BY GRIMACHEW GASHAW
Today’s Herald guest is Michel Saad, Head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Ethiopia. He was born in Lebanon during the civil war that ravaged the country. In those days, children of Lebanon including him were forced to waste most of their time out of school. When things went back to normal, he attended primary and secondary schooling.
As he embarked up on higher education he studied first degree in chemistry, as well as another degree in international law. His career history started in a private company that works on pharmaceutical and medical equipment. He also worked as a TV News correspondent. He then joined the humanitarian field working for the international committee of the Red Cross for 13 years before joining UNOCHA.
He has been in Ethiopia since the end of January this year. Just before he was assigned to the UNOCHA position, he used to enjoy visiting various parts of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Herald had a short stay with him and discussed a range of issues related to humanitarian responses and the challenge he faced so far while doing the same job. Have a nice read.
How effective are you in coordinating global emergencies to save lives during humanitarian crises?
As part of the UN agencies, OCHA is the only entity that embraces the word “humanitarian” in its name. Over the years, it has developed its capacity of reacting at times of emergencies be it natural or manmade disaster across the globe and scaling up the assistance in a place where there is small presence of it.
We have several arrangements with different partners of UN agencies, Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, international and national NGOs, member states or governments, at times when our services are linked to emergencies, search and rescue people affected in case of emergency situations.
So, we have several modus operandi that enable us to react quickly in case of emergency situations across the globe. In some protracted settings–in a crisis lasting more than six months or one year, we carry out the humanitarian response plan combining all these humanitarian needs by first or early December every year so as to do global humanitarian overviews launch which happened last December for the first time in Addis Ababa at the AU Commission.
Our job is to coordinate humanitarian responses to reach the people in emergency situations. First, we identify the humanitarian need, make sure where the needs are available, and make sure anyone is left behind. So we do not only focus on an emergency that is grabbing the attention of the globe, but we make sure to tell all member states, all partners if there are other humanitarian needs somewhere else.
Gather Information and manage it in a way to be able to provide the response effectively and sit down with the partners and governments to see who would be able to do what to respond to this crisis. However, generating ideas by itself is nothing unless you get the money that enables you to do much. We also have a whole branch working on humanitarian financing. At the global level, we call the central Emergency Response Fund and then in some countries we do have a country based full fund.
In Ethiopia, for example, we have the Ethiopian humanitarian Fund which has been in operation since 2006. It is one of the oldest in the world. And last year, for example, through this fund, donors provided about 100 million USD. It is one of the effective tools for donor’s to be able to channel funding to local organizations who sometimes might be struggling in accessing international funding. It also allows us to react very quickly as we work with local partners who understand the situation as they are amongst the community who might be affected by a natural or manmade disaster.
And then we work on advocacy to highlight that there are humanitarian needs in place X, Y, Z, and also to support the authorities to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law.
As we react in emergencies, our way of operating is to go somewhere, understand the needs, provide the response, coordinate the response, monitor the impact, face it down and hand it over to other partners who do more in terms of resilience and development.
Unfortunately, this is not the case everywhere. We are seeing more and more devices that are taking longer in time. Since we had the COVID pandemic, two years ago, we are the first to react and call the world community respond to the COVID Emergency across the globe. Since then, we would need to find a way to bring our colleagues from across the globe as humanitarian people could not respond to all the needs.
In Ethiopia, we have been operating for more than 40 years in different capacities. The latest crisis that we are dealing with is the drought in the eastern and southern part of the country back in 2016 /2017. Indeed, we did support the COVID response and then the Locust infestation. Unfortunately, while we were facing down the operations, the conflict in the north unfolded. Thus, we had to revisit our posture, increase our capacity and start responding to the needs.
In today’s Ethiopia, I think we can say that we are dealing with at least two crises; conflicts mostly in the northern part of the country in Afar, Amhara and Tigray. The drought started initially in the eastern part of the country and part of the southern regions such as Somali, SNNPs, and Southwest Sidama. Then, we are seeing it spreading.
As per the humanitarian response plan reviewed initially, we were calling for 3.1 billion USD to provide aid for about 22 million people in Ethiopia. Later on, when we reviewed it again, the humanitarian demand was increasing from 3.1 to 3.3 billion USD. Thanks to the generosity of donors, we received good funds, I would say. However, we are still less than 50 per cent funded which means we are forced to make very difficult decisions. So either 50 per cent of the people will not get the support or we will support everybody instead of giving them 100 per cent of what they need.
Thus, we keep on reminding the international community to provide more support considering that Ethiopia is a big country with a large size of population and complex situations be it manmade and natural disaster. We need to ensure that there is enough attention on the situation in Ethiopia.
What is OCHA’s plan to improve humanitarian access in the northern part, especially after the peace deal made between the Ethiopian government and TPLF forces?
The resumption of the first military convoys back in the first of April this year, OCHA was the first to open the route and managed to provide assistance without forgetting the communities in need, in Afar, and Amhara on the way. Then, on 24th August, we faced lockdown in terms of sending aid from one region to the other, although we never stopped working.
So, our colleagues everywhere in Amhara and Tigray continue to work despite the circumstances. We very much welcomed the news after discussion in Pretoria in South Africa. And then, we always have very close discussions, collaboration with the government at several levels from federal level up to the zonal or woreda level. During that time, we intensified these consultations and discussions to see how we would be able to scale up and from where. We have to recognize the efforts done by the Ethiopian government to provide humanitarian access to the people affected by conflict in the northern part of the country.
If we compare the situation today with what we had, ahead of the peace deal, we were able to fly from Addis to Mekele with the United Nations and humanitarian Air Services flights. Today, we are able to fly from Addis to Mekele and Shire- two different destinations – using four flights per week.
Previously, we were sending aid only through the Samara -Abala- Mekele route alone. Today, we are continuing from Samara to Mekele route and Kobo to Alamata. We are also sending aid from North Gondar – Adi Arkai – Maitsebri. Humera-Shire-Sheraro is the other corridor that we send aid to the people affected in the conflict. So, there is an improvement in terms of access.
Thanks to the decision made by the Ethiopian government, the consultations we have been making with them will be able to advance the access as it was a conflict zone. We need to have these discussions, consultation agreements to see how we can scale up humanitarian aid to the people in need. We are seeing a greater improvement. In discussion with our partners such as humanitarian operators and donors, we see how they can support the humanitarian operations.
Could you tell me how the war affected the distribution of humanitarian services in northern parts of Ethiopia during the last two years of conflict?
The situation in conflict prone areas mainly in Tigray and parts of Afar and Amhara were very difficult. The main thing is that the whole region was cut off from the rest of the country. Due to the fact that Public utilities be it power supply, telecommunication, banking services, even the supply for the market, the trade routes and all of that could not be managed from the center and terminated service as the days went on. We are able to provide life saving support in times of emergencies but we cannot substitute for a function in market and services and all of that.
Due to this reason, we have been really trying to see how we can do to the best of our capacity and respond to these needs. However, the situation was really difficult. I mentioned parts of Afar and Amhara as they were under the same state of affairs. The cessation of public utilities such as electric power, banking, trade routes creates difficulty to provide humanitarian access to the people in need.
Food and water shortages have been seen in drought affected areas. So how does OCHA manage problems related to malnutrition?
Thank you for mentioning this. Last year, we started raising the alarm bell about the drought that started mostly in the eastern part of the country and struggled to get attention back. We pushed our colleagues from headquarters to give us some funds from the central Emergency Response Fund so as to initiate the response and this was back in December last year. At this moment, I think we managed to rally and put more attention on the drought situation in the country.
We have done some events about the drought in the Horn of Africa as natural disasters or pandemic do not know borders. However, the situation in Ethiopia needs special concern as it may be the first time when we are entering into the fifth failed rainy season. This explains the magnitude of the drought situation.
Another thing that we should keep in mind is we had a locust infestation that occurred in eastern and southern parts of the country two or three years ago. When we have a locust infestation, by the time we get rid of this problem, the soil would have really lost its nutrients and power. The lives of pastorals are relying on their livestock. These people are moving from one place to the other in search of pasture and water. However, the livestock of these pastoral communities have died in staggering numbers.
This is a strong indicator about the gravity of the situation. In some pockets, there might have been some cases of malnutrition as the people are not moving as they used to do regularly. Lifestyle of the community would impact on the quality of the food intake.
This increases the rate of malnutrition that occurs in many parts of the country in Somalia, Guji, Bale, Borena of Oromia state and Konso. What we do in terms of responding to this very acute and concerning need is, our partners are more specialized in addressing malnutrition. So we work very closely with the health sector to respond directly to where it is needed without allowing anybody to fall behind.
Recently, we have colleagues from five different clusters and we pragmatically decided to join forces together to be able to have a more effective impact with the minimum resources at hand. So we have partners from the agriculture, food security, nutrition, health, water & sanitation, hygiene clusters, five of them came together under inter cluster collaboration. And they have started working focusing on Somali and parts of Oromia states.
We would like to call on all benevolent– all the people who are attentive and sensitive to the immediate view of human suffering. We do need support as we cannot allow in 2022 for people to die of hunger or malnutrition. We do need support as we are seeing the numbers of people who seek humanitarian aid is increasing. We are trying our best to respond to working in coordination and collaboration with government officials at all levels.
How much of your humanitarian supply like water, food and medicine are obtained from local sources? How much do you think of the service benefiting local suppliers?
Some of the supplies are unfortunately not available in Ethiopia’s market and we are forced to import. Whenever we are able to find any of the intended supply in the market, this is what we try to privilege as much as possible. We are here to provide humanitarian aid. This is the way of giving back.
And at the same time, I would like to highlight that more than 90 percent of our colleagues are actually from Ethiopia and whenever we do any tasks related to humanitarian assistance, we still need their assistance to move them around, put them in the warehouse and distribute them to the people in need. So, this is considered as supporting the local economy.
But we have welcomed the recent development in terms of the green initiatives of Ethiopia; not only the planting of trees but also the increase of wheat production and development in agriculture. Our colleagues who are more experts in this field discuss with the government if we can start now considering instead of importing food and if we can link up people who are in need and those who are producing.
During the recent OCHA, AU and other stakeholders summit here in Ethiopia, what important decisions were made regarding humanitarian service delivery in our country?
In the event organized, we said that the situation in terms of humanitarian need is getting worse. We have more people in need of humanitarian assistance. I asked for more than 51 billion USD which is a lot of money. As the humanitarian needs continuously increase, it is imperative to discuss with all partners. We have to put together and find a way to respond to the humanitarian need immediately. Let’s finger fence one year to another as the challenge will not disappear by itself. Thus, we have to do something important.
So, calling donors, the world community and philanthropic organizations who can support a dollar, birr and voluntarism intention is imperative to manage it. We were also working closely with AU and other partners such as the international federation of the Red Cross, other UN agencies as well as local and international NGOs to see how we can support the humanitarian agency.
When we say natural and manmade disasters, this can happen anywhere. Nobody can say this could not happen to me. Africa is not only a place for humanitarian crises, be it natural or manmade disasters but also a place of high potential to African people to see how they can support each other when there are other crises and mitigate the humanitarian impact.
As a coordinator of global humanitarian assistance, what do you convey for the international community to further reach the war affected areas?
What we ask from the international community is, to make sure that no one is left behind. This is something that member states have signed on to the United Nations with sustainable development goals. No human suffering should be provided with more attention than human suffering. Any human suffering anywhere in the world is something we all have the responsibility to address in any way we can.
That is why, we find a way to support all the positive momentum to allow access to the people who are in need, set aside stability to come back replacing insecurity anywhere it can have and make sure that humanitarian assistance and operators stay in the way from other kinds of interests be it political, geopolitical and others.
We have the job to do. We have worked according to principles that we did not invent. Everybody has subscribed to communities and member states of neutrality, impartiality and independence and most importantly humanity. This is the point we want to remind everybody. Humanity should come first. We should always consider humanity. How we can support each other wherever needed to put our hands together.
Thank you very much.
It’s my pleasure.
The Ethiopian Herald December 31/2022
