The UN is once again confronting the need for reform – which is neither surprising nor new. International humanitarian organisations tend to expand as new crises and priorities bring new responsibilities, structures and layers of support. Over time, however, structures created to respond to particular needs can become permanent features of the system, even as needs, priorities and available resources change.
The current UN80 reform process is therefore necessary and timely. Reducing positions, consolidating functions and supply chains, relocating activities to lower-cost locations and eliminating duplication can all produce important savings.
But will they be enough?
UN organisations have been through periods of retrenchment before. When resources decline, positions are abolished, structures consolidated and expenditures reduced. When funding improves, organisations tend to expand again as new priorities and demands emerge.
Perhaps the present financial pressure should prompt a more fundamental question: not simply how the humanitarian system can perform its existing functions at lower cost, but whether international organisations need to perform all those functions themselves.
One proposition that deserves serious examination is considering a substantially greater role for the private sector in humanitarian delivery.
Businesses already supply humanitarian organisations with food, vehicles, fuel, technology, transport, warehousing and numerous other goods and services. Nevertheless, humanitarian organisations generally assemble these inputs into their own delivery systems.
What if, in appropriate circumstances, private operators were contracted to take responsibility for much more of the chain, from procurement through logistics to final distribution, while humanitarian organisations defined the required outcomes, established standards and safeguards, and independently verified performance?
This is not an argument that private companies are inherently more efficient, or that such a model would work everywhere. It is a proposition worth testing: whether competition, commercial incentives and the adaptability of businesses can deliver certain humanitarian outcomes more efficiently – and at lower cost – than maintaining permanent institutional capacity to deliver them directly.
During my humanitarian career, I was involved in one particularly sensitive operation in which a large population, fleeing war, had become extremely difficult to reach. The country remains unnamed to protect the population’s identity. They were stranded in a harsh and isolated desert environment, far from established communities, markets and basic infrastructure, in a place where no normal economic or social life existed. Considerable senior management time went into negotiating access, and several ambassadors became involved in lobbying for a solution. Eventually, an exceptional direct distribution operation was mounted.
The cost of direct distribution went far beyond the cost of the items themselves and their transport. Because the operation was implemented directly, it was subject to the UN’s extensive administrative and security protocols, with all the associated costs. Add the diplomatic engagement, negotiations and senior management time needed to secure access, and the true cost was considerably greater than the conventional cost of moving assistance from one point to another.
We subsequently tried a different approach. A private operator assumed responsibility for the operation, from procurement and transport into the area to undertaking the distribution. Commercial actors found ways of navigating an environment in which conventional humanitarian access had become extraordinarily difficult, and the operation was carried out at a significantly lower cost than the earlier direct operation.
What was particularly striking, however, was that while humanitarian access remained extremely difficult and costly, commercial activity began to emerge within the affected area. Reports from inside suggested that goods were being traded and money-transfer businesses had begun operating, indicating that commercial networks were finding ways to serve a population that conventional humanitarian operations were struggling to access.
That experience left me with a question that has stayed with me ever since: is the objective of humanitarian access to secure access for the humanitarian organisation, or to secure access of humanitarian assistance to the people who need it?
The two are not necessarily the same.
Recent reports from Gaza raise related questions but also shed light on the issue. Amid extraordinary destruction, insecurity, restrictions and humanitarian need, commercial activity has continued. In its humanitarian situation report released last month, Ocha – the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs – reported 884 commercial lorryloads entering Gaza in a single week, of which 290 carried goods classified as non-essential.
That is remarkable. It demonstrates that commercial networks can continue to identify demand and move goods in extraordinarily difficult environments.
Profit is clearly an incentive for commercial operators. But profit cannot exist without demand, and effective demand requires purchasing power. What is perhaps most striking in Gaza is that, given the extraordinary destruction, displacement and deprivation, one might hardly imagine sufficient purchasing power remaining to sustain meaningful commercial activity, let alone demand for non-essential goods. Yet such trade persists.
This does not mean markets can replace humanitarian action. It does demonstrate that commercial networks can be remarkably resilient and adaptive, finding ways to connect supply with demand even in some of the world’s most difficult operating environments.
We should be examining much more systematically what markets and private operators might be capable of doing as part of humanitarian response.
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Nepali nationals are attempting to deliver critical aid to areas cut off by the August 26 flash floods. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Days after the flood hit Nuwakot district, houses are still buried under mud. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Nepali businessman Shree Lamichhane, with interests in Dubai and the US, reached the flood-hit area two days after disaster struck to distribute blankets, clothes and food. Chris Whiteoak / The National -
Mr Lamichhane reported seeing villages and towns left inundated with thick mud. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Mr Lamichhane will return to Nepal on the weekend of September 5 bringing more aid. Shree Lamichhane -
Mr Lamichhane travelled to Nepal with a group of friends from Dubai, India, the US and Belgium. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
The group took aid to Nuwakot district, which was among the worst-hit regions. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Citizens say Nepal will need long-term support for the thousands who can never return to their devastated homes. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Flood water caused damage to buildings even up to four and five storeys high. Photo: Shree Lamichhane -
Nepali citizen Rajani Thapa is travelling with aid workers to places with no road access to deliver food, medical supplies and sanitary pads. Photo: Rajani Thapa
Greater private-sector implementation would not mean transferring humanitarian responsibility to businesses. Quite the opposite. It would require international humanitarian organisations to become stronger in the functions that only they can credibly perform.
Needs assessment, beneficiary identification, data and analysis, programme design, market intelligence, planning, humanitarian standards, monitoring, evaluation and accountability should be areas for greater investment, not simply targets for cost reduction.
An organisation that directly executes less must become exceptionally good at deciding what needs to be done, setting the standards by which it is done and independently determining whether it worked.
Outsourcing execution does not necessarily mean outsourcing verification or accountability. Indeed, accountability would need to become stronger, not weaker.
Private operators could be contracted against clearly defined deliverables, with payment dependent on verifiable evidence that assistance had reached the intended population. But distribution is an output, not the ultimate humanitarian outcome. Averting famine, saving lives and improving well-being are the outcomes that matter. This is where the role of international humanitarian organisations becomes even more important: setting the standards and defining the intended outcomes at the outset, and then independently assessing whether those outcomes have actually been achieved.
Humanitarian organisations should therefore retain independent post-distribution monitoring and assessment. The private operator delivers and demonstrates that delivery, the humanitarian organisation independently verifies performance and determines whether the intervention improved people’s lives.
That would shift attention from measuring organisations’ activity towards measuring humanitarian results.
Local commercial operators often possess something international organisations cannot easily reproduce: intimate knowledge of how their environment works. They understand local authorities, including de facto authorities, transport networks, communities and security dynamics. And they have powerful commercial incentives to find workable ways through difficult operating environments.
There are legitimate risks. Markets can fail and contractors can underperform. But those risks can be addressed through competition, clear standards, independent verification and strong humanitarian oversight.
UN80 is addressing important questions about structures, efficiency and costs. These efforts are necessary. But this reform moment also offers an opportunity to ask something more fundamental: not simply how to operate the existing humanitarian machinery with fewer resources, but how much of that machinery international organisations need to operate themselves.
This question is particularly important given the way humanitarian action is financed. A system that depends substantially on voluntary and unpredictable funding cannot sustainably build and maintain permanent staffing and infrastructure without long-term financial predictability.
A more flexible operating model could be better suited to this financial reality. Contracting private operators for clearly defined functions and results could allow implementation capacity to expand when needs and resources increase and contract when they decline, without requiring humanitarian organisations to repeatedly build and later dismantle permanent structures.
It could be a differently configured one: leaner and more flexible in implementation, but stronger in needs assessment, analysis and programme design; more robust in standards, monitoring and accountability; more focused on outcomes than institutional activity; and more willing to harness the adaptability of markets and private enterprise – where the evidence shows they can deliver more efficiently and cost-effectively.
