long, which fell into disrepair in the early 1990s when fighting swept through the area three times and civilians fled to camps near Mogadishu, the capital.

The program has succeeded where others have failed because Somalis are responsible, says Abdulkadir Mohamed Elmi, chairman of Bani Adam, the Somali group that oversees the canal project.

“By giving food to a local NGO [nongovernmental organization], in the Somali way of thinking, if they attack that food, they’re also attacking my tribe,” he says.

In contrast, he adds, Somalis consider food controlled by foreign donors to be up for grabs--and you’d better get it before someone else does.