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Equipping Humanitarian Workers in Conflict Situations
National Entity Report
1 Nov 1998
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| Keywords: | All "Peace & Conflict" reports |
Equipping project staff in conflict situations
to be agents of positive developmental energy
Warren Nyamugasira, Nigel Marsh, Lincoln Ndogoni
Summary
Developmental assistance makes powerful changes to communities into which it is introduced, but the energy it brings can either be positive or negative - it can produce long term benefits or create more problems. The modern dynamic of humanitarian work is that the staff of non Governmental Organisations is largely composed of nationals. This article argues that primary attention has to be given to the psycho-social well-being of the national staff to equip them as agents of positive change, and proposes a mechanism to address this need that has been modelled by World Vision in Rwanda.
Introduction
Humanitarian organisation?s are increasingly taking steps to ensure that their project staff are nationals of the countries in which they work, a direct result of in-country government pressure, economic realities of project management and prevailing NGO philosophy. This has many repercussions, good and bad, but it presents a special problem for those working in environments characterised by serious conflict. While international staff may produce plans that create unexpected negative consequences, in a situation where 19 out of 20 members of staff may see themselves on one side or another of a dispute, their presuppositions and prejudices can introduce still more risk.
In places where involvement in confrontation is virtually universal, where everyone has been touched to some extent by the effects of violence and hatred, national staff will be variously victims, agents and witnesses of all that has gone before. Individuals may be shocked and traumatised, bitter and vengeful, fatalistic and apathetic, paralysed by unexpressed grief or prone to mood swings. The question needs to be asked: How can staff who are themselves products of the conflict be assisted so that they can engage in humanitarian work without prejudice or bias and with a peacebuilding perspective?
This article proposes a solution which may have a radical effect on development agency strategies and donors. If successful it would be of great benefit to the clients of the agency and the nation in which they live. Primary emphasis has to be placed on the psycho-social well-being of the national project staff, to help them learn to cope with the trauma they have suffered, and to equip them with the tools necessary to bring similar relief to those with whom they work.
Such an approach is being tried experimentally by World Vision in Rwanda, using methodologies designed at Butare University, to provide trauma intervention for 350 staff working at all levels in the organisation. The main thrust is the Personal Development Workshop, which has many benefits but one objective - to equip the staff to deal with their own traumatic memories. To some degree this frees them from their prejudices and makes them more efficient in work that contributes to peacebuilding.
Aid as a source of negative energy for conflict
In any ongoing conflict situation, ill-planned relief aid and developmental intervention can significantly increase the chances of future conflict, emphasising the differences of warring parties or bolstering the war economy (1). Indeed, for it to do otherwise requires conscious planning. Assistance should be strategically provided in a way that promotes reconciliation among warring parties rather than emphasising their differences. It should aim to help beneficiaries regard improvements to their lives as resources that are too good to lose in further conflict, rather than resources that will help them adopt their fighting position again.
In a reflection on Rwanda's history, and the present state of development, Peter Uvin laments that 'the development aid system still neglects most of the non-economic aspects of development in favour of a narrow economic-technical approach'. Issues including human rights, income inequality, authoritarianism, humiliation, fear and impunity are wrongly being ignored, he argues:
"(This) allows the processes of exclusion and humiliation to continue unabated, if not to become strengthened, to the greater pleasure of those benefiting from them. Hence, much development aid helps to lay the groundwork for further inequality and mal-development, as well as structural, and, eventually, acute violence." (2)
Another less-documented effect of aid is its ability to build up negative psychological energy in those locked into a victim mentality - recipients who consider practical inputs as a vote of support for their plight in a political, rather than a humanitarian, sense. On either side of a conflict there will be individuals, and often whole communities, who see themselves as wronged, cheated or defeated in a struggle they consider they had a reasonable cause to fight and win. For them, survival or development is not the main issue - everything serves another desire, which is restitution, retribution or revenge. Aid may then be seen by them - or at least portrayed to them by their leaders - as moral support for their world view. It fuels bitterness and rather than offering hope of a conflict-free life reignites the desire for self-justification and the possibility of a fight-back. The material value of the aid is calculated in terms of the ability to restore the recipient community to a war footing.
Targeting aid in a way that prevents it from being hijacked by such negative influences requires project management and staff who can adopt a viewpoint that is above the emotive pits into which everyone else around them may be falling. To do this, however, is a formidable challenge at a time when an increasing number of staff are nationals who are themselves products of war.
Recipient governments are increasingly exerting pressure on international organisations to pare the number of expatriates to a minimum. Rwanda is no exception. This comes as part of the more interventionist approach being adopted by host governments towards NGO activity. The result is that the brunt of the burden of creating appropriate humanitarian intervention falls on a largely national staff who are as much affected by the conflict as the people they are trying to serve.
Aid as a source of positive energy for peace
This raises a fundamental question for donor agencies and humanitarian organisations working in conflict-prone societies: Can projects help people recover what they lost without increasing antagonism between adversaries? This is the key to peacebuilding - focusing assistance, and the mechanisms for providing it, in ways that increase long-term understanding and mutual interdependence between the opposing communities.
In this sense, the underlying question for every aspect of a project is fairly simple, although answering it may not be. Does this action tend towards development for peace, or is it helping someone prepare for war? The extreme end of this argument can also be simply stated: Don't develop the capacity of people who don't want peace - the so-called 'irreconcilables', those unwilling or unable to return to a state of harmony.
Deciding whether a person or a community is commited to peaceful development, rather than trying to restore their position for more conflict, requires risky value judgments. Development organisations shy away from them, because to face them makes aid more a political tool of the donor than ever before. "We will only help you if you demonstrate that you're working towards peace," is a philosophy that tends to move us away from another article of faith of the development community: "We will help anybody in need regardless of their race, ethnic background or political affiliation."
A middle way is to focus on developmental peacebuilding, storing positive energies in every project undertaken. That means establishing methodologies, mechanisms and working procedures that create or develop connectors(3) between communities as they improve the life of the communities and their members.
For example, World Vision has a large, successful seed multiplication programme in Rwanda. Beyond its immediate impact, it has connected farmers from different backgrounds and geographical areas across the country. Originally this was not intentional, but it became obvious that the projects were serving this purpose, and increasingly these connectors are being introduced deliberately.
Seeds for new varieties of principal crops, and sometimes new crops, are quarantine tested and then experimentally grown in WV test beds. They are then given to one or two associations of beneficiary farmers on a contract basis - a set proportion of the crop is either bought back by World Vision for distribution to other associations, or it is given directly by one association to another for further multiplication. Careful selection of the second-level recipients creates interesting connectors with peacebuilding potential. Likewise, it is common for livestock re-stocking programmes to provide rabbits, pigs, goats and cows on the condition that offspring are availed to other associations. Where this can be done in a way which leads one community to provide benefit to another, a connector has been made.
Where local staff are significant in the planning and execution of intervention strategies, it is essential for a positive outcome that satisfactory time and expense are invested in them as people to prepare them for the work. Mary Anderson and Peter Woodrow make a similar point in a wider context (4):
"Emergency relief projects always have an impact on local people's capacities and vulnerabilities, either positive or negative ... There may be an increase in capacities or there may not be. This depends on how the plows and seeds and technical assistance are offered ... " (italics their's).
Projects should be judged developmentally, rather than simply in their success at getting goods to beneficiaries, they argue, and 'there is an education job to be done with the public, news media and donor agencies to gain support for using developmental criteria to evaluate relief work, and for using funds donated for emergency relief to support developmental elements of emergency programming.'
Local staff as agents of positive development energy
To identify appropriate connectors between communities takes discretion and effort, and requires incisive thinking from the people working nearest the beneficiaries - the social workers, agronomists and community technicians. It is here that national staff who are free of the prejudices of many of their compatriots are of supreme importance. They intuitively know which groups should connect with which others, and how to arrange projects that promote interdependency rather than make one community more secure at the expense of the other. Enabling staff to work in such situations requires equiping them to help people they once considered enemies.
To work as a national within the community in this way needs patience, skilful follow up, and sometimes professional intervention. Telling farmers they can have free beans to plant provided they give a share from the crop to a supposed enemy puts those farmers in a stressful situation. Reaching a point of understanding and compromise draws on skills from the agronomist which go far beyond the agricultural methodologies in which she may have been trained. She must know something about conflict resolution, negotiation and stress management, and must also understand when to call on specialised help. But before any of that can be helpful, she must be free in her own mind of her client's prejudices.
Another solution, that does not go into the depth that World Vision Rwanda is now pursuing, is stress management for staff and beneficiaries, and this can be highly beneficial. It may be that burn-out in workers and loss of enthusiasm among recipients could be significantly reduced by clincial attention to conflict-related stress. This becomes even more important after a critical incident. Following the murder of a national member of World Vision's staff in Ruhengeri in August 1997 - the third in the year - a security review found the staff were gripped by a kind of fatalism. WV responded with critical incident trauma workshops, led by a psychologist and a stress management specialist. One result was an increase in security-consciousness, perhaps indicating a reduction in the trauma-related fatalism present before.
Martha Thompson, recalling 12 years experience with various NGOs in Central America, eloquently makes a similar point about feeling helpless in the face of conflict, background tension, and violence in El Salvador:
"Fear could not be shown, even when fear and guilt were our ruling emotions. Part of that was due to guilt, but sometimes it was dictated by an attitude of bravado. We were not able to talk about our own fears, much less deal with them, so everything was made into a story or a joke. ... The greatest compliment was to be described as calm in a difficult situation. All one's effort went into appearing calm at the expense of processing fear ... I believe (now) that it is vital to seek a way to discuss fears without always having to appear strong ... Unprocessed feelings led to overwork, which led to burn-out. ... Now I know how emotionally unhealthy that was, but at the time, repression of grief was a necessity." (4)
Surely the right response on behalf of national staff is not to wait for a critical incident to respond, but to create a format that can enable them to process their feelings and find comfort from their grief.
Equipping national development staff for peacebuilding
International NGOs in Rwanda are 95% staffed by Rwandan nationals (5). These are the people who have to explain the situation in which they work clearly to donors and partners outside the country; prove they have the fairness and integrity to impress government; resist the pressure to use development aid negatively which may be put on them by community leaders and others; and introduce realistic, effective peacebuilding connectors into community based projects. To help meet these demands, World Vision Rwanda decided to provide a course in a workshop setting for its 350 staff, the Personal Development Workshop (PDW). This was based on methodologies researched by Simon Gasibirege of the University of Butare, field tested by his team, and refined by World Vision's former trauma coordinator Evelyn Burkhard.
The World Vision PDW is an 11 day course over a four month period, with a mixture of lectures, question and answer sessions, and small group discussion. Professional counselling is available at any stage. The course begins with a one-day introduction, followed some time later by three monthly periods of three days each covering emotions, forgiveness, and bereavement, and a final day of processing. Informal intervention is introduced in the working environment as the workshop leaders consider it necessary
The PDW was initially greeted with scepticism and even fear by the staff. In some cases they resented the implication that they had a problem, and in others they feared that examining well-buried emotions might cause them to lose control and slide into madness. As early groups went through the course, however, many showed visible signs of improved mental and emotional health, with positive repercussions in work and at home. That progress led to acceptance for the course, which became a priority for managers, some of whom previously had objected to the time commitment it required of their staff. Latterly participants are expressing a desire for five days each month rather than three, and a strategy has been created by which all staff members should participate within two years, with further plans for the course to be taken into the wider community after that. A governmental donor organisation, AusAid, announced in December 1997 it would fund the PDW for the following three years, by which time it should be a programme run for client communities rather than WV staff.
The aim and end result of the PDW is that each member of staff can speak not just for his or her own 'group', but for that of the people he or she used to consider enemies, as well as third parties. In that way development genuinely becomes multi-dimensional, rather than just the pursuit of whatever is best for 'my group'. Connectors in projects cease to be theoretical, but actually emerge from among the people themselves.
While it is not always appropriate in all cultures to encourage individuals to 'talk through' their problems, the idea of being given some opportunity to express inner pain is therapeutic. Many people feel voiceless, without identity, because of violence and long years of persecution. One woman admitted during a PDW session, "For the last 30 years I have never told who I am - even at years five and six in school I didn't know my ethnic group."
A senior member of World Vision Rwanda local staff acknowledges he had changed his names in his youth to disguise his cultural identity so he could gain access to education from which he would otherwise have been barred. Such people have a sense of identity stolen by 'the other group', and finding a common voice with them can give a sense of relief.
The PDW, as with any therapy, is unable to benefit an unwilling participant. Yet WV's experience is that those who have gone through the course so far are mostly responsible people who want to be free of the pain and the prejudice that has dominated their lives for at least three years, and often much longer.
Multiplying the rewards of the PDW
As a general rule, donors do not consider psycho-social intervention for the staff of humanitarian organisations to be cost effective, but this is short-sighted. The benefits of having a national staff capable of functioning in their environment in an apolitical and constructive way may call for added expenditure in already tight budgets but is productive in the long run.
If the Personal Development Workshops works effectively on 350 Rwandan staff, there is a good chance that this will have a direct positive impact on their work. Clinical evaluation tools are being developed to establish whether and how this takes place. Additionally, it is hoped they will process the course content and some among them will find ways to adapt it to new groups with whom they work. Messrs Gasibirege et al at the University of Butare are watching with interest as World Vision refines its ideas among its staff before broadening its scope again to meet the needs of the wider population. WV is identifying members of staff who can be trained to teach the principles of the workshop, so they can take it to community groups in WV's working areas.
A great many things are being tried in Rwanda and other parts of the world, often with great optimism and little else to back them up. From seminars to religious events, a virtual reconciliation industry has grown up in many quarters. Some of these efforts are better than others, but the linking theme among the best is that they are professionally put together and rigorously refined in real situations before being used more widely. In this sense, the chance to try a new approach on a 'trial group' of willing staff makes good sense, increasing the professionalism of World Vision's psycho-social inputs into the community.
Planning for positive, peacebuilding developmental relief
The need to create positive energies for development rather than storing negative energies for future conflict requires donors to be more selective in their support for projects, and puts increasing emphasis on them to be aware of the political nuances of the situations into which they will be investing resources.
That, in turn, puts a responsibility on the development organisations working on the ground. They need to develop more capacity to report back the characteristics and attitudes of the communities in which they work. Once again, if the staff is largely national, it is imperative that the initial effort of development is among the staff.
Inevitably government, which likes to keep control of the functioning of the NGOs in its domain, has to be brought into the process. On a human level the leaders are as bound by their deeply held prejudices and as traumatised by their experiences as every other member of the population, and dealing with them requires maturity on the part of the project staff.
Local authorities have their own pressing needs and agendas, and are often products of the complex rivalries in their areas. It takes understanding and maturity on the part of the staff to know how to resist pressure and negotiate sensibly, whether their heart inclination is on the same side of the argument as the authority figure or not. To accede to an inappropriate request turns donor resources into a direct energy store for more conflict.
Conclusion
The fact that an increasing number of project staff are nationals and that they are inevitable ?products? of war is an issue that needs addressing. Without this and associated issues being addressed, the organisation's work in the community will inevitably be directed by the unspoken and often unrecognised inclinations of the local staff, and it will become increasingly identified with one side or other in the conflict. The implication of this is the fuelling and sustaining of conflict through aid. Facing up to internal staff problems may be difficult, but it is essential if the organisation's work is to bring long-lasting benefit, storing energies for positive change. It is also essential that donors re-assess funding priorities to take this into account. The World Vision experience with its Personal Development Workshop, while still at an early stage, suggests one possible response that is having a positive result among the staff, and through them, the wider community. Adapting this workshop to be conducted in the wider community is a goal that WV Rwanda is looking towards.
References
(1) "Too often, aid workers are overwhelmed by the prevailing violence and confusion and believe these to be the only realities. They design programmes, make decisions, distribute goods, employ and deploy staffs in ways that ignore, and negate, the other realities - those on which past peace rested and future peace could be built. What additional good could be done by assistance that is provided in conflict areas if, while emergency needs were being met, local capacities for peace were also recognised, supported, encouraged and enlarged?" Anderson, Mary B (1996) Do No Harm: Collaborative for Development Action Local Capacities for Peace Project (p2)
(2) Uvin, Peter (1996) Development, Aid and Conflict: Reflections from the case of Rwanda, United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research - Research For Action 24, p34
(3) ?Connectors? is a term used by Mary Anderson to refer to activities or approaches that bring about increased connection and interdependency between different groups.
(4) Anderson, Mary B, and Woodrow, Peter J (1989) Rising From The Ashes, Development Strategies in Times of Disaster, Westview Press (pp93,94)
(5) Thompson, Martha (1997) Empowerment and Survival, Humanitarian Work In Civil Conflict, Development In Practice 7/1, Oxfam Publications (pp 54,55)
(6) The Government of Rwanda Evaluation Report For NGO Activities (March 1997) suggests there are around 12,500 employees of NGOs in Rwanda, of whom 605 are long term expatriate personnel.
The authors
Warren Nyamugasira is an economist who has worked with development NGOs in Uganda and Rwanda for 19 years. He is now Programme Director for World Vision Rwanda.
Nigel Marsh is a journalist and has worked with NGOs in Uganda and Rwanda. He is now Communications Officer with World Vision in Rwanda.
Lincoln Ndogoni is a counselling psychologist, worked with Amani Counselling Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, and taught at the University of Nairobi for six years.
All three can be contacted at World Vision Rwanda, BP 1419, Rue Kamuzinzi, Kigali, Rwanda.
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