The drought comes with Zimbabweans enduring the worst economic crisis in a decade - prices of staples such as sugar, cooking oil and rice have more than doubled since June, jacking up inflation to David Beasley, executive director of the U. World Food Programme, said 2. The government estimates another 2. In , Zimbabwe faced one of its worst food security crises in decades, due to poor agricultural seasons, hyperinflation, failed economic and agricultural policies, and the consequences of Cyclone Idai and the COVID pandemic.
Action Against Hunger's team in Zimbabwe set up emergency multisectoral programs at the beginning of to provide for the most vulnerable people affected by prolonged drought and the socioeconomic crisis. We protected livelihoods from further deterioration by providing and strengthening access to drinking water and sustainable food and income. This included providing 3, urban households with cash transfers, with the aim of increasing resilience and reducing negative coping strategies of vulnerable families.
Much of the aid is distributed by agency personnel who were previously involved with development activities in the same locations. These individuals, and their politics, are well-known within communities. Agencies, including Save the Children UK , have stipulated in contracts with national staff that political views should never be expressed at emergency food distributions.
This perception becomes more problematic still during the registration process for beneficiaries, when food aid recipients are targeted selectively. A community member who is excluded on the grounds that their livelihood status does not merit assistance may believe that the real reason is that the person tasked with registration is a member of an opposing political party. Lastly, the principle of neutrality has also become a source of controversy at the level of community politics.
In traditional Zimbabwean society, one of the obligations placed on local leaders is to assist their people in times of need. In return for discharging such an obligation, the legitimacy of the chief in the eyes of the population is considerably enhanced. Within such a system, the arrival of an aid programme, where beneficiaries are selected through a broad-based community consultation supervised by an external agent, has been viewed by some traditional leaders with suspicion.
These concerns are reinforced by the fact that agencies have sought as much as possible to ensure that no political capital should be made out of such interventions. But if chiefs can claim no credit, they come to see the principle of neutrality as further undermining their role as guardians and benefactors of the poor in their communities. To minimise the problems agencies are facing, more needs to be done to publicly disseminate the principles that inform emergency programmes.
The fact that it is in conformity with an internationally-recognised set of standards is rarely appreciated, because agencies have taken insufficient time to promote this realisation among councillors, chiefs and other officials. The principle of neutrality, in company with the other provisions stipulated in the Code of Conduct, provides a basis of accountability not only to donors but also to the intended beneficiaries of emergency programmes.
If conformity to these principles depends not just on the willingness of agencies to uphold them, more needs to be done to inform aid recipients of what the code means to them. Very little of this has taken place in Zimbabwe. Communities may be informed about ration rates and the place, time and frequency of distributions, but the standards that agencies should uphold in their operations are rarely discussed.
Unless communities themselves begin to press for these standards to be realised, including the prohibition on furthering a political or religious position through aid deliveries, too much depends on the goodwill of implementing agencies to enforce them. Feedback structures at local level are needed so that people who believe that a standard has been infringed have a clear, transparent and independent mechanism of registering their complaints.
During the early phase of the food crisis, several agencies met to discuss their concerns around monitoring humanitarian principles in such a politically-charged environment. This was partly because no agreement was reached on what circumstances might provoke a response by other agencies in other locations if any one member of the group had their activities undermined.
This lack of clarity has compromised organisational solidarity in the current crisis: individual agencies have become vulnerable to local pressure, and some officials believe that, if put to it, the aid effort will continue regardless of what standards are infringed. While pragmatism, experience and accumulated local knowledge are often more useful than a set of rigid rules around humanitarian principles, good practice guidelines on this issue would be welcome.
To achieve this, humanitarian agencies need to document and analyse the challenges that face them in their pursuit of standards in complex emergencies, so that others can benefit and learn from this experience. A principle such as neutrality needs more solid practical literature behind it, especially documentation at the margins where it is tested, so that field staff tasked with its implementation can do more than merely recite its provisions.
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