Episode 7: Humanitarian Standards
Tanya Wood has more than 20 years of management experience in the humanitarian sector, in both headquarters and countries such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Haiti. Her career has been focused on leadership roles within international membership organizations, including the IFRC, International Council of Voluntary Agencies, Neglected Tropical Disease NGO Network, and others. She combines her leadership experience in international membership organizations with experience of accountability and humanitarian standards. She is currently the Executive Director of the CHS Alliance and co-author of their new report entitled: Humanitarian Accountability Report 2020: Are we making aid work better for people affected by crisis? She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.
She speaks to us about:
power dynamics in the sector
combining patient led health approaches with aid delivery
network organizations and the idea of ‘the collective’
the history of the Core Humanitarian Standard
the data used in the report
the need to measure commitments made to people affected by crisis
the gap between policy and practice
individual vs systemic change
living our values and principles
how the standard can be improved - and much more!
Transcript
Intro: I think the question really has to be applicable to the broader sector. What we hope from the people who've read the report is that the sector recalls its commitments that it's made. But what I also think the report does is offer, I suppose, a congratulatory approach to those organizations who've really taken that next step, to actually say, if we're going to have this standard, and this is the essential elements of principled and accountable aid, I need to be able to measure myself against them.
Safa: Welcome back to The Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa, and I'm your host, thank you for joining me as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all career stages and organizational affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Tanya Wood, the Executive Director of the CHS Alliance, a network of more than 150 organizations committed to making aid work better for people through application of their core humanitarian standard. Tanya has more than 20 years of management experience in the international humanitarian sector, in both headquarters and other countries such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Haiti. Her career has been focused on leadership roles within international membership organizations, including the IFRC, International Council of Voluntary agencies, neglected tropical disease NGO network, and others. She combines her leadership experience in international membership organizations with experience of accountability and humanitarian standards, having worked previously with Sphere as an auditor of the CHS with the Humanitarian Quality Assurance initiative. Tanya, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Tanya: Thank you so much, Safa. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Safa: Thank you. Just to begin with, maybe you could share why you first wanted to work in this sector, what motivated you and what you were hoping to contribute to at the earlier stages of your career?
Tanya: That's such a great question, Safa. Because I think when you ask that question, it makes you see the different connections along the way of why and how you've come to work in the sector that you have. I think like, for many of us, it goes back to our sort of childhood, upbringing, being born in the 70s and growing up through the 80s with the Band Aid musical charity and the work there on our television screens, I think started to give that overview as a small impressionable kid on the world out there and what was needed to help and that piqued my interest. My parents, my mom was a nurse, and my dad was a Siberian academic. So we had this sort of caring and compassionate side in the family mixed with this sort of adventurous exploration of cultures, which was such a influence on me growing up, sort of the big world to be explored. And that led me to study anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And I think that was quite a transformative moment for taking all these great ideals that you have growing up as a child, and then going to this quite radical university that just sort of destroyed those ideas and makes you really like, reflect and think on the more challenging aspects of what we're trying to do and who's trying to do it and for what and the sort of the challenges of the colonial approach to development and aid, and that was kind of an excellent grounding, I think. But then I still went on to work for the Red Cross, which was my real passion, for working in emergency and humanitarian responses for over 10 years.
Safa: Over the years, you've had different roles. You've worked, as you said, with the IFRC as a field coordinator in Sri Lanka in the post-tsunami operations environment and also in Haiti after the earthquake. Could you tell us what were some of the major ethical issues you observed or you faced in your own work?
Tanya: Yeah, I think this is really interesting to reflect on, for how the sector also has shifted. I worked for the IFRC, sort of in my 20s and 30s. Traveling like many of my contemporary peers, where we would go off to various emergencies, and I reflect on it now and think that I think the sector is starting to question its approach to sending expatriates out to these areas, but not only sending them out, I think this idea of sort of who knows best? And I think, I'd like to think anyway, the sector is reflecting on that. And it's now much more aware of sort of building on the voice of people affected, listening to them, learning from them, working with national partners, working with the government, and whose responsibility is it. But I have to admit, and I'm sure most of us do, if we reflect on our work sort of 10,15, 20 years ago, there was this real arrogance that we could run off, and this goes to the sort of the power dynamics in the system. We were backed up with the funding and the remit and the approach of sending young people out to these kind of extremely complex environments. We still do that. But I think we do it with a more critical approach than what we did in the past.
Safa: And in terms of your own work, how have you reflected on your own positionality, maybe as a British woman, or at that time you were a younger person? Or was there maybe a particular moment or a series of experiences that kind of led you to change how you think, or maybe decide not to take on those kind of roles anymore?
Tanya: You know, maybe not one specific thing, but I think, a series of events. I think Sri Lanka and the tsunami operation was a turning point for lots of people who worked in the sector. It was a difficult, challenging response on so many levels. But I think it was formative for, we can't carry on sending lots of people into these operations, and into complex political situations, there has to be a rethink for how we look at the sort of ethics of aid. And then maybe on a more sort of personal anecdote after Sri Lanka, I went and worked in the Caribbean for four years and in the Caribbean, is one of those unique opportunities to work in a region- I was so aware of my Britishness and the challenges of my Britishness in the Caribbean, with the history of the region, and that was quite humbling. But also in a place with excellent colleagues, very collegial ways of spending a lot of time there, I was there for five years, investing in the place and the dialogue and the discussion, to make me very aware of my own - my own Britishness, as I say, working as head of a region for the Caribbean, was sort of slightly awkward, and should have been awkward. And then maybe just to sort of flesh out the sort of change in career that I took after that time, which I moved from the humanitarian sector and took a slight career shift into working on leprosy and neglected tropical diseases. And there, I suppose was where I got the real opportunity and chance, that I hadn't in the humanitarian sector to that point, of really working on this idea of patient-led approaches to the work, to aid delivery or health delivery as it was. We invested a lot in working with and for the people affected by leprosy, their own advocacy, putting them in real positions of leadership and advocacy on their own rights. And that was a really fascinating approach to work on. The two married together in a way of this sort of accountability to people affected and sort of where are we putting the voice and where are we putting power? And that was an interesting step out from this, the machine and the humanitarian approach into something quite different. And then very sort of rewarding to then come to the CHS Alliance.
Safa: Yes. So you mentioned your transition to the CHS Alliance - in 2018 you became the Executive Director. Could you tell us about maybe what interested you in this role and what you hoped to contribute to in terms of accountability processes in the sector?
Tanya: It was and it is an amazing role for two reasons, maybe more, but for two that leap out - it really was this continuation of the sort of who holds the power in the sector and whose voice are we listening to. And the CHS Alliance and its history with accountability - coming from the Humanitarian Accountability Project, then into the CHS Alliance, with a real core that is about listening to the people that have been affected by crisis, that's the sort of fundamental essence of the CHS. Continuing from this work that I had done around sort of patient centered approaches in the health world, it really was just a fantastic next opportunity to really invest in what that means coming back into the humanitarian sector. And then it tied together with my career in sort of membership organizations, this idea of the collective, the idea of building on a network approach to these standards, and what does it mean to affect change by trying to get organizations to be accountable to a standard? And how can I use the past that I had of working in membership networks to try and see how we can leverage more take up of the CHS, but also more accountability to the CHS, to really work on what its potential is for a transformational standard for the sector.
Safa: Mm hmm. So the CHS stands for Core Humanitarian Standard, and the Alliance has, through a global consultation process, created a set of standards called the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability, which comprises of nine commitments that members of the Alliance can voluntarily measure their work against. Could you speak to us a bit about the history of the standard or how it was authored and why those nine commitments were specifically chosen? And if they've changed over time or not?
Tanya: Yeah, certainly, I think it's a fascinating process. The Core Humanitarian Standard came about in really sort of 2013-2014 with, as you say Safa, this very broad consultation in the sector, not only with sort of NGOs, the UN, donors, but also with national governments, people affected by crisis themselves, to look at what a core standard could be. And what the Core Humanitarian Standard does is really outline the essential elements of principles and accountability and high quality aid. And as you can imagine, that's a pretty challenging consultation process to really try and nail down and condense what should be the essential elements. And the fact that they were able to do that, at the time through this consultation, to come to these nine commitments - I think what the real beauty is of what was achieved, and that was before my time, but what the real beauty of what was achieved then was writing these commitments as the commitments we were making as a sector to the people affected by crisis. So they're written in a way with the intention that people who are affected by crisis, receiving aid should be able to better hold organizations to account and also vice versa, they should know what they can expect and be able to demand that. So that's the intention. And these nine commitments where the boil down of what the essential elements could be. Just on the terms of who it's for, maybe just to mention and clarify, this was really produced by the sector for the sector. It came out of the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response initially, which is the largest NGOs and the Red Cross movement network. But it really became a sector wide standard, which was endorsed by the sector just before the World Humanitarian Summit. The other piece that I think is really interesting with the CHS, the Core Humanitarian Standard, which had been tried before with the previous Humanitarian Accountability Standards was that it's not only voluntary, but it also is verifiable. And this is really important for us as the CHS Alliance, because it we really ask, not only our members, but organizations across the sector, to not only say yes, they agree with this standard, and they will implemented it. What we ask them to do is go through and really measure how they're achieving those commitments that they've made to people affected. And they have to measure their approach. They have to account for their approach. And then it's a four year cycle of improvement. So it's not just saying whether they meet these commitments. They have to kind of show how they're meeting those commitments. And they're also going on a journey to make sure that they make improvements. That's potentially transformational. Whether we're there yet we can talk more about that, but the idea within this is quite different from the sort of more voluntary approach that we've taken to standards in the past. Maybe I would just like to clarify there that of course it still is a voluntary standard. And you mentioned about who and how it's authored by - the standard is ourselves as the CHS Alliance. And then we jointly own the standard with the Sphere Standards, which are long known standards in the humanitarian sector, and Group URD, a French organization who also own the third copyright of these standards. And the intention of that was to really make it a sector-wide standard, rather than just something that was specific for one organization to be promoting, but give it more leverage in the sector.
Safa: Earlier, you mentioned working with membership organizations, and this idea of the collective or organizations within the sector coming together to work towards a specific goal. When it comes to these nine commitments and applying them, could you speak to how different organizations, in different contexts with different stakeholders each can apply them in their own way, even though it's like a common set of commitments? What are the ways in which it can be applied differently, given the context of each organization?
Tanya: I think this gets a little to the heart of where the CHS is right now. What I mentioned before in terms of the CHS is really written as a set of commitments that is made to the affected people. And what could and should be the great leveler of the CHS, is that it shouldn't really matter whether you are a small, community-based organization, whether you're UNICEF, whether you're OCHA, whether you're a large INGO, international NGO, in the sector, those commitments are made to affected people. And they should all be able to be measured in different ways. But they should all be applicable by any organization. And that's really important if you think about what the essence is of this, which is, ultimately that the people themselves can know what to expect and hold organizations to account. And that shouldn't matter, whether you're wearing the Red Cross T-shirt, whether you're wearing the Oxfam T-shirt, whether you're wearing the local church organization T-shirt, it shouldn't be about that organization, it should be about the person themselves, knowing what they should expect and being able to hold those organizations to account. Now, that's the essence of it. What we're finding over time is obviously there's different challenges in how organizations apply the standard. And the verification process that we ask organizations to go through, we now have around, I think, latest figures is 91 organizations that have been through a verification process and roughly about 110 different data sets. And what we are able to glean from that is that actually, a lot of the challenges are the same that organizations have. For some national organizations, it's actually easier to meet the commitments because you have less chain of difference between yourselves and the person that you're working with. Whereas obviously, for the sort of larger organizations where there's such a chain of different organizational processes to go through, it's sometimes harder. But we have now different data sets on the UN through to the large INGOs through to national NGOs, and it's painting a picture for us of how these commitments are being met.
Safa: Mm hmm. So last week, you released your 2020 Humanitarian Accountability Report, of which you were co-author. And the overarching question that the report asks or seeks to answer is whether we are making aid better for people affected by crisis. So just to break that down, could you speak to what the "we" refers to, if that's just the members of the CHS Alliance or also the broader sector?
Tanya: I think there's two lenses that we look at the "we" through. The CHS doesn't belong to the CHS Alliance. It really does belong to the sector. So are we making aid work better for people affected by crisis, which was the intent of the CHS, and that the sector itself launched it more than five years ago - I think the question really has to be applicable to the broader sector. And what we hope from the people who've read the report is that the sector recalls its commitments that it's made. But what I also think the report does is offer, I suppose, a congratulatory approach to those organizations who've really taken that next step, to actually say: Well, if we're going to have this standard, and this is the essential elements of principled and accountable aid, then I need to be able to measure myself against them. So while it takes a sort of moralistic approach to the whole sector, what it also does is produce an evidence-based picture, which is reliant on the 90 + organizations that have gone through the verification. So I think we are trying to bridge two things with the report, the sort of more moralistic approach of where we are having set ourselves this standard, and then the more evidence-based of what the verification data is telling us.
Safa: Mm hmm. So speaking of that more evidence-based approach, could you speak to the different data sets that the report is based on or maybe just the process of collecting and analyzing that in order to come up with the report?
Tanya: So I mentioned around how important it is for us as the CHS Alliance to ask our members and other organizations to verify against the CHS. And there are three ways that they can do that. They can either do a self assessment, which is what it says. They go through their own assessment process with health and tools from ourselves and how to do that with surveys for their staff, partners, the communities they work with. And then they get their own report. And then we ask them to make improvement plans against that. And that's probably our largest data set right now, around 60 organizations who've gone through that self assessment and given their data to us. But then what's interesting, and also was quite revolutionary when the CHS has started was we also set up, we being the sector, set up an independent organization called the Humanitarian Quality Assurance initiative, which does the independent verification and certification. And this was important for the sector that it has a separate organization from ours, one that is part of the standard bearer, one of the copyright holders of the CHS. So it can give more independent, objective oversight and do the audits against the CHS. And so they do the reports, they do the process, they do it over a four year with an initial audit, a midterm audit and a final audit. So in the report, the data sets, we have two lots of data that you see in it. We have the sort of amalgamation of all the 90 + organizations, of what their different data is showing us, which gives us a snapshot of where we are at the end of 2019 and early 2020, what the data was telling us. And then with the certification, we're able to measure over time, and see how over time, those organizations who put themselves through a really robust objective approach to seeing how they could uphold this standard - there we get this data set, which shows us how progress is being made over time. Those figures are smaller in number right now. They're more around the 30 mark. So it's not a huge database, that one, but it does start to show how these changes are being made over time.
Safa: So overall, the report finds that there is still a substantial way to go for those who are participating. And also, I guess, the sector to meet the 9 core elements and their related 62 indicators. And I read that one of the key findings is that those indicators relating to establishing policies are generally doing better than those related to what organizations or staff actually do in practice. And this is something that we often talk about in the podcast in terms of the gap between policies or promises, or theories, and then what actually plays out in practice. Could you speak to that finding a bit?
Tanya: Of course, I think this is, as you say, Safa, I think this is what we know is a challenge for us, something that we need to be very cognizant of in the sector, is around our policies, often better off saying what we will do, then actually in the doing. And this starts to give us some evidence that this is the case with these commitments to CHS. I think what is important, or interesting to note on this is that with these audits that I just mentioned, what an organization has to do with these audits, which is a really robust process, where organizations have to show all of their policies that are in place to meet the commitments, then the auditors go to the field locations, the country locations, or the regional locations if it is a national NGO, and talk to the staff there to see how the policies are being actually implemented. And then they go a step further, and they actually go and talk with the people affected, trying to find out questions like: Did anyone ever come and tell you what to expect from this aid agency? Did anyone ever tell you how you can complain? And so within that, you start to build up a real picture of not only the policy, which in many audits, you could tick the box if the policy was in place, but they really put an organization through its paces to see if it's meeting its commitment actually where it matters, in terms of delivery to the actual people affected by the crisis. What then you build up is if an organization is doing not so well in how it actually implements, it has to be able to improve on that in a fairly, usually short space of time, between one or two years, between when the next audit would come along. And so it really is a bit of a push to not only say, have we got these policies in place? Are we doing things in the right way at our headquarters? But making sure that that is actually having an effect at the country offices. But also importantly, are we really asking the people who are receiving our aid, who we are working for, who we are protecting, who we're delivering services for, whether we are actually meeting these commitments that we've made to them. So it starts to build up an interesting process over time, of being able to see this picture quite starkly of the differences between what we say we do and what we actually do. And I think that's important for the sector.
Safa: And you mentioned how the audit process is a four year period. So you know, they go back and measure year after year. Another point that's related to this, that the report also brings up, which not only comes out of this report, but of course other reports, other reviews, other research have also found is the extremely slow pace of change in the sector. Could you also speak to that finding a bit and maybe your thoughts on how to address this type of slow pace of change that is a barrier when you're trying to meet the commitments.
Tanya: So I think the CHS is ultimately is about delivering change, you know, it has this potential through the commitments it's made and the verification processes and these audits, and this real emphasis around improvement and transparency of improvements, to make a change in the sector. But like you say thats slow, the Humanitarian Accountability Report shows we're not meeting those commitments. So we still have a way to go further to make that change. And I think there's lots of ways that we can look at kind of why and how we're not making the changes that we want. And there's two ways that come out in the report that I think are just sort of some fundamental blocks to that change. I think one is the nature of the humanitarian system. And this is referred to in the Humanitarian Accountability Report, and in the ALNAP State of the Humanitarian System and some of ALNAP's studies on change in the sector, which is this sort of machine-like approach to humanitarian work. And I think there's an element of that that has to be in place, that has to be there to be able to respond to these hugely, largely, crazily chaotic, devastating disasters, wars chaos that we find ourselves in. There is something very valid about having a machine-like response to how aid is delivered quickly, efficiently, effectively. And yet, at the same time, that approach, that model, that machine-like approach, I think in this day and age with the advances we've made in technology, the different state of development, the different ease of being able to move goods around the world, we're having to rethink of whether that model is the right one. But that gets to the real core essence of whether the humanitarian machine that we're built on is fit for purpose. And that's one that I think most humanitarians sort of grapple with is how do you manage to balance the sort of quick, efficient, effective life-saving, bringing in the humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence and impartiality, to then be able to also be reflective and building and change on what the people need and want. And that's, I think, the fundamental dilemma of where we are. What hasn't caught up to create that change at the moment is what the business incentive is to change as well. Like maybe morally we know that that is the right approach. How do we get our policies and our practice to have that approach, but also, we have to change the donors response as well. Donors need to hold us accountable, of course, to how we're funding, but then that has to be adaptable enough to change. And that comes through strongly in the report - the need for more adaptability, the need for more agility in the sector. And maybe the fact that the sort of machine-like response that's done us well has to change. I think there's two other interesting areas of the report that sort of go to this question, and then also get to the essence of what this report is about, which is when you start to look at the different commitments, ones which are doing well, and the ones not doing so well. And the one that's doing the best, almost meeting the commitment is commitment six, which is around coordination and complementarity. And I think we have to acknowledge the strides the sector has made, based on the reports that kept coming out about how we were uncoordinated, how we were duplicating, how we were not working in the most efficient manner. And I think the sector took that on and has put a lot in place, the clusters, the HCT, it's really looked at how it can address that, though the report shows it is still not doing as well as it could be, but it has made progress. The one that hasn't done as well, and this our sort of key headline from the report is commitment five, which is complaints are welcomed and addressed, which means we're still not putting the people first, we're still not putting the means and mechanisms in place for them to have their say, and being able to adapt on the basis of what they're telling us or what they're feeding back to us. So the sort of holistic messaging in there is we're still not being agile enough to adapt. And we're still probably more looking at how our own machine-like approach can work best, as opposed to really seeing how we can adapt and respond to the differing needs, and the ever changing needs of the people that we're trying to serve.
Safa: The report states three main challenges, and you've already spoken to two of them, which is improving organizational flexibility to respond to rapidly changing needs, and engaging better with people affected by crisis. And the report also states that when asked, recipients of aid say that they find aid either not at all or not very empowering. Could you speak to that finding a bit and what your thoughts are on that in terms of, well, the main question of the report is how can we work better? So could you speak to what your thoughts are on that.
Tanya: This comes not only from our own CHS verification data, but we also, as you mentioned, we cross reference this with other sources in the sector that are interested and really looking at this, such as the ALNAP reports, as well as Ground Truth Solutions Reports, who spend a lot of time talking and asking these questions of the people who've been affected by crisis and received aid. And I think this comes out as a stark message to us, which is this finding as you say, is that people don't find aid empowering. They don't feel empowered, and we aren't doing enough. We still haven't, even though we've been talking about this for the last 20 years, we still aren't cracking this ability to really be able to listen, work with, adapt to the people who really matter in this. And if we go back to, you know, I think let's just reflect a little on the timeframe of where we are today in this report, in 2020 - this sort of history of calling for stronger accountability measures goes back all the way to the 1994 Rwanda Joint Evaluation, through to then the call for a humanitarian ombudsman, then for the Humanitarian Accountability Project, which then became the CHS - it's not that we haven't kept trying to do this. And I think it just comes again, like if we go to the start of our some of our conversation was today, which is around this power imbalance in the sector, are we ready to really be able to come up with a different model that will empower people? And what does that really mean in a kind of chaotic, disaster response environment, as opposed to maybe where I was talking about my own career influence in terms of working on more health-based, sort of patients rights and working on sort of more disease specific approaches, which puts people in the driving seat. I don't know what the solution is. Like the solution in a way is we need to continue with this endeavor of organizations really holding themselves to account on how they are putting in the processes, not just being an additional add-on to a program that you add on or go back to the community and ask them how the program was. But really, as we were talking about earlier, in terms of the CHS trying to look at both policy and the practice. Trying to see how we look at how we're listening to people, how we've got the right processes in place, how they go through the entire organization, and actually have an effect right up to the leadership level to make that cultural change. We've got some good examples of organizations. CAFOD is mentioned in the report, the Humanitarian Accountability Report, who really had to do a kind of thorough, right from leadership down to the field level of how they were looking at their complaint mechanisms as a result of the verification, they got to their midterm audit, and they hadn't made enough improvement in how they were doing. And so they made a massive effort to really improve and we've got some great stories of how their organizational culture changed, to be able to adapt to that. And that's one organization. Fantastic. We've got other examples like that. But we have to kind of still change as the sector, we have to try and get more organizations who will commit to this process, because now with this report, we've got it stated in kind of black and white, that with all of this effort, with all of this history, we still aren't meeting these commitments, we're still not able to put in place the ability to listen, learn and adapt programs and processes, which would then hopefully enable people to say that they do find aid more empowering than what the results are right now.
Safa: So just to follow up on that, you mentioned commitment five, which measures the degree to which organizations and work cultures welcome and address complaints, and how it received the the lowest score. And within that there's kind of two elements. One is that you can receive complaints or have a mechanism for receiving complaints, both internally in terms of from colleagues, from staff members, but also in terms of from your so called beneficiaries or target communities. So these two different kind of groups who both require fair processes, accessible processes of making complaints. But that there is this kind of overall culture of silence or this prevalence of lack of accountability overall - when you think of not only how the humanitarian sector is doing in terms of its relationship with those who are living in crisis, or are impacted by emergencies, but also amongst its own staff members, in the internal work culture, what are some of your thoughts or maybe the findings in terms of the internal practices, where maybe sometimes there's a double standard with what the policy or the goals are in terms of how to treat or the relationship with the local communities versus the real relationship or the environment that exists amongst colleagues within the organization.
Tanya: Thank you for bringing that up Safa, because I think it's a really important aspect, which we haven't touched on too much, because we've been focusing much more on the sort of accountability to the people affected, which is kind of the Core Humanitarian Standard. But what the CHS looks at is also, it's got a strong element around this sort of what we call the people management approach. It is in there as commitment eight, which really looks at sort of our own staffing. But also, the history of the CHS Alliance itself was a merger of two organizations, the Humanitarian Accountability Project, and People in Aid, putting the two parts together to say, actually, we can't look at kind of good accountability unless we're looking at our own sort of people management approaches. So that was, in a way, the two parents of the CHS Alliance, were taking exactly that conundrum that you outline, which is not only how do we be accountable and listening and learning from the people that we serve in our programs, but also as well within our staffing. That was sort of the essence of the CHS Alliance. What's also been put in the spotlight the last two years was that the sector has a challenge as well with how it lives its own values. And we obviously were challenged from 2018 onwards following the Me Too movement with our own sort of Me Too in the aid world, which really put the spotlight on the fact that not only have we still got a massive problem with abuse in the sector, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and abuse in the sector, but also our cultures. The challenges to our own internal operating values, our being able to live our values within the organizations themselves. And that's something that the CHS looks at. But I think because it's so ingrained that we can't just say, well, because we work and we abide by these values, these sorts of anti-poverty, anti-racism, we take a feminist approach. If we're not living those values within how we act within our staff, whether we have strong policies that make sure sexual harassment isn't allowed, anti-bullying, that we make sure we have solid whistleblowing policies in place, we have to be paying attention ourselves. We've recently started a project called kind of caring and cultivating compassionate organizations. There was a series of conversations we had just to try and take a bit of a health check on the sector. And, you know, again, maybe this comes back to this over focus in the past of where the humanitarian sector came from, as the sort of machine like, the international flying into the national approach, quick, efficient, macho type culture. And that's, that's being tested right now, I don't think we've come out the other side of it yet. But in the same way that model might not be serving us well anymore, it's not necessarily serving us well in our organizations. So I think it's a really core principle of how this connects together. This just isn't again about kind of how we serve the 'other', but really about how we are living our values and principles within ourselves and within the organizations.
Safa: Mm hmm. You know, we started the conversation speaking about coloniality and power dynamics, and we briefly touched on it a few times. But in terms of the report, there's not really any kind of really mention about racism, or the histories of coloniality, or the power dynamics in the sector. Could you speak to why that kind of more historical power structure type analysis is not in the report?
Tanya: I should mention that this report comes now in 2020. And it reports on the current CHS, which was put together, as I mentioned, based on consultations in 2013 and 2014. And if we just take a little bit of a pause for reflection of what's happened over those five years, which five years in some ways you can say doesn't seem that long. In other ways, I think the sector has been through some really much needed and painful learning. As I mentioned, there was the sort of the Me Too and the Me Too in the aid sector. I think the sort of climate crisis isn't also acknowledged enough in the CHS. And that comes out in the opinion pieces we have in there. I think the other piece, as you very rightly say, is this sort of explicit acknowledgement of racism doesn't come out. Next year in 2021, the CHS will undergo its first revision. And I think, it's needed now because I think the world has moved on, things have changed. We have learned a lot since 2014. But I imagine, you know, in my view, obviously, it'll go through another sector wide structural consultation, debate, discussion that's needed. I can well imagine, and I hope, personally, that we do have much stronger language in there about the power dynamics, and certainly that racism is explicitly mentioned in the next version of CHS.
Safa: Do you think there's any, I don't know if this is like a realistic possibility of adding to the nine commitments?
Tanya: I don't know if we'll add to it, because there is something about trying to keep to what is essential. And if you start to add too much, you start to water down what is really essential. Again, if we think of these as commitments that we're making to affected people, we have to be very explicit. So I think in the next revision, there will be a push to try and articulate more clearly, or in a more concise way, what those essential elements should be. So that it can continue to be very clear to affected people. However, I think in my view, if you think about it in terms of red lines, what is acceptable and what's not acceptable. And I think that's going to, I hope we can, we've learned as a sector and can be a little bit more explicit, as you say, sort of more explicit, in our terminology, more explicit in terms of talking about racism, really addressing the power dynamics, but without adding to, rather than just sort of adding on and adding on, trying to keep boiling this back to if we are working with some of the world's most vulnerable people, or who were put in an extremely vulnerable position through no fault of their own, through wars, famine, disasters, we have to have some basic standards in place that say an organization who is working with these people has to have these policies and practice in place. And that's really the intent of the CHS. That's where it's grown to, and it's sort of early five years. And it's where it can, if you sort of think of its sort of maturity, it could make more impact in the next five years.
Safa: You know, sometimes on the podcast, we speak about the tension between individual change versus systemic change. And I read on page 18 of the report, a sentence that kind of resonated with me. And just to share that sentence, it says: "individual organizations often make significant and successful efforts to change specific areas of their work. But it is harder to reach a point where enough organizations are making similar changes at the same time, creating a critical mass that supports systemic change." So in thinking about systemic change, and maybe the intention behind the standards, from the perspective of the CHS Alliance, what would you say are your thoughts or maybe some of the points to make in terms of the difference between just promoting or encouraging individual change versus how that can turn into systemic change?
Tanya: I'm hoping and anticipating that this is going to be one of the critical discussions, partly in the revision, and partly following on from this version of the Humanitarian Accountability Report. It's a question that we've been posed with. What we have right now is we have an amalgamation of data that shows what these almost 100 organizations - we get a snapshot in time. But you're really right. I would love to hear from your listeners on this is this challenge between you know, even if we got to say 1,000 organizations measuring their application of and improvement against the CHS, do we still get to see whether that is creating a systematic change at the actual humanitarian response, where it matters? What we are starting the next, I suppose chapter, the next version is looking at the CHS and we hope by the next time the report comes out, what we're wanting to do is not only look at the amalgamation of organizations, but to try and take a collective approach, trying to take an actual context and say, how is the CHS being applied in this particular response? And it's sort of like the sum of the parts, do they add up to make a difference? Or actually, does it not matter if we have so many organizations that are individually making the change, yet at a collective level, that's not where the change is happening. So that's the hypothesis. I think it's going to be a fascinating discussion to keep happening, we are going to be starting work on looking at what that collective accountability looks like in actual responses. And I hope maybe in two years time, I could come back and we could continue that discussion.
Safa: Just as a final question, commitment seven of the report is all about learning from experience and improving. And both within organizations and just as a trend in the sector, many times there are very wonderful reports written, very insightful analysis, great actionable steps, but then that learning, those insights are not really internalized, or they don't really translate into action, which is something we kind of touched on earlier, too. But in terms of your thoughts, or your hopes, what would you say are maybe ways to incentivize organizations to really implement these learnings? Or in terms of the importance of really internalizing these lessons, are there things that you'd like to speak to in terms of that point?
Tanya: You know, when you say, what are my hopes, I hope that we maintain this momentum that the CHS is creating. As you mentioned, so rightly, we're very good at doing recommendations, we're very good at saying what we need to do. There has never been an incentive system to actually have to do those changes. Now, there are two aspects we can take from that. And this is sort of a bit of a thread of some of the discussion we've been having. There is the sort of moral imperative that we know we have to be more accountable, closer to listening and responding to the people that we are working with. And so there's a real moral drive. And that's been the drive really, for us today, for these organizations who've gone through the verification, credit to them that they've really done it on the moral imperative. This is a standard, and we are going to show how, as an organization, we're meeting it, but the other driver that we know, makes a change in the sector, is whether the donors request it. And we are slowly, and it is slowly, but we're starting to see donors request it, ask for adherence to it, either use it as a fast track for their partner assessments or actually demand it as part of a funding. And so I think we encourage that in a way because we know that unless basically building on this sort of business model we have, we know the donors are a driver to change, and they can request it. So we are going to be doing further work with the government, donors to ask them whether they will recognize the CHS to put more effort and attention on that this doesn't just stay, as you say, a sort of nice learning exercise, but that this really drives an approach of improvement. And that has to go throughout the whole chain of the sector. It's not just the government's asking it of their partners, the INGOs have to be -if a national NGO is verified against the CHS, they should take that as a sort of level playing field of this organization has been verified against the CHS, this organization has the right tools and processes in place for it to meet its due diligence as a partner. And so we have to look at that whole accountability chain throughout the system to see if it can become -what we can't have it, as you mentioned, just another nice learning process. It actually has to be driving the changes that we so know are needed in the system.
Safa: Mm hmm. Yes, I hope so. Absolutely. Tanya, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you for being here and speaking to us about the report. I encourage all our listeners to read the report themselves and maybe share their thoughts with you and your team too.
Tanya: We would really appreciate that. Thank you so much Safa.
Safa: I also want to thank our listeners. Thank you for tuning in, we invite you to join the conversation.
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