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Localizing the International Humanitarian Response in Ukraine

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Ucrania
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RI
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Summary and Recommendations

Ukraine’s government and civil society have managed an impressive humanitarian response to the displacement and destruction ongoing since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Without much early help from international actors, most of whom were slow to mobilize or scale up their presence in the country, local and largely volunteer-driven efforts served as the backbone of the initial relief operation. But these efforts can no longer sustain themselves without external resources.

Thankfully, donors have rapidly stepped up, committing more than $12 billion to help meet Ukraine’s humanitarian needs in the last six months—a record amount of time. That funding, however, is almost all going to the United Nations and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). International aid agencies then largely pass resources on to Ukrainian organizations that are overwhelmingly the ones delivering aid to beneficiaries. But this creates a circuitous and costly process that often results in delays and complications for both national NGOs and the people they aim to serve.

Most importantly, this internationalization undermines Ukrainian organizations’ leadership and ownership of the response. It runs counter to commitments the aid community has made—most notably in the Grand Bargain, which commits donors and aid organizations to provide 25 percent of global humanitarian funding to local actors—to center and empower local actors in the humanitarian system. Instead, an international aid economy is fast emerging in which foreign humanitarian actors are empowered while Ukrainian organizations serve as partners or sub-grantees attached to the budgets and strategic decision-making of INGOs and UN agencies.

Moreover, the flood of funding to international organizations is increasingly diverting human capital from Ukraine’s own civil society, private sector, and government—much as it has in other emergencies. At the same time, it is drawing significant human resources from INGO operations elsewhere in the world, arguably hindering those responses in countries where the needs are no less urgent. A proposed exemption from military conscription for staff of humanitarian agencies as currently drafted could further privilege international organizations over local entities.

Given the strength of the public, private, and civil society sectors, the Ukraine context clearly illustrates the dangers and missed opportunities of building parallel aid structures that disempower local, democratically oriented governance structures. It is therefore no surprise that a backlash seems to be building against the internationalization of the humanitarian response. Ukrainian and even some international actors warn that undermining local capacity could prove particularly debilitating as the war grinds on and in its wake. As the focus shifts to reconstruction and re-integrating people who were displaced, and as international actors inevitably withdraw at some point, Ukraine must be able to rely on its domestic capacity. To ensure that it can, several steps should be taken as soon as possible:

  • Donors, INGOs, and UN agencies should move beyond aspirational objectives to concrete planning for a localization strategy. This strategy should set out specific targets and benchmarks to steadily move the ownership of funding and programs from international to local entities. The strategy should include short-term targets with a view to shift the current trajectory of funds in the next 6-12 months towards local entities and to engage more local entities as the majority stakeholders in coordination mechanisms like the Humanitarian Country Team.

  • Donors, INGOs, and UN agencies should set targets for localization in Ukraine that exceed the aim of the Grand Bargain. As part of a new localization strategy for Ukraine, donors should seize the opportunity afforded by the relatively high degree of development and institutional capacity in the country to stake out more ambitious medium- and long-term targets.

  • Donors should expand the use of the UN Ukraine Humanitarian Fund (UHF) to channel resources to local organizations. Despite its slow progress on localization since the February invasion, the UN’s $200 million pooled humanitarian fund for Ukraine is well-placed organizationally to rapidly execute a shift towards funding local relief groups. The UHF has operated in the country for years. In 2021, the fund succeeded in channeling 50 percent of its money to local organizations.

  • Donors should demonstrate flexibility and adjust their risk tolerance to empower Ukrainian civil society and volunteer networks. Donors maintain rigorous requirements and systems for implementing partners, which are designed to ensure accountability and effective aid delivery. But donors will need to accept more risk to accelerate localization. For example, Ukraine offers the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) an important opportunity to carry out its recent commitment to accept a high level of risk to shift ownership, authority, and responsibility to local groups across the globe. For the EU, this would mean allowing its main aid agency, the Directorate General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), to relax its restriction on funding non-EU-based organizations to allow Ukrainian NGOs to directly apply for funding. This would require a legislative change but, as Ukraine is now an EU candidate country it would seem, politically at least, a quite reasonable step.

  • Donors should invest in capacity building for local actors receptive to technical assistance. A top priority would be to build the skills and capacities required for donors to make Ukrainian NGOs direct grantees rather than sub-grantees. International NGOs and foreign experts with a long history of navigating complex aid regimes could play an important role in this effort. This is particularly true for those INGOs that have already having built and managed donor-funded projects in Ukraine.

  • Donors should support local consortia led by well-established, national NGOs. These consortia could serve as vehicles for distributing funds to smaller Ukrainian NGOs and volunteer networks. Here as well, INGOs could provide technical support to ensure that the local consortia have the capacity to meet donor requirements. By going directly to Ukrainian organizations, donors can save money and then use those savings to spread existing humanitarian funding over a longer timeframe.

  • As has long been called for by supporters of the Grand Bargain, donors should ensure fairness in covering the overhead costs and security expenses of local partners. This would mean mandating that international actors who partner with local entities apply an adequate, if not equal, overhead percentage and security budget for the local entity as they do for themselves. This would ensure that Ukrainian organizations can better cover their own core operational costs while protecting their staff and operations as well as international actors do.

  • Donors should invest in anticorruption systems embedded inside Ukrainian organizations. Rather than build parallel systems to exert more international control over aid and avoid the potential costs of corruption, donors should invest in embedding more anti-corruption systems within Ukrainian governmental bodies and NGOs. This could also entail a wider engagement with local anti-corruption organizations – some of which already have a deep experience in the fight against corruption. These efforts should enable the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian NGOs to strengthen their management of the country’s social protection mechanisms.

  • Donors and aid agencies should strengthen support for Ukrainian organizations willing to separate humanitarian operations from the military effort. Donors should fund specific interventions to help Ukrainian organizations who wish to act as principled humanitarian actors separate their humanitarian assistance from support for the military effort. In all cases though, more direct donor funding to Ukrainian entities will inevitably lessen the corrosive impact of aid mixing with which many INGOs and UN agencies are currently grappling.