Project: UNICEF’s WASH program

Agents for change

UNICEF’s job thus turned into one of trying to match capacity with reality by finding the resources to meet the task. Ervin says this involved “working out what we were currently delivering and how we would extract what was required and putting a dollar value on that”. UNICEF, as the cluster lead, would then ‘subcontract’ other agencies to provide the right services. “We’d say ‘what we don’t need is equipment X, we need more human resources. Can you help us train 400 people to a standard where they know how to separate garbage?’ It’s a gap analysis, creating a picture of what the situation is and an idea of what the situation should be and trying to get there,” Ervin explains. “That has to be done again and again because it’s iterative, the goalposts will change.”

The complexity of working on humanitarian projects such as this comes from the number of players willing to give assistance. “What will happen is 10 NGOs will show up and say ‘we have 400 garbage bins and we built 40 toilets over there’ and no one really knows who’s living there. Are those toilets full? Are they being emptied?” Ervin says it is therefore necessary to structure a system where UNICEF worked with the locals to sort out what was needed and to advertise that, so that other agencies could take care of it.

For this to happen, however, other agencies had to accept the authority of UNICEF as the cluster lead. “Even though we were coordinating, we weren’t the boss. People have to respect that and buy into it. If an organisation thought the cluster was dysfunctional then it would avoid the cluster and do its own thing,” he says. “Coordination is the thing that makes or breaks a humanitarian response. If you have, as you often do, multiple stakeholders—the government, NGOs, UN agencies, the beneficiaries—if there isn’t a unified picture at least on some aspects, or operational agreements, it just falls to pieces. It would not happen unless everybody worked together.”

Despite the number of international stakeholders involved, Ervin emphasises that the baseline for any change was the local input, which came from engineers within the community. “I was tasked with coordinating garbage collection for 300,000 people; it would have been exponentially more difficult if not for Tamil municipality civil engineers. They had books and they had maps and charts showing where and how much waste was being produced and which days the waste was happening. I was grateful for that.”

UNICEF was careful not to make the area a cookie-cutter case, instead choosing to take the local information and scale it up for the extraordinary circumstances; while the local engineers knew how to deal with a township of 15,000, the sudden influx of 300,000 displaced people required a different approach.

“My biggest relationships were with the local engineers. Over there, the engineers have to have a strong connection to the community they’re serving,” says Ervin. “I learnt a lot from them and how they did things. As UNICEF, it wasn’t us hijacking the show. It’s their show but we’re there to support them.”

Here comes the rain

The threat of disease reared its ugly head again with the approach of the monsoon season. The project’s biggest risk factor was interruption to the logistics of carting water into the camp and taking waste out. “Monsoons are usually fine but when governments give land for displaced people, they give them land where no one lives. No one lives there for a reason. The land was flood prone and the soil was incredibly soft; if the road was soft the big trucks can’t get in,” explains Ervin.

Floods would also exacerbate sewage problems, turning a leaking toilet into a health disaster, he says. “We were scared that lots of people were going to die because we did not have the medical infrastructure to deal with an outbreak. It looked as though there was going to be a humanitarian disaster in a humanitarian disaster.”

In response, each of the clusters developed a monsoon preparation plan that built in risk mitigation strategies such as alternative supply routes. Fortunately, in the weeks leading up to the monsoon season, the government began to ‘repatriate’ thousands of the displaced, easing some of the pressure. What happened during the monsoon thus became manageable. “It was bad, but none of the major systems completely fell over,” Ervin reports. “There were a few emergencies but the situations were managed by us or by others. If a truck couldn’t get to a particular supply point, then it would go to the next one.”

Finding context

A mistake that outsiders often make is assuming that all humanitarian disasters require the same response. A water project like this, however similar to others in output, is actually dependent on factors that always differ. “You could say we dealt with this after the [Indian Ocean] tsunami, but the politics of that was different, the environment of that was different and the geography of that was different,” Ervin points out. “Working internationally adds that extra level of complexity because it’s not the social contracts or systems that you’re used to working to.”

He uses this to explain why water and sanitation is no longer just pumps and pipes. “In terms of technical outcomes, we did build landfills and water treatment plants and sewage collection and garbage collection. They’re physical objects, but the reason they exist is so people can drink water,” notes Ervin. “The main achievements were being part of a team that was working to create an environment where the affected population felt like they had some control, some dignity, and there was some effort to try and establish some normality in their lives under very challenging circumstances.”

Lessons Learnt

• Understanding the people element is essential to any program. I looked for humanitarian and social outcomes, a value system about seeing people live with dignity.
• Support networks, both personal and professional, are really important. It is very important to debrief with colleagues. When you’re knee deep in it, your perspective is quite different.
• Be flexible. Your terms of reference are an iterative process.
• Take initiative and be proactive. Proactivity isn’t enforcing your agenda on the situation, proactivity is to listen, learn, adapt and overcome.

—Daniel Ervin