By Katherine Arie
AlertNetJanuary 2, 2003
What might every aid worker need in his or her travel kit? What guidelines should they follow when cooperating with the military? How should they react if caught in crossfire while trying to dole out food?
Two British former aid workers, Barney Mayhew and Mark Hammersley, have established a website where such questions can be posted and answers can be found quickly.
Still experimental but fully functional and growing fast, the Aid Workers Network (www.aidworkers.net) is a "one-stop shop" where aid workers can share experience and find resources to help them with their work in the field. "Aid Workers Network enables people to help each other solve problems," Mayhew told AlertNet. So far, the free, member-based network has attracted 1,100 people in 90 countries.
The website is divided into two parts: the Forum, where members can ask and answer questions on a variety of topics, from "Being an Aid Worker" to "Programme Implementation," and the Aid Workers Exchange, a weekly e-mail bulletin intended to be useful for aid workers who can receive e-mail but have limited Internet access or slow connections.
The Aid Workers Exchange contains brief articles of particular interest to Network members which are not available elsewhere on the Internet. One of the most popular articles offers tips on how to manage time efficiently, in order to keep a field operation running smoothly. Others focus on road safety, record management, how to apply development principles during emergency relief and how to plan an effective exit strategy at the end of an aid programme.
The site also provides links to manuals and documents, such as the Sphere Project's standards for disaster response and MANGO (Management Accounting for Non Governmental Organisations) guidelines on writing funding proposals, and the People in Aid's Code of Best Practice in the Management and Support of Aid Personnel.
In effect, the network provides busy aid workers -- who have little time or are unable to search the Internet's thousands of pages of documents written in various languages -- with short cuts to information. "The problem isn't that manuals don't exist, or that valuable information isn't available, but you have to know where to look," said Hammersley.
"The Web is full of information but it's difficult to find practical advice," Mayhew agreed.
VARIETY OF LANGUAGES
"In the multi-national community of aid workers, which operates in a variety of languages and where terms are not always standardised, often what's needed is someone to say, here, this is what you need."
At one point, Mayhew found himself in this position. After brief stints as an officer in the British Army, a ceasefire negotiator in former Yugoslavia and a U.N. coordinator of humanitarian affairs in Rwanda, he took a job in the mid 1990s as Christian Aid's manager in eastern Congo, then Zaire. "I had never worked for an NGO before," he said. "I arrived during a war and realised I needed a manual on how to do a 'seeds and tools' programme. You need so many things, and you can trouble your head office only once or twice a week."
The experience triggered the idea for the Aid Workers Network.
Mayhew met Hammersley in Bukavu, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was working as a programme manager for AlertNet member the International Rescue Committee. Hammersley had left a management consulting job in London to work in a bar in Rwanda, before joining the IRC. "That's where I learned about conversations between aid workers," Hammersley said. "They'd come to unwind after very stressful days, trying to solve important problems. At the field level, everyone mucks in together, sharing information and giving support."
Five years later, the Aid Workers Network was born. In many ways, the need for such a service has never been greater.
In recent years, the job of providing aid has become more complex. Aid workers increasingly find themselves in security risk areas and operating out of hazardous duty stations. Disasters, too, are not what they used to be. Famine, for example, was once caused by a lack of rainfall. Today, it is caused mainly by war and often perpetuated by politics, which frustrate and sometimes prevent relief efforts.
As a result, aid workers must deal with a head-spinning number of issues, including the proper procurement and distribution of supplies, financial management, staff retention, risk assessment, contingency and evacuation planning, security and health, communications networking, and vehicle safety. "A specialist quite quickly has to be a generalist," said Mayhew. "A doctor must have management experience to make sure his staff is paid, he has to think about the security of the team, logistics."
MORAL CHALLENGES
Many of the things that an aid worker must learn are of the nuts-and-bolts variety, but aid staff also face moral challenges, which tend to fox even seasoned veterans. They must be ready to deal with corruption, with bribes at checkpoints, even the tricky subject of sex, sometimes of the "fee-for-service" variety, between aid workers and beneficiaries.
Then there is a host of things that an aid worker who has already set out into the field might not have anticipated needing: for example a standard job description for an accountant, a manual on land-mine awareness, a pocket calculator.
To make matters worse, many aid workers are not properly trained and simply do not know what to expect. There is no standard training program for aid workers. Traditionally, humanitarian aid agencies have trained workers in logistics management and to be technical experts. A growing number of organisations offer security training. But many aid workers are sent to the field with inadequate skills.
"This is a serious problem," a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told AlertNet. "Too often, expatriates sent into disaster situations are not prepared for where they are going, are not familiar with humanitarian principles, with basics such as Sphere standards, with the country or contexts, with the background information, with any sense of 'lessons learned' from previous disasters, with the national culture, with the security concerns."
When a disaster strikes, the necessary rapidity of response often leads to the deployment of less qualified and less experienced people than would be desired. There is little time for training at that point. "The overall need is for better general training within organisations and more support to staff when they are on the ground," the USAID consultant said.
Providing support for field workers on the ground is what the Aid Workers Network aims to achieve. "That's the niche we felt was missing," Mayhew said. Mayhew and Hammersley hope the Network will help to fill the void, but they point out that it is not, and is not intended to be, a replacement for proper training.
Nor does it take a normative stance on anything. For example, both Mayhew and Hammersley lament that standards are not more widely shared with new aid workers. However, instead of coaching its members, the network simply points them in the right direction. "We help to implement standards by making links to Sphere available," Hammersley said.
Indeed, the Network does not take a view on any of the issues that are debated on its bulletin boards. It simply provides space for discussion of different perspectives, with the goal of giving a voice to people who struggle to have a voice in the international forum. "Members participate as individuals, not representatives of organisations," said Hammersley. To facilitate open discussion, the Network does not ask a member's nationality. "That way, people can participate without being distracted by who is an expatriate or who is not."
Mayhew believes that the arrangement can help break down barriers. "Expats swing in and hold the purse strings," he said. "And there is a great divide, or the perception of a great divide, between expats and local workers. By not asking the nationality of members, it helps to give one person one vote."
He says that simply providing a space for discussions has made a difference. "That alone has taken people forward. A slightly more educated group of people who are more sensitive to each other and who are listening to each other will have a better chance.
"The ultimate goal is aid work done better."
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