Dignity not digits

Haiti is a major challenge for aid workers: vast numbers of people requiring urgent help, a country so damaged even before the earthquake that its people require both emergency relief (food, water, shelter, WASH, medical aid) but also very significant long term economic development to rebuild itself. In this complex context, safeguarding the dignity of those affected by the earthquake requires us all to think beyond mere numerical benchmarks.

Most commonly cited standards are enshrined in the Sphere Project, a collaboration of hundreds of NGOs, UN agencies and academics, which produced a set of guidelines for humanitarian response. Aid agencies measure performance against these guidelines as as they provide water, food, shelter and sanitation facilities to around 1.5m people in the wake of what was described by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as “the biggest natural disaster in history”.

While aid workers sometimes use the words “standards” and “indicators” interchangeably, in the context of Sphere they have distinct meanings.  Standards are qualitative. Of latrines, for example, the handbook says: “People should have adequate numbers of toilets, sufficiently close to their dwellings, to allow them rapid, safe and acceptable access at all times of the day and night.” In principle this sounds like something we could ascribe to – but what does it really mean on the ground, when you’re an NGO worker trying to help a camp of 20,000 homeless people? How many latrines are needed? Where must they be sited? So indicators are more concrete and in many cases purely quantitative. “A maximum of 20 people use each toilet,” for example.

Early in my time here in Haiti, one thing I noticed was that a lot of people were throwing up their hands and saying: ‘We can’t meet Sphere here’. But rather than just thinking of Sphere as numbers and saying ‘we can’t meet these here, full stop’, the approach has to be to look at Sphere overall and at how we can achieve these and what happens if we can’t achieve them.

Conditions here in Port au Prince are difficult. There’s not a lot of space: this is primarily an urban area which was very overcrowded in the first place and suddenly people are all tumbled out of their houses and crammed into tiny squares in city centres. This makes it incredibly difficult to follow Sphere standards and indicators in such an environment. However, we can’t throw it out completely. What is Sphere about? Sphere is about people having rights to a life with dignity, and effective disaster response requires paying attention to Sphere’s common standards  which cover such aspects as beneficiary participation, monitoring of response actions and aid worker responsibilities.

People at a water distribution point in a Port-au-Prince neighbourhood

The problem with Sphere as with any standards is that they are not adapted to the particular situation in Haiti. And NGOs can find it difficult to move away from these to adapt their responses to the specific needs at hand. To gauge effectiveness the local context is integral to aid activities in Haiti and the evaluation in terms of adherence to Sphere.

For example, we measure our WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene)achievements not only through records of litres of water supplied to camps and numbers of latrines, but also through water use surveys and sanitation monitoring, which frequently indicate practices of returning to original homes to access alternative water supplies and more familiar toilet facilities. The WASH cluster (comprised of NGOs working together in this sector) here in Haiti has a strategy for gradually improving sanitation by reducing the ratio of people per latrine from 100:1 for the first three months of the crisis to 50:1 for the next three months, and to 20:1 after a year. Obviously we’d like to do this faster if we can.

Whilst NGOs are not yet fully reaching Sphere’s water and sanitation indicators due to the scale of the disaster, the situation is improving. In the beginning of the emergency humanitarian organizations provided five litres of water per person per day. That has now increased to approximately 10 litres.