Meet the Inter-Agency Regional Analysis Network (IARAN), a team of nine that is changing the way non-governmental organizations (NGOs) think about aid.
The IARAN, which gained international acclaim when it published “The Future of Aid, INGOs in 2030” report in July, helps humanitarian organizations all over the world by informing NGO strategy through its research about the changing nature of global humanitarianism. Paramount to its mission is ensuring that NGOs around the world harness foresight and modernized approaches to aid when addressing crises.
The group first worked with Save the Children International in 2012 and is now partnering with the international-nonprofit Action Against Hunger to introduce the organization to more proactive and sustainable methods of programming. In both its test-run with Save the Children and its current pilot phase, the group has seen a real change in the way each organization operates — an indicator of success.
The Borgen Project spoke to the IARAN Director Michel Maietta and Communications and Event Manager Leonie Le Borgne about the IARAN’s progress thus far and its ambitions going forward.
“The vision that is behind this program is actually how to contribute to alleviating poverty in a more efficient and preemptive way,” Maietta said. “Most of the humanitarian NGOs are very reactive. Naturally, you want to react when there is a threat. But the problem with reaction is that in the long-term there is no sustainability, and the problem will remain, the vulnerability will remain.”
To create sustainable solutions to the problems endangering the world’s most vulnerable, Maietta argued, NGOs must anticipate and address the root causes of global crises before they manifest. Many of today’s organizations have not practiced such foresight and as a result have not been able to adapt to new challenges or innovate in meaningful ways, yielding disastrous results.
“The refugee crisis that Europe is facing today is a direct consequence of the inability of the humanitarian system to directly access the population in Syria,” Maietta said.
Alternatively, when NGOs prepare for the future and create mechanisms that reduce damage down the line, they greatly increase their potential for positive impact. Planning as far as 15 years in the future can save lives as well as money, and more generally, increases organizational efficiency.
The IARAN aims to bring strategies of preparedness into the humanitarian mainstream.
“[The IARAN is] completely unable to diagnose the Hurricane Irma impact,” Maietta said when describing the IARAN’s scope of influence, “but what we can do is address the root causes of Irma, which are the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and climate change, and then help game-changers to design a preemptive strategy that can actually correct or re-address these root causes.”
Preemptive planning also allows organizations to be quicker and more flexible in their responses to disaster.
“Reactivity and life-saving response, and then strategy, preemptive news and the capacity to address root causes of the problems — the two can be done together. But, you need both. You cannot have one or the other.”
In addition to developing and expanding their work with NGOs, Maietta and his team are also working to enhance the humanitarian leadership graduate programs of two universities in France and Australia. The aim is to ready the next generation of humanitarian managers and directors for the global challenges ahead. This leadership is crucial for the creation of lasting and effective change within NGOs.
“We strongly believe that the humanitarian actors today are very good tacticians because they are very, very reactive,” Maietta said, “but the humanitarian system needs to have strategic leaders, leaders that can handle strategy in a very complex way because the context where we are interacting is very complex.”
The IARAN additionally publishes between 35 and 50 reports a year on a variety of issues, ranging from alleviating poverty to addressing undernutrition to responding to global migration crises. It will also produce a book in the next year that will discuss the organization’s findings from the last four years, including how it developed its methodology and promoted an organizational change in Save the Children and Action Against Hunger.
While the IARAN and its many projects are instrumental in promoting change within humanitarian organizations, the organizations themselves must act for any real progress to occur.
“The mission of IARAN is to offer food for thought but change will not happen without the actors,” Maietta said. “The actors need to be able to be the protagonists of the change.”
Time will only tell if NGOs take up Maietta’s call to action.
– Sabine Poux
Photo: Flickr
Trouble in Paradise: How to Help People in Mauritius
Despite this, there is still poverty and a significant need to figure out how to help people in Mauritius. Along with poverty still being present on the island, there are still issues of violence against women, children losing parental care due to poverty and the social exclusion that affects children with disabilities. With the island seeming more like a tropical paradise at times, it is important to keep in mind that there is still a great deal of disadvantaged and poor people in Mauritius, particularly in rural areas.
Another factor in Mauritius’ poverty situation is that there is no official poverty line in the country. They use a relative poverty line that is defined as “half median monthly household income per adult equivalent.” The poorest households usually satisfy three basic conditions: households that have difficulty obtaining daily basic food, households that consume government rice and households that buy food on credit.
Now we must consider the best ways of how to help people in Mauritius, allowing us to address these issues and achieve a better standard of living for the poor. The first solution undertaken by the government was implementing a social welfare program that aims to bridge the gap between the poor and the non-poor. The program focused on the distribution of social aid to needy people, subsidies on basic food items, improving the level of education, microfinancing small and medium enterprise and female empowerment in the labor market.
Social policies such as this are essential for combating poverty and for pinpointing how to help people in Mauritius effectively. Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies, said: “Although being poor does not necessarily mean being permanently mired in poverty, effective social policies which maximize the power of human agency will be a key part of any solution.”
In 2017, Mauritius instituted the Marshall Plan Against Poverty, an ambitious reform aimed at addressing persistent pockets of poverty and social exclusion in the country. Though the plan refers to the official number of poor households as 33,600, the government is focusing on the absolute poorest, equaling about 10,000 households. So far, the plan has committed approximately 2.2 billion rupees, or $63 million, over the next three years as they continue to implement the Marshall Plan.
There are several other solutions that can help us find how to help people in Mauritius, such as introducing legislation for a national minimum wage for workers and taking an initiative in creating more jobs in the manufacturing sector and other industries. The minimum wage of a worker should be equal to or more than the revised figures published by the Household Budget Survey of Statistics Mauritius, as it is necessary to reduce income inequality and to help the poor find a decent life using their own efforts. Similarly, as other countries around the world have shown, there is a working-class population that will largely never earn a degree, prompting the need for an increase in jobs for the working class.
– Drew Fox
Photo: Unsplash
Patricia Arquette and Mohammad Ashour Conferred 2017 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award
Arquette created the charity, GiveLove, a U.S. based skill-training non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to the instruction and promotion of Ecological Sanitation (EcoSan) and compost sanitation. Arquette founded GiveLove to assist after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred approximately 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
GiveLove works in emergency and development contexts to introduce low-cost, decentralized sanitation systems based on container-based sanitation and human manure composting approaches. Specializing in dry toilets, known as, “compost toilets,” GiveLove’s industrial partners operate in areas with high demand and dry areas to provide safe options for latrines dug in challenging environments.
GiveLove has implemented training programs in Haiti, Nicaragua, Colombia, Uganda, Kenya, India and the United States. The charity partners with NGOs, local community associations, schools, youth groups, universities and governments. GiveLove provides technical skills training, program design and support, staff training, monitoring and evaluation and design consultancy. GiveLove also instructs local organizations to advance sanitation in high-risk communities. Arquette’s company trains licensed sanitation builders, as well as district technicians, to apply and manage projects.
The Center bestowed a second 2017 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award upon Mohammad Ashour.
During his acceptance speech for the Conviction Principle Award, Ashour promoted universal healthcare and condemned racism. Ashour’s enterprise, Aspire, operates in Ghana and the United States.
Aspire raises food-grade crickets on a commercial scale and actively works to normalize the consumption of insects in the western world. Ashour’s company, based in Austin, Texas, created a massive farm to raise crickets used to make mainstream snacks. The Center honored Ashour with the 2017 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for pursuing his goal to produce a high-grade source of protein, while also reducing the carbon and land footprint that stems from farming cattle. Crickets are a healthy source of protein and offset the harmful effects that come from the reliance on beef production.
At the onset, employees fed the crickets. However, this system proved inefficient and ineffective, as humans work during daylight hours and crickets are nocturnal. Aspire subsequently incorporated a robotic system that provides the ideal amount of food to the crickets. These adjustments to the cricket’s diet created a better product.
Inside Aspire’s newest building, a robot feeds millions of crickets 24 hours a day. This facility is a 25,000-square-foot research and development center. Aspire plans to duplicate this technology on an additional farm that is 10 times the size of the present plant. It’s a scale that Ashour believes will propel crickets as a mainstream food in the United States. For an insect’s diet to meet its sustainable promise of supplying protein without the carbon and land footprint of beef, Aspire must increase production, making cricket protein widely available and affordable. Mohammad Ashour believes Aspire’s endeavor will make that possible.
According to The Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky, the 2017 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award honored and extolled the valuable contributions of people from around the world.
– Heather Hopkins
Photo: Flickr
The IARAN Keeps Its Eyes on the Future
The IARAN, which gained international acclaim when it published “The Future of Aid, INGOs in 2030” report in July, helps humanitarian organizations all over the world by informing NGO strategy through its research about the changing nature of global humanitarianism. Paramount to its mission is ensuring that NGOs around the world harness foresight and modernized approaches to aid when addressing crises.
The group first worked with Save the Children International in 2012 and is now partnering with the international-nonprofit Action Against Hunger to introduce the organization to more proactive and sustainable methods of programming. In both its test-run with Save the Children and its current pilot phase, the group has seen a real change in the way each organization operates — an indicator of success.
The Borgen Project spoke to the IARAN Director Michel Maietta and Communications and Event Manager Leonie Le Borgne about the IARAN’s progress thus far and its ambitions going forward.
“The vision that is behind this program is actually how to contribute to alleviating poverty in a more efficient and preemptive way,” Maietta said. “Most of the humanitarian NGOs are very reactive. Naturally, you want to react when there is a threat. But the problem with reaction is that in the long-term there is no sustainability, and the problem will remain, the vulnerability will remain.”
To create sustainable solutions to the problems endangering the world’s most vulnerable, Maietta argued, NGOs must anticipate and address the root causes of global crises before they manifest. Many of today’s organizations have not practiced such foresight and as a result have not been able to adapt to new challenges or innovate in meaningful ways, yielding disastrous results.
“The refugee crisis that Europe is facing today is a direct consequence of the inability of the humanitarian system to directly access the population in Syria,” Maietta said.
Alternatively, when NGOs prepare for the future and create mechanisms that reduce damage down the line, they greatly increase their potential for positive impact. Planning as far as 15 years in the future can save lives as well as money, and more generally, increases organizational efficiency.
The IARAN aims to bring strategies of preparedness into the humanitarian mainstream.
“[The IARAN is] completely unable to diagnose the Hurricane Irma impact,” Maietta said when describing the IARAN’s scope of influence, “but what we can do is address the root causes of Irma, which are the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and climate change, and then help game-changers to design a preemptive strategy that can actually correct or re-address these root causes.”
Preemptive planning also allows organizations to be quicker and more flexible in their responses to disaster.
“Reactivity and life-saving response, and then strategy, preemptive news and the capacity to address root causes of the problems — the two can be done together. But, you need both. You cannot have one or the other.”
In addition to developing and expanding their work with NGOs, Maietta and his team are also working to enhance the humanitarian leadership graduate programs of two universities in France and Australia. The aim is to ready the next generation of humanitarian managers and directors for the global challenges ahead. This leadership is crucial for the creation of lasting and effective change within NGOs.
“We strongly believe that the humanitarian actors today are very good tacticians because they are very, very reactive,” Maietta said, “but the humanitarian system needs to have strategic leaders, leaders that can handle strategy in a very complex way because the context where we are interacting is very complex.”
The IARAN additionally publishes between 35 and 50 reports a year on a variety of issues, ranging from alleviating poverty to addressing undernutrition to responding to global migration crises. It will also produce a book in the next year that will discuss the organization’s findings from the last four years, including how it developed its methodology and promoted an organizational change in Save the Children and Action Against Hunger.
While the IARAN and its many projects are instrumental in promoting change within humanitarian organizations, the organizations themselves must act for any real progress to occur.
“The mission of IARAN is to offer food for thought but change will not happen without the actors,” Maietta said. “The actors need to be able to be the protagonists of the change.”
Time will only tell if NGOs take up Maietta’s call to action.
– Sabine Poux
Photo: Flickr
There’s an App for That: Middle Eastern Startups
Now, this trend has taken hold in an unlikely place: the Middle East.
Currently, the two most prominent Middle Eastern startups in the region are Souq, an online e-commerce retailer and Careem, a ride-hailing service. While these firms are not based around wholly original ideas, the mere fact of their creation shows a desire for citizens in these countries to utilize smart technology to improve their daily lives.
Amazon’s acquisition of Souq in 2017 showed the effectiveness of the firm in the region, considering that Amazon’s modus operandi when entering new regions involves launching its own platform paired with a substantial investment component. The efficiency of Souq, however, allowed Amazon to make a direct buyout instead.
Startups like those seen in other parts of the world are sprouting up in the region regardless of the challenging economic and political circumstances they face. In 2016, the top 100 startups in the region raised over $1.42 billion, with each firm raising at least $500,000. But this does not come easily.
Many Middle Eastern countries do not have a conducive climate for startups compared to western Europe and North America. Bankruptcy laws and overregulation have stifled innovation for decades. However, the increase in startup firms in a variety of sectors shows a young, tech-savvy population that seeks to innovate and reinvigorate the economies of the Arab world.
Jamalon, an online book-selling firm, was started by a Jordanian who grew up in Palestinian refugee camps. Ala’ Alsallal saw a need for greater access to Arabic-language books for people in the region, especially works that are banned by various governments in the region.
“You know what the censors told me? ‘We don’t want any books that can change the way people think,'” Alsallal told Forbes Magazine. “That doesn’t matter,” he says. “We just keep sending them.”
Entrepreneurship with a social mission is common among startups, and it is no different in the Middle East, as shown by Jamalon. Average citizens are destined to benefit immensely from these companies. If this trend continues, the advent of Middle Eastern startups will increase access to services and will improve the quality of life for the people of the region.
– Daniel Cavins
Photo: Flickr
5 Things the US Needs to Know About Extreme Poverty
As with most things in life, poverty cannot be viewed through a single lens. It is a complex social issue, but gains over the past few decades have shown that it is a solvable issue. With continued foreign aid and trade, the world can get that much closer to realizing the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030.
– Jeanine Thomas
Photo: Flickr
The Global Learning Crisis and How It Can Be Addressed
This current report states that without learning, education fails to deliver on its main goal of eliminating extreme poverty and creating important life opportunities for all. Even after spending several years in school, millions still cannot read, write or do basic mathematics.
Globally, approximately 264 million lives are shy of achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4), quality education for all. Some of the hardest hit by this global learning crisis are youths in countries such as Syria, Yemen and Sudan, as well as thousands of Rohingya children that were driven from their homes by the Myanmar government.
The report also notes that when leaders of countries make “learning for all” a national priority for its citizens, education standards can improve dramatically. South Korea is an excellent example of this. What was once a war-torn country with very low literacy rates achieved universal enrollment by 1995, and its youth performed at some of the highest levels when it came to international learning assessments.
Not all hope is lost, however. Some countries have decided to take action when it comes to combating the global learning crisis, and in particular, there is one region that happens to be facing the most severe cases of these challenges. Ghana’s government has been actively investing in its future and is completely on board with SDG4 by pursuing innovative strategies that will ensure girls, in particular, can continue their education.
In all, World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer states that “The only way to make profess is to ‘find the truth from facts.’ If we let them, the facts about education reveal a painful truth. For too many children, schooling does not mean learning.” Three factors that will work towards combating the global learning crisis include assessing learning, making schools work for all children and mobilizing anyone and everyone who has a stake in learning.
– Sara Venusti
Photo: Flickr
Accountability for Human Rights Violations
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who was imprisoned in Moscow. He was convicted of aiding tax evasion in 2008 and died in custody in 2009. Surprisingly, though, his legal troubles did not end there. In a trial in 2013, a Russian court further convicted Magnitsky of tax fraud–four years after his death.
Magnitsky’s death was more than just an untimely demise of a 39-year-old lawyer. While he is said to have died of acute heart failure and toxic shock caused by untreated pancreatitis, Magnitsky had been severely beaten while imprisoned. In fact, his colleagues even insisted that the convictions against him were falsified in order to obstruct Magnitsky’s own accusations of massive tax fraud by Russian officials.
An investigation into the lawyer’s death was opened in November 2009, only to be dropped in March 2013 with the conclusion that Magnitsky had been legally arrested and detained, as well as denying claims that he had been tortured and had been denied access to medical attention.
The United States passed a law in 2012 in Magnitsky’s name that imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were thought to be responsible for serious human rights violations. The law froze any U.S. assets held by these officials and went so far as to ban them from entering the United States.
In 2016, Congress took an important step in addressing global accountability for human rights violations by expanding the earlier Magnitsky law to the Global Magnitsky Act. The new act allows the executive branch of the United States government to impose visa bans and targeted sanctions on individuals responsible for human rights violations or corruption, as well as those officials who abetted or were complacent with such violations.
The Global Magnitsky Act acts as a deterrent, warning foreign officials that unlawful violence could result in serious repercussions from the United States government. Additionally, the act offers incentives to foreign governments for improving mechanisms to increase accountability for human rights violations. By working with the U.S. on human rights violations and corruption investigations, leaders from other countries can voice their contempt for human rights abuses in their own countries.
The effectiveness of these sanctions can be seen in Russia’s response to their imposition. As a result of the global embarrassment inflicted on the country following the enactment of the law, the act has become a fixation for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The act continues to endorse accountability for human rights violations in various cases around the world on the recommendations of senators as well as a group of human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch.
– Richa Biplane
Photo: Flickr
The Benefits of Solar Power in Botswana
Solar panels are making a major impact on the lives of rural families in Botswana. About 80 percent of people in Botswana have been utilizing firewood for sources of light and heat. Unfortunately, many acres of forest have been destroyed due to the loss of trees used for their light and heat. Now that the UNDP-supported Rural Electrification Program is in place, life in Botswana has changed for the better. The goal of the program is to provide 65,000 homes with solar power.
A benefit of solar power is the time saved by women and girls. Retrieving wood and constantly tending to the fire to maintain light and heat in the home can be a time-consuming task. Newer wood-saving stoves being used in Botswana can cook a four-person meal with only a kilogram of wood, which reduces the wood gathering time and intensive work. This gives people more time to invest in other needs.
There are many benefits of solar power compared to other forms of fossil fuel energy. For example, solar power does not release any pollutants into the environment. Solar panels are a good investment because they are cheap and can supply power indefinitely with no ongoing costs. For countries struggling with poverty in Africa, cheap energy is a smart, long-term solution.
Solar power in countries like Botswana allows families to focus on other important things in their life, as opposed to constantly retrieving wood just to fulfill their basic needs. Botswana is one of Africa’s more stable countries, mostly free of corruption. The country is the world’s largest producer of diamonds, making the country a middle-income nation. The benefits of solar power are an important move in powering the country in the right direction.
– Chloe Turner
Photo: Google
House Bill to Combat Human Rights Abuses in North Korea
The Kim regime has continued to inflict disturbing human rights abuses in North Korea on its people. As a result, to help keep America as well as innocent citizens of North Korea safe, the House has voted unanimously on a critical and bipartisan North Korea human rights bill.
According to Newsweek, North Korea’s authoritarian regime has “snatched” teenagers out of their schools to be Kim Jong-un’s apparent sex slaves, forces members of the country’s upper class to watch executions and its leaders are perfectly content to eat expensive foods while the rest of his people subsist on grass.
Reuters recently reported that executions are often carried out in prison camps to instill fear and intimation among prison inmates that are contemplating an escape attempt. Public executions are carried out for minor crimes and distribution of South Korean media can also lead to execution.
According to NK Daily, a person in North Korea can be sentenced to death for communicating with the outside world, and a minimum of ten years of reeducation is the punishment for listening to South Korean media or another foreign radio.
The bill to combat human rights abuses in North Korea is a reauthorization of a 2004 North Korea human rights law that will add to the measure of new provisions aimed at spreading uncensored information throughout the country to inform the citizens of North Korea what is happening in the outside world. It will enact important snippets of updates that have to do with freedom and technological advances that are beyond radio broadcasting.
Chairman Ed Royce and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently stated that “the truth is Kim Jong-un’s greatest enemy. So as we step up sanctions to cut off the cash that funds Kim’s nuclear program, we must also break down barriers to truth in North Korea. This bill will update critical efforts to get real, accurate information into the hands of North Koreans through radio broadcasts, USB drives, mobile devices, and more. When Kim Jong-un has to answer to the North Korean people, he will pose far less danger to us.”
– Sara Venusti
Photo: Flickr
How to Help People in Brunei
Brunei is a small nation located in the northern coastal area of the island of Borneo, which also encompasses parts of Malaysia and Indonesia. Brunei‘s territory extends itself through an area of 5,765 kilometers of land, where about 423,000 citizens live.
How to help people in Brunei is not an easy question to answer at first glance. The fact is that despite its size, Brunei’s economy is considered to be one of the best performing in the world.
The country mainly exports liquefied gas and crude oil across the globe; natural gas and petroleum represent 60% of the country’s economy. Brunei’s extended forest territory allows it to produce abundant amounts of non-renewable resources and energy.
In spite of Brunei’s level of productivity, the issue of how to help people in Brunei remains because, despite the country’s great wealth, the social and political system causes difficulty for Brunei’s citizens.
As an absolute monarchy led by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, freedom of speech has been limited within the media, including radio, television, and print, as well as for citizens.
In 2014, Brunei adopted sharia law, a list of laws based on the religion of Islam. Consisting of three phases, two of which have to be yet implemented, sharia law is currently enforced among Brunei’s citizens.
The only approved phase for the moment includes prison sentences for what most developed first world countries would consider minor. Pregnancy outside marriage, failing to attend Friday prayers, propagating religion other than Islam, among other offenses, are severely punished with prison sentences or fines.
Organizations such as the United Nations have spoken out regarding Bolkiah’s intentions, but despite commenting on the sultan’s ideas for the future of Brunei, the country remains part of the United Nations due to providing free medical care, education and more to its citizens.
Boycotts of the Beverly Hills Hotel and other properties that Bolkiah owns have been enacted by numerous international companies to put pressure on the sultan to repeal sharia law. Celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John have taken up the issue to bring awareness to the inequality and discrimination that is currently taking place in Brunei.
How to help people in Brunei is a social issue rather than an economic one. Brunei is a country that violates human rights every day and no organizations are actively fighting against it. The imposition of sharia law in Brunei is continuous and awareness is key in order to eradicate such human rights violations.
– Paula Gibson
Photo: Flickr