Indicators in Humanitarian Response

The complicated, but popular, question of how to measure progress in responding to humanitarian needs has become highlighted once again. At present mortality and malnutrition rates continue to serve as the most commonly used indicators for the time being, there have been renewed need for benchmarks to measure the performance of aid agencies in effective emergency response to disasters. Early 2005 following the call of British International Development Secretary for the need to set benchmarks for the scale and speed of response, DFID launched an initiative to define new sets of standards for this purpose. One suggestion made by DFID is to create standards relating to protection. There have already been debates that have taken place on this issue, in various forums, leading to the understanding that protection work does not lend itself to be translated into standards and indicators. The SPHERE project, Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response, has been the most comprehensive effort in setting standards to date. Following the Rwandan refugee crisis in 1994, the sphere standards, which are rights based, were created to improve the quality and accountability of humanitarian response. The main issue however may be that coordinators and more often practitioners seem to not know enough about the sphere standards and filling the gap of integrating sphere into coordination mechanisms. At the moment the sphere office is not alone in researching the bottlenecks for implementation of standards at the field level. In the world of standard setting, networks or initiatives, such as the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership or the Emergency capacity building initiative, undertaken by predominant NGOs are also looking at the practices of agencies using standards at the field level. Other standardized methodology for monitoring and assessing relief SMART, for example, has also been under development in other corners of the humanitarian community, but unless these new methods make their way to field level, their feasibility is under question. On the other hand, too many standards, and indicators run the risk of creating bureaucracy and even duplicating some of the same efforts in search for professionalisation of the aid community. While the need to strike a balance between techniques of needs assessments and data collection with the need for reactivity and speed in emergencies being primary issues. Hilary Benn, in answering a member of parliament's question on his most recent estimate of the number of people who have died each day on average in Darfur, stressed, back in June, on the lack of data available on mortality rates. Mortality figures continue to be key indicators in assessing the magnitude of a crisis. Many issues are raised with regards to mortality data, such as the classic ethical dilemma in making a distinction between the mortality rates in industrialized countries with those in African countries to classify emergency levels. There were also concerns about collecting and using the data which might be manipulated by political actors. This even throws up questions on the relevance and use of the most basic data with regards to human survival in emergency settings. The point was made in a survey by the Humanitarian Policy Network that mortality findings in emergencies will help to hold combatants, host governments, relief agencies, donors, international governments, and the media accountable for their possible shortcomings to respect, protect, and assist affected populations. In this respect where the UN takes the leading role in emergency response, there could be scope for improvement in the issue of having combined Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator as the preferred option. Given that here are so many Residents without adequate humanitarian experience, there should be greater efforts to try having a separate Humanitarian Coordinator in at least some situations to compare the two options. The UN has often cited that the separation does not work.. there is a fundamental dilemma in having both the RC and HC functions in cases where the government is a party to the conflict. The RC is expected to work with such a government on the development side, while at the same time, pushing issues such as humanitarian access and security. Issues around impartiality and neutrality come into question when there is a dual hat roles being undertaken by the same person.