Missing pieces?

Assessing the impact of humanitarian reform in Pakistan

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Summary

The displacement of more than three million people in Pakistan has triggered one of the biggest emergency responses of the year. This paper attempts to assess the extent to which this response lived up to global commitments for providing enough aid, in the right place and at the right time, in a way that is appropriate to the needs of crisis-affected people.

Four years after the launch of the UN-led humanitarian reform process, the humanitarian system in Pakistan appears to have made some progress in terms of mobilising effective and principled humanitarian action –but still falls far short of achieving the stated objectives of the reform process.

This paper argues that more could be done to ensure that humanitarian assistance in Pakistan and other countries is more adequate, timely, flexible, impartial and appropriate to people’s needs.

Recommendations

To international donors, the Pakistani government, and UN cluster lead agencies

• Faster, more flexible and adequate funding and disbursements to frontline aid actors.
• Greater commitment to needs-based responses, with more effective coordination mechanisms and common approaches for ensuring impartial humanitarian action.
• Strong inter-cluster coordination to provide comprehensive programme recommendations on how to better analyse, assess and respond to out-of-camp IDP needs in current and future relief operations.
• A radical rethink of standard assistance models in which cluster explicitly and regularly consider what type of assistance would be the most appropriate in each phase of a humanitarian response.
• The Pakistani government should establish a national framework or policy for responding to internal displacement with UN and donor support, by strengthening district and provincial disaster management and coordination bodies.

Oxfam International Briefing Paper

Author: Nicki Bennett

Publication date: 1 October 2009