The World Food Programme is the conventional humanitarian sector’s most well-funded agency. What do its money troubles say about where emergency aid is headed?
This is another edition of Inklings, where we explore all things aid and aid-adjacent unfolding in humanitarian hubs, on the front lines of emergency response, or in the dark corners of online aid punditry.
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Also today: Gender parity and job seniority at the World Health Organization, how to measure dodged disasters, and whatever MMDMA is.
On the radar|
Measuring up: The World Food Programme is quick and effective at scaling up but needs to better prepare for the stark financial future ahead as ground-level responses face “appalling” budget choices. That’s the verdict from the latest in a series of value-for-money industry assessments conducted by MOPAN, a network that evaluates multilateral organisations on behalf of aid donor countries. The report warns of tough times ahead for the world’s biggest humanitarian agency – and the wider aid sector. A few of the key points:
Money troubles: Squeezed donor funding is a sector-wide problem, but WFP should have anticipated the extensive cuts in the pipeline earlier, evaluators said. WFP warned staff of cuts and restructuring last October, but it should have been clear well before that the record $14 billion WFP took in in 2022 would be an anomaly. The agency finished with $8.3 billion in revenue last year – more in line with its pre-pandemic income trends.
Future planning: WFP must do more to address “severe financial challenges”. The same goes for all humanitarians, but much of WFP’s funding is earmarked for specific programmes or crises, and it is heavily concentrated (the United States supplied more than half of the agency’s income from government donors in 2022 and 2023). “WFP does not yet have a clear strategy for planning, delivering, and demonstrating value for money,” evaluators said.
Donor problems: At the same time, the agency must improve its relationships with donor governments, particularly after aid diversion scandals last year. Part of this is also WFP’s public messaging around funding, evaluators said: The agency has made extensive ration cuts across the globe in recent years, and it has often fundraised on the back of these cuts in press releases. The MOPAN report diplomatically describes these as “last-minute fundraising drives based on threats of breaks in the food distribution pipeline”.
Staff fears: When food aid diversion was revealed in Ethiopia last year (uncovered by USAID, rather than WFP itself), senior staff were removed. This has had a ripple effect for staff elsewhere. After all, aid diversion is a reality, not an exception, experts say – even if the sector hates talking about it. “Some employees in-country have concerns about whether WFP will support them when things go wrong, given the organisation’s response to the aid diversion in Ethiopia when senior country managers were removed from their posts,” evaluators said. Meanwhile, major restructuring at the top of WFP “created anxiety among staff”, as have ”current resource reductions, which will also affect employment levels”.
Partial disclosure: A recent internal audit showed that staff responsible for billions of dollars in contracts and grants aren’t required to take part in the UN’s financial disclosure programme – a tool to prevent conflict of interest. As contributor Stéphanie Fillion recently outlined, the loophole includes a majority of staff who approve grants or manage large trust funds for the UN’s humanitarian aid arm, OCHA, and the human rights office, OHCHR. The UN publishes some financial disclosure filings as part of the programme – but only on a voluntary basis. The head of OCHA, Martin Griffiths, has not publicly disclosed his declaration. He’s entitled not to, though most others who share his rank of under-secretary-general did in 2023. Previous relief chiefs appear to have been a bit shy as well. There are no filings from Griffiths’ predecessor, Mark Lowcock. On the other hand, Stephen O’Brien filed twice in three years. Valerie Amos has records for three years, as does John Holmes (who started a run of five straight UK nationals as relief chiefs back in 2007). But as Fillion notes, these honour system disclosures are “typically short on information”.
Meanwhile: Griffiths, of course, is stepping down as relief chief due to long COVID. There’s plenty of speculation of who his successor will be (and which passport that person will likely have). Griffiths has said he’ll leave at the end of June. But it appears UN Secretary-General António Guterres won’t be naming a new relief chief before July hits.
Data points|
How is the World Health Organization doing on the gender parity of its workforce? That depends on how high up you go.
The WHO says just over half of its long-term staff are women (50.3%), according to an HR report that went before the agency’s executive board earlier this year. But the share of women inches down as seniority levels rise.
Women comprise about 44% of jobs at the P4 level and higher (P4 jobs require seven years of experience and a master’s degree). Only a third of director-level positions are held by women.
In other words, the higher the pay grade, the greater the imbalance:
Women are a clear majority in one category, the report notes: As of July last year, 67% of WHO’s interns were women.
Acronymage|
ADA: How do you count the benefits of dodging a disaster that never struck? The Averted Disaster Awards was created with this in mind. The Lamu County Emergency Operation Centre in Kenya snagged this year’s top prize, recognised for averting five major disasters. In a recent case, prevention efforts helped mitigate severe flooding in late 2023 by evacuating 4,900 families and their livestock three weeks before floods set in. This prevented the deaths of at least 109 people, according to the award’s analysis.
HINIVUU: The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva has a new café, and it’s on brand (if a bit on the nose). Café HINIVUU is named after the core principles of the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary, service, unity, and universality. The rest of the humanitarian sector usually drifts off after the first four.
MMDMA: Precariously abbreviated, the Migration Management Digital Maturity Assessment is a tool the International Organization for Migration is starting to use to measure “digital maturity” in countries.
End quote|
“They’re going to have to make a case for it, and the case can no longer be that children are starving.”
Rachel Scott is senior assessment manager at MOPAN. She worked on the WFP evaluation above, and chatted with me about some of the key points below.
The New Humanitarian: The evaluation dips into system-wide problems that affect more than just WFP. You warn: “There is a risk that donors may insist more and more on funding their own political priorities rather than meeting needs”. What do you mean by this?
Rachel Scott: I think there are concerns that humanitarian principles risk not being behind funding decisions anymore. And how far is that going to go? [Donors could say:] “We’re only funding our pet projects going forward”. There’s a real risk in that. And how do [aid organisations] set themselves up to make sure the narrative they’re pitching is what they’re doing, and why it’s important, and why it’s good value to be doing this. That’s going to be a big challenge for the system going forward.
I think [humanitarian] principles has gone past an issue that is just about access. The risk is that, in this geopolitical environment, it also becomes about funding – especially because humanitarian aid is so earmarked.
… We’re still in this denial thing in the humanitarian community, that it’s all going to be fine, and all this stuff is temporary, and it’s all going to go back to the way it was, and it’s not.
The New Humanitarian: The report rates WFP well on many fronts, with a few exceptions. For “the organisation provides value for money”, WFP was given an “unsatisfactory” score. That seems like a pretty important one.
Rachel Scott: It’s all about this new funding environment. They’re going to have to make a case for it, and the case can no longer be that children are starving, because geopolitical interests are getting in the way of that. It’s no longer: “Somebody’s starving, I’m going to send you some money”.
So they are going to have to make the case that, not only is this the right thing to do, but also, “We have [considered] all the different ways that we could do this, and this is the best way”. This is not exclusive to WFP. The system itself doesn’t look at value for money.
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