From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY NATURAL DISASTER• Providing a means for communities to voice both positivefeedback and criticism to those providing humanitarianassistance, and to receive appropriate redress;• Documenting efforts to ensure accountability, and makingrecords available for public scrutiny.Establishing a complaints mechanism in its Malawi food crisisresponse programme in 2005–06 allowed Oxfam to discover and rectifycrimes being committed by ‘middlemen’ in the programme, who werestealing food that should have been going to beneficiaries. The beneficiariesprobably would not have had the courage, or known how, to contactOxfam and the police had they not been involved in discussions inthe first days of the programme about their rights and how best tomake complaints.Achieving this kind of accountability involves both learning howto do it (bearing in mind that it is it is far from easy to achieve in themiddle of a humanitarian catastrophe) and establishing a system forassessing and reporting back on progress, so that organisations can seehow well they are doing and generate the pressure to improve.There are various ways in which the effort to improve downwardaccountability could evolve further. One option is to focus on settingstandards and indicators for best practice, as the Sphere initiative hasset quality standards for humanitarian assistance more generally. Asystem of peer review, with published results, could improve levels oftransparency and speed up efforts to spread best practice amongNGOs. Eventually, it may become necessary to opt for a system ofcertification by independent auditors. This might help to assuagethose critics of NGOs who argue that self-regulation is not enough inan age when the public has moved from a ‘trust me’ to a ‘show me’culture; however, there are concerns that such formal Northernaccounting and auditing models could increase costs and excludenascent Southern aid agencies that could otherwise become importantplayers in the future.The very word ‘disaster’ comes from the Latin for ‘ill-starred’, but itis inequality and injustice that determine who is at risk from disaster,not the stars. And by hitting poor and marginal groups hardest,disasters ratchet up inequality within and between countries.255