by Jean-Dominique Merchet
LibérationMarch 7, 2002
After 17 years spent in the field of humanitarian aid, Sylvie Brunel has thrown in the towel; disgusted. At 41, this geographer resigned from the presidency of Action Contre La Faim. Before that, she was responsible for research at MSF.
Interview with Sylvie Brunel, ex-President of Action Contre la Faim
Why are you resigning as president of ACF only 8 months after your election?
I quickly realized that it was a business. The gap is widening between people's expectations (primarily donors) and the reality of NGOs. Unfortunately, these organizations are working more for themselves than for their so-called beneficiaries. I was hoping to be able to reverse this trend but I didn't have the means to change this situation. I'm not sure that donors understand how the organizations they support are getting off track.
Who are these donors?
For ACF, it's 500,000 people giving 75 million francs each year – but humanitarian organizations together reach many more people by communications and fundraising. When NGOs say that 80% of their budget goes "to the field," they forget to mention that the field includes the salaries of those in headquarters who are working – however loosely – for the programmes in the field.
What are the problems you have come up against?
First of all, I discovered that the levels of salaries, without being shocking in and of themselves, seem incompatible with being an association which asks for public money. In many NGOs today, salaries of upper management are over 30,000 FFs a month. Salaries seem to have sky-rocketed in recent years, and not only at ACF. NGOs respond that if you want professionals you have to pay them. This makes sense to me, but donors have to be informed. Today the average donor makes three of four times less than the heads of NGOs. And he doesn't know it because the NGOs do not function in a transparent manner.
I didn't want to be accused one day of cheating donors, who are constantly receiving mailings in which you can see a kid in Sudan which is telling them "if you don't give 100 FF, he will die." The NGOs who demand transparency from everybody and who spend their time preaching to others are not practicing what they preach. These structures have produced "nomenklaturas" that have little to do with humanitarianism, with regard neither to their salary nor their mentality. Business is booming, and the point is not to rock the boat. Actions are rarely evaluated, and when they are, nobody gets to see the evaluations.
In other words?
I have the distinct impression that, at ACF, the criteria for opening and closing missions have become purely financial. The length of missions depends not on their usefulness, but on whether or not funders are willing to finance the missions, and for how long. Is the profit margin on the missions enough to pay for the costs of HQ? NGOs say that they are independent; they claim to go where the needs are. I, however, have seen boards that make decisions purely on a financial basis. To ask which are the "profitable" missions, a term constantly being used, seems to be the main concern. We have become subcontractors of the big funders. All this shocks me, because we have an obligation to our donors, and particularly to the populations that we were created to help in 1979. Of course we have an "emergency fund," but it is mainly used to finance structural costs. We are not able to respond to emergencies in less than three weeks, during which time people die of hunger, but we still collect funds.
Three weeks is huge!
It's a lot – but many NGOs are even slower. We are happy to immediately send representatives to plant the flag, to justify the fundraising appeal. When there is an emergency, some NGOs are very good at alerting the media and giving their name and bank account number to donors. Afterwards, they take weeks to act effectively on the ground. For Afghanistan, NGOs asked for funds for weeks and weeks, during which time they were doing little or nothing.
What about the Sierra Leone affair, where NGOs have been implicated in the sexual exploitation of refugees?
This brings up the problem of transparency and monitoring of missions. I hope that this scandal forces organizations to question more their way of working. And I hope that the Sierra Leone affair will be an exception, but I am not at all certain.
Is the absence of monitoring widespread?
Even the best NGOs rarely give a proper account of their actions. They always say, "We are going to open a feeding center," "We are going to distribute medicine," but they rarely get out of the cycle of "victim-donation." There are few evaluations of programs, little transparency on the criteria for intervention. I learned recently that in order to avoid keeping mothers with their children for a month while the kids are in a feeding center for severely malnourished children, ACF is now testing nutrition biscuits that can be distributed directly at home. However, it seems that these products must be taken with drinking water, and that they are badly tolerated in certain cases. Why haven't such actions been the focus ahead of time of debates on the ethics?
Humanitarian action seems to be running wild….
I have the feeling that some NGOs use the argument of suffering to justify their existence and increase their market share. To keep going becomes their main reason for being and their real "beneficiaries" their nomenklatura. Many NGOs are only associations by virtue of their fiscal statutes and the fact that they don't give out dividends. But their marketing practices distance them from their true objectives and make them real businesses. Their situation will become more and more delicate, because, until now, their costs have been financed by the "profit margin of the missions," with donors providing the rest. But these "margins" will get smaller and smaller because institutional funders are more and more reluctant to feed machines that get bigger and bigger without necessarily intervening more effectively in the field.
Despite everything, humanitarian action continues to attract.
There is always a need for militancy, and so much the better. But I am sad to think that in becoming volunteers in the field, many young people give their lives and their skills in the service of an idea which sometimes brings cruel disillusionment.
I've come to believe in a paradox, after 17 years with NGOs and in the humanitarian field, that the state should restore order and demand more transparency on the part of the humanitarian community. Nowadays, in the name of humanitarian action, people will do anything.
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