FRANCAISMédecins Sans Frontières - Comments
9) The institutional learning
-In the French humanitarian field, MSF is one of the few NGOs with a high sense of self-criticism, also one of the few to be very politically aware of the possible side effects of some programmes. Ever since the beginning, the organisation raised a lot of questions about the end and the means of assisting one country or another. The creation of an MSF Research Foundation confirmed a strong analysis capacity. Eventually, the problem is linked to the specific way MSF works as compared to other humanitarian actors. MSF is often perceived as arrogant, and its “splendid isolation” hinders co-ordination and mutual consultation efforts. In the field, it happens that tasks and territories are shared: the ICRC, for instance, will be in charge of surgery while MSF will be responsible of anaesthesia. Such complementarities are also true of NGOs like Save the Children, which is less involved in emergency and to which MSF sometimes gives its programmes when leaving a country.
-Yet co-ordination remains a major challenge. Regarding Maela camp, which was set up in 1993 to accommodate the victims of political clashes during presidential elections in Kenya in 1992, a local priest in Burnt Forest, quoted by Monica Kathina Juma, observed : co-ordination” “United Nations Development Programme, MSF-Belgium, MSF-France, National Christian Council of Kenya, Catholic Church, Red Cross, human rights organisations, mention them, all of them were there. Then every agency was doing anything it wanted. There was no co-ordination, no listening to each other… nothing. It was not unusual to find a family with six tins of oil from six different agencies when they did not have a blanket. By the end of it the displacee was far worse than when he/she fled here for help… I think the intervening agencies helped themselves more than the victims. The whole issue of helping has been politicised and this has only multiplied problems here… child prostitution, refusal to return and hence occupation of farm lands, dependency, etc. I really wish all these agencies had not come to Burnt Forest… Vulnerability is higher today than it was when the emergency began”.
-The international office of MSF also has difficulties harmonising the strategies of various sister organisations. For a long time, these had been raising funds individually, and some projects were conducted twice, with useless costs. To improve its financial transparency, the movement has been considering centralising both the accounts and the circulation of the resources of its sections throughout the world. In 2004, only the Norwegian and Australian sections did not publish their financial annual reports on Internet.
