As Cohere embarks on a journey of internal reform and shifting power we are also asking ourselves questions about the appropriate roles and responsibilities of donors and funding intermediaries in the refugee response. In this blog I call for approaches that uphold engagement, understanding and solidarity as equally important and the concept of giving.
There are clear causal links between global wealth inequality and forced displacement. Past colonialism was explicitly wealth extracting and the scars of colonialism are etched into today’s conflicts around borders and resources. Today, to add to on-going neocolonial extractive global systems, the wealthiest countries are the biggest consumers and consequently the most responsible for the climate crisis that will forcibly displace hundreds of millions of people in coming decades.
The majority of people who are forcibly displaced need urgent humanitarian assistance. Their needs must be met by people who are less vulnerable and more prosperous than them. Refugees aren’t wholly dependent on the globally prosperous, and not all need assistance for long, as there are unrecognised resources within refugee communities and the communities immediately hosting them who are often not beneficiaries of global wealth injustices. However, the unavoidable fact is that when people are forcibly displaced they usually depend to a certain degree on other people choosing to help them.
Today, virtually all giving to refugee communities is based on choice. The choice of donors to give to a particular cause, the choice of governments to spend taxpayer money on addressing the challenges of forced displacements. Despite the fact that those who have benefitted from global wealth injustices have a moral obligation to share their wealth with those affected by global inequalities, there is no compunction to share their wealth. There are currently no legal systems that I know of in which refugee populations could sue the globally wealthy for the world’s injustices and demand reparations to compensate for their experience. (Perhaps it could be something someone might try one day in the wake of on-going attempts to demand reparations for slavery and war crimes.)
For now, refugee communities need people to choose to give, and this creates a power dynamic where the giver has power over the receiver - has power to determine elements of someone’s life over which they have no control. This power exists whether the giver is a professional donor agency, a government donor transferring taxpayer funding, or an individual donor giving their own money. The power also exists if the “giver” is an international NGO that has received the funding from another donor and is passing on that funding, of course while taking a significant cut to fund their existence. It makes sense for refugee communities to be connected most directly with the original givers, such as when refugee-led organisations receive funding directly from donors, rather than as downstream recipients of a long chain of intermediary humanitarian agencies. Currently, less than 1% of funding allocated to refugee responses is controlled by refugee led organsations, and one of the reasons for this is the incredible wastage of resources that fund humanitarian agencies who may eventually go on to channel (some) funds to refugee leaders.
When donors are connected more directly to refugee leaders, humanitarian funds are used more efficiently. Cohere is trying to make this happen through the platform we co-launched, Reframe.network, which already enables donors to give in such a way that 100% of their donation will be received by refugee leaders. These donors may choose to give out of a sense of altruism or generosity, and hopefully others give out of sense of solidarity, that as human race we have to all move forward together. Some may give out of a sense of collective responsibility for the situation we find our world in today, and still others may interpret their level of privilege as unfair and a consequence of an unjust history, with a view to playing their role in rebalancing privilege and justice.
We would hope that individual donors would not give as a way of grandstanding, or as a tokenistic gesture to mask a perpetuating a power imbalance. They would not give with one hand, with the explicit intention of extracting with the other in the way explicitly espoused by government aid strategies.
When individuals make a choice to give, especially when their motives are genuine, they are expressing an important freedom and part of that freedom involves the right to choose who to give to and how to give it. At the same time we should remember that refugee led organisations (RLOs) are also in the position of choosing how to spend these resources on behalf of the communities they serve, knowing, as we do, that they don’t use the funds directly for their own personal benefit. They need to make decisions on behalf of communities whose same freedoms and rights have been suppressed by the experience of forced displacement. RLO leaders are in the challenging position as interlocutors between the original donors, and the community recipients of aid and their varied rights and entitlements.
Aid moves in a chain from the original donors via RLOs to the recipient communities and all three entities should be engaged creatively in the process. This is firstly inevitable, because unless donors have agency over the funding they choose to give, there is nothing to force them to give it (for better or worse). Secondly, it is fair that all three entities are able to express their own positions within the chain of aid, they have the right to be involved. Thirdly, in my opinion the re-balancing of injustices and inequities will be far more effective when we build up a sense of community. The donors should be invested not just in the transfer of funds, but invested in building understanding in and empathy for the causes they are supporting as a broader strategy for preventing some of the world’s problems.
What should be the role of international organisations in this chain of funding? Too many organisations build their business model around taking a chunk of this funding as it makes its gradual way to refugee communities. When this chain has multiple nodes and bottlenecks we end up in a situation where far more aid is being spent propping up aid worker salaries than reaching refugee communities. Sometimes this is an implicit business model, such as fundraisers and project development teams being rewarded for their ability to generate income for their organisations. Other times this strategy is explicit, with phrases such as “we need our jobs too” being overheard in the sector.
Instead the main priority should be to facilitate the flow of funds as directly as possible between original givers and refugee communities. For Cohere this would mean that when at all possible the funding should bypass our bank accounts and go directly from individual donor to refugee led organisation, and this is very much our approach, such as via www.reframe.network.
A laudable additional example is Give Directly, the organisation that gives a one-off cash transfer to every household in a defined geographical area. They pool all funds they raise, with the clear explanation that donors are not choosing who the money is going to, because the funds will simply go to everyone in a village, district or refugee camp. This approach would appear at first glance to be even more efficient than Cohere’s in transferring funds to refugee communities, although in practice Give Directly have to use aggregators such as RLOs to help them identify all the households and make disbursements in refugee hosting areas. They also pool the funds at some, albeit comparatively efficient, cost and at the same time exclude the donor from any engagement in aid beyond the act of giving, something that I would argue does not help build a community based on solidarity. Conversely, the act of investing in social entrepreneurs could arguably be framed as an act of enhancing the agency of a community, by enabling innovators to build a platform that could grow to more than what a one-off cash transfer could achieve for a community, including scaling humanitarian funding or commercial investment in sustainable projects.
Another fascinating position is that of Adeso, the African NGO led by Degan Ali, who in turning down institutional aid from government donors have converted their annual revenue from a $25M+ NGO to a $3M revenue NGO, arguably achieving more for the sector in the process. Adeso goes further by urging the international aid community to stand back to allow local and national governments to lead the refugee response and all the service delivery of aid, urging them instead to use their large budgets to lobby the global north countries they are headquartered in to stop perpetuating global inequality.
I fully back Adeso in this line of advocacy. It would be shocking to imagine a large NGO providing all the services to refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, rather than the state, so why should it be different in the global south? I also understand the logic and applaud the success of Give Directly in cutting out most of the inefficiencies in the flow of aid. However, I fear that both approaches could give an excuse for the privileged, those who are benefitting from an unjust and unequal global order, to think they are doing their bit and that topics like the global refugee crisis don’t directly affect them.
This is why at Cohere we are creating channels for donors to not only give towards refugee communities, but in the process learn more about the realities of forced displacement and about the people impacted by the inequalities of today’s world. Ultimately this will mean that donors have some influence over which organisations receive funding but they will also be more engaged with a worsening global refugee crisis. Now is not the time for giving a small portion of income and moving on with life, and it is not time for a display of power. There will be 117 million forcibly displaced people by the end of this year and before long the global refugee crisis will negatively affect everyone on the planet if it doesn’t already - this trend will only be reversed if we see ourselves as one community built on empathy and solidarity. Everyone has to be involved.
To learn more about how Cohere is bridging the distances between refugee communities, refugee leaders and potential donors all over the world visit our website, and learn about the RLOs and their specific projects on www.reframe.network.
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