Switzerland - The risks of merging foreign aid streams

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) Deutsch (de) Schweiz legt Auslandhilfen zusammen: die Risiken (original)

Italiano (it) La Svizzera raggruppa l'aiuto estero: i rischi

Français (fr) Comment conjuguer l'humanitaire et la coopération au développement

After the disastrous earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Switzerland helped to rebuild schools. It dispatched experts on earthquake-proof construction, provided information on building standards to the Haitian government, and trained bricklayers.

Was that considered development aid? No. In Switzerland's view, it was humanitarian aid.

Now consider another scenario: in the tense, hostile atmosphere surrounding the Sri Lankan civil war in the late 1990s, Switzerland organised performances of Mother Courage and her Children – a war drama by Bertolt Brecht – in Tamil and Sinhalese. Audiences were intended to get the message that the country would not make progress without a peaceful solution.

What type of aid was that? For Switzerland it was development aid. Without peace there is no development – so went the thinking.

If all of this sounds confusing, an internal study by Alliance Sud, a coalition of Swiss NGOs, confirms that most people would find it hard to distinguish between humanitarian aid and development cooperation. Many mix up the two and regard the work of NGOs as falling in the area of humanitarian aid.

'When we talk about development cooperation, chances are no one would think of a theatre project in Burma where the topic is empowerment and good governance,' says Swiss historian Konrad Kuhn, an assistant professor of European ethnology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Development cooperation grew directly out of humanitarian aid, and today they sit on a continuum – so it is not easy for people to make the distinction.

A global trend

If humanitarian aid and development cooperation are merging more and more, it is not because of any theoretical discourse – it has simply developed in this way in practice.

International humanitarian aid during the cholera epidemic in Haiti, for example, was not just a short-term intervention involving medical care. It also focused on water supply issues. Only in this way can aid hope to have long-lasting effects.

A family washes clothes in the River Meille near the former UN base in Mirebalais, Haiti, in October 2020. Ten years after a cholera epidemic swept through Haiti and killed thousands, families of victims still struggle financially and await compensation from the UN as many continue to drink from and bathe in a river that became ground zero for the waterborne disease. Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved

Things can get more complicated in places where development aid is being delivered and war suddenly breaks out.

'In the past, the development operation would quit the terrain when things got 'too hot',' says Markus Heiniger, who spent years working for Swiss development agencies. Today such operations are expected to stay on the ground even if the situation is fragile – the reasoning being that conflicts now last longer and many regions are more unstable than they were 30 years ago.

According to Heiniger, Switzerland is not the only country grappling with this blurring of lines. The time has come, he believes, for some kind of restructuring of the groups involved, which until now have been organised“in silos'.

Institutional reorganisation

In the Swiss capital, the Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) is set to be rejigged. The departments of humanitarian aid and development cooperation will merge in September 2022.

Humanitarian aid and development cooperation at the SDC have been institutionally separate for historical reasons, explains spokesperson Léa Zürcher.

“This division makes less and less sense today,' she says. An external evaluationExternal link in 2019 recommended that the SDC adapt its organisation to changes in the field. Going against the recommendation, however, the SDC is not merging the framework credits for humanitarian aid and development cooperation.

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