IAHE: Lessons from the Scaled-Up Humanitarian Response in Somalia

Over the last three decades, Somalia has received humanitarian assistance to help the country deal with violent conflict, periodic droughts and floods and other shocks, like locust infestations and the COVID-19 pandemic. Famine was declared twice during this period. In 2021 – 2023, the worst drought in 40 years hit East Africa, wreaking havoc across the region and destabilizing Somalia in particular. The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in Somalia increased rapidly. 

In response to this worsening humanitarian crisis in Somalia, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), chaired by the Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC), launched a Scale-Up Activation in 2023. In doing so, the Committee – the longest-standing and highest-level humanitarian coordination forum within the United Nations system – aimed to mitigate the devastating impacts of the drought and to prevent famine. 

To assess whether this international response achieved its objectives and to glean learnings for future scale-ups, the Emergency Relief Coordinator established an Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation (IAHE). The IASC chose the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) to conduct this evaluation, which we carried out in close collaboration with Raagsan, a Somali social enterprise. 

Some of our findings so far:

Humanitarian assistance helped prevent famine and saved many lives, but had significant unintended side effects

An estimated 74,700 people died due to the extended drought, but it would have been tens, if not hundreds of thousands more without the scaled-up assistance. However, the humanitarian response also had significant unintended effects. Assistance influenced where displaced people fled to. Affected people’s resilience was eroded by the drought and the humanitarian assistance’s shift away from livelihoods and resilience activities; it was further eroded by the negative incentives the targeting of some of the aid created. A final unintended effect of the scale-up was the increased risk of aid diversion, following the rapid, large-scale influx of additional resources.

Our recommendation:

• Strengthen awareness and understanding of how humanitarian aid influences the behavior of individuals and institutions. Seek to avoid unintended negative consequences and instead create incentives for affected people that support long-term development. 

Security management – and the related lack of international field presence – emerged as recurrent obstacles for an improved humanitarian response in Somalia

Current security management makes operations and field visits very expensive and undermines humanitarian principles; overly restrictive UN security management practices limit the operational independence of aid organizations, and the pervasive use of armed guards and escorts affect the extent to which humanitarian organizations are perceived as neutral. The lack of an international field presence has inhibited efforts to reduce aid diversion and strengthen accountability to affected people. While the humanitarian community made strong efforts to increase the delivery of assistance in hard-to-reach areas, the success of these efforts remained limited. 

Our recommendation:

• Conduct a fundamental review of humanitarian security management approaches in Somalia. 

Coordination and leadership have led to innovation, but coordination structures are overly complex and fall short of some basic practices

Important new approaches developed in Somalia serve as examples of good practice for other countries and are mostly a result of effective leadership and good coordination. However, the coordination setup is complex and involves some duplicative structures as well as some gaps. Too many meetings have low attendance and no systematic documentation and follow-up. Adding to this, essential data about the response was difficult to come by and/​or lacked plausibility.

Our recommendation:

• Streamline the humanitarian coordination structure in Somalia, reducing the number of coordination forums and meetings by at least half.

The response lacked accountability

Like other inter-agency humanitarian evaluations, the Somalia evaluation highlights a lack of accountability mechanisms within the humanitarian system that can be used to address identified and recurrent shortcomings. A key issue is the inadequate Accountability to Affected People (AAP). Efforts to strengthen AAP have focused on creating feedback mechanisms. These systems, however, proved to be not very effective. In addition, little progress was made toward establishing a collective feedback mechanism during the scale-up. 

Other key aspects of accountability to affected people have received much less attention: affected people were not involved in key decisions and have shown limited understanding of how these decisions were made.

Our recommendation:

• Make the humanitarian response more accountable by ensuring systematic follow-up to recurring recommendations at country and global levels, increasing transparency and strengthening the engagement of affected people. 

The response understandably prioritized life-saving sectors, but had critical gaps in WASH; it made some progress in reaching minorities and people in hard-to-reach areas

The Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) defined clear sectoral priorities for the response: it identified food security, health, nutrition and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) as central to famine prevention. However, different sectors expanded their coverage at different speeds, hindering the provision of integrated assistance. The WASH cluster lagged behind other priority sectors throughout 2022, with a demonstrable impact on affected people.

Important progress was made in reaching minorities, especially the strengthening of access of marginalized clans to assistance. However, other axes of exclusion, primarily gender and disability, received less attention. In terms of expanding reach in hard-to-reach areas, national and local organizations played a key role.

Our recommendation:

• Continue and expand efforts to provide an integrated response to urgent needs and to reach all population groups. Expand and replicate the good practice of using country-based pooled funds to support integrated, localized responses.

The Humanitarian Country Team’s reforms on aid diversion hold important lessons

Aid diversion is a longstanding challenge in Somalia. Following an investigation of post-delivery aid diversion, the HCT adopted a series of reform measures. These hold important lessons, including the learning that the scale-up did not pay enough attention to mitigating the increased risk of aid diversion. Moreover, significant challenges remain in implementing a joint approach to the reforms. Efforts to develop a common humanitarian beneficiary registration system, for example, saw parallel investments and were not linked to the ongoing efforts to create a Unified Social Registry or a national ID system. 

However, the reform process played an essential role in rebuilding trust and creating a spirit of transparency and cooperation between UN agencies, NGOs and donors. 

Our recommendation:

• Adopt the lessons from the HCT reforms on aid diversion. Ensure that future scale-ups include risk management as core capacity to be enhanced.

Methods used:

The evaluation draws on 153 interviews with aid actors at global and country levels, consultations with 381 affected community members and a review of key documents and data. Evaluation findings, conclusions and recommendations were validated and refined in workshops with stakeholders in Mogadishu and Geneva.

Download the full report here.