Remote management of humanitarian assistance
Delivering a programme through partners and locally recruited staff when international staff cannot be present. Remote management is usually adopted as a security measure and it moves risk rather than removing it.
What remote management is
The term covers a range of arrangements that share one feature: the decisions, the money and the accountability sit with an organisation whose staff are not at the point of delivery. The degrees vary. A programme may be managed from a capital city with occasional visits. It may be managed from a neighbouring country. It may be managed entirely through a local partner, with the international organisation never present.
Why organisations adopt it
Remote management is adopted when the risk to international staff of being present exceeds what the organisation is prepared to accept, and when the need it is responding to has not gone away. It is therefore often a decision taken under pressure, by an organisation that has already decided to continue the programme, and it is frequently adopted without an assessment of what it does to the risk carried by everybody else.
What it moves, and to whom
- To national staff. The people who remain are the ones exposed, and they usually cannot leave. Their profile, their families and their future in the country are all bound up with the programme in ways that an international contract is not.
- To partner organisations. A local partner that delivers on behalf of an international agency takes on the visibility of that agency without its resources, its insurance or its ability to relocate staff.
- To the people served. A programme delivered at a distance is harder to monitor, harder to correct and easier to capture by local actors. Where the assistance is diverted, the population bears the consequence.
- To the accuracy of the assessment. An organisation that is not present cannot see what is happening. Its context analysis degrades, and every subsequent decision is made on worse information.
What the record recommended
Four measures recur. Assess the risk to the people who will actually deliver the work, rather than to the staff who are being withdrawn, and record the difference. Fund the local partner to manage security properly, rather than requiring it to absorb the cost of a presence the international organisation has decided it cannot maintain. Build in verification that does not depend on the partner reporting on itself, because the arrangement removes the ordinary oversight along with the staff. And set a review date, because remote management tends to become permanent by default and the conditions that justified it are rarely re-examined.
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.