Can we make better use of humanitarian data for an impartial and humane response to crisis?

Data is everywhere, and the humanitarian sector is no exception. As humanitarians, we want decision-making to be ‘data-driven’ or ‘evidence-based’. To this end, we conduct numerous needs assessments and analyses, and feed the results into various response-planning processes. The most comprehensive needs assessments and analyses take place annually to develop response plans, which aim to understand crises, and in particular the needs of those affected, as best as possible. For those working on humanitarian needs analyses, each year therefore presents an opportunity to use the existing data to shape how we think about crises, understand the needs of those affected, and by extension the required response – ultimately to contribute to a response that is in line with the humanitarian principles, most notably those of impartiality and humanity. However, this opportunity also presents a risk of misguided analysis supporting misguided response.

Ahead of data collection exercises, people involved in the needs assessment design process often spend a considerable amount of time discussing which indicators to collect. Once the data has been collected, much less time is spent reflecting on its analysis and interpretation. The analysis is then often reduced to an indicator-by-indicator reporting of proportions of households or people having given certain answers, and therefore the proportions of households or people likely needing different kinds of humanitarian assistance.

In the short term, such analyses may appear simplistic and like a lost opportunity after having invested so much time and resources in the assessments. In the long term, they may even be counterproductive and undermine an impartial and humane response to crisis. For this reason, if we want our data to remain meaningful and not potentially harmful, all of us working on humanitarian data and needs analyses hold a responsibility to reflect more seriously on what this data – how we analyse it and communicate the results – really means. What are the narratives we are reinforcing? What are the stories we are providing ‘evidence’ for? And what does this mean for the people from whose lives the data has been taken?

The following is a reflection on humanitarian needs assessments and crisis response, in particular in the context of more long-term strategic response planning: what the data we currently tend to collect means, what we say it means, the kind of response this entails and should entail, and how we could make better use of our data to support an impartial and humane response to crisis.

According to need: ‘humanitarian needs,’ ‘human needs’, or other kinds of ‘needs’ – and what kind of response?

We implement humanitarian needs assessments in contexts deemed ‘humanitarian crises’, largely for the purpose of ‘humanitarian’ response planning. But what are ‘humanitarian needs’? Presumably, they are needs humanitarians are mandated to and can realistically address – related to excessive suffering, mortality and a lack of dignity, all of which are very difficult to define. Needs assessment results are used to raise funds for a ‘humanitarian’ response, hopefully also under the assumption that this is the best type of response to the identified ‘humanitarian’ needs, i.e., they are needs best addressed by humanitarians, their tools and approaches.

When I conducted humanitarian needs assessments in the past, almost by definition, I would assume the results to be reflective of humanitarian needs. What if this was not the case? During an assessment, if I found a person who did not have access to adequate and safe shelter, did this mean they were in need of shelter? Maybe. At least, this would often be the conclusion and the end of my analysis. The provision of emergency shelter would then be an adequate response to this ‘need’. However, there is a possibility – especially in protracted contexts or those of long-term displacement – that if I asked the person directly, they would say they were in need of work to be able to repair their shelter or move to better housing. Or they might say improvements to the security situation were required to allow them to return home, earn money and repair their own home. They might also point out that, while the emergency shelter they were provided initially served them well after they lost their home, they increasingly feel a need for a more long-term, independent and dignified solution. All of these needs clearly entail a response different from the continued provision of emergency shelter.

Maybe I did not measure any defined need after all, but rather a lack of something – in this case, a lack of adequate and safe shelter – that can give rise to different needs. Depending on the point of view I adopted, I could have come to different conclusions as to what the need – and therefore the required response – was. Humanitarians will usually respond to an identified lack of something by addressing the symptom, not the cause. As such, they will address the ‘lack of access to adequate and safe shelter’, and related ‘shelter needs’, by providing emergency shelter or repair support in the short term. In the long term, the same lack of independent and secure access to ones’ own safe and dignified housing and the broader needs (of self-reliance, safety and security) it reflects remain unaddressed. The same often holds true for other forms of emergency relief assistance or the temporary substitution of state service provision, such as education and healthcare.

Clearly, humanitarians are not usually in a position to provide more than emergency shelter, and likewise may be unable to meet other ‘needs’, e.g. due to legal or political barriers. For instance, in refugee camps, the provision of formal education may be prohibited, and people may not be allowed to work. There then seems to be little humanitarians can do to truly meet education or livelihood needs, with the exception of advocacy by actors with specific mandates (e.g., the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, advocating for refugee rights). They can often provide informal education or work opportunities, both of which can serve as temporary stopgap measures. In the long term, though, the lack of formal education or livelihood opportunities that needs assessments will continue to capture may point to a need to regain access to such opportunities, rather than a long-term need for perpetual emergency assistance.

In sum, humanitarian needs assessments, rather than directly measuring ‘needs’, directly measure certain gaps in access to basic goods, services and infrastructure. These gaps can give rise to or be driven by a wide range of needs. These needs are only humanitarian to the degree that they can be addressed through a humanitarian – usually short-term and limited in scope – response. For the remainder, they are situated outside the immediate humanitarian realm, requiring other tools, approaches and responses – diplomatic, political, developmental (and possibly sometimes military) – aimed at building or rebuilding economies and state service provision, lifting legal barriers, supporting conflict resolution or providing immediate physical safety.

Why it matters: the humanitarian alibi

Much has been written on the humanitarianisation of crises and crisis response, humanitarianism as a fig leaf or alibi in the absence of broader forms of action. These terms all refer to situations in which a response to crisis is largely reduced to a humanitarian response, and where focusing on and investing in the humanitarian response substitutes for and detracts from a lack of other forms of action. These include the military protection required to ensure people’s safety in the face of ongoing violence, or the long-term strategies and investments required to resolve conflict, and guarantee rule of law, political stability and state service provision – more broadly, the political or diplomatic efforts required to find political solutions that will end need.

In these situations, humanitarians are the main – or only – actors responding to crises in both the short and long term, and so they are often seen to be responsible for a much broader range of issues than they can possibly address. Discussions usually centre around the inability of humanitarian action – in the absence of other forms of action – to provide direct physical protection or meet people’s ‘safety needs’, substantially contribute to conflict resolution, stability and security, or to sustainably substitute for or ensure (state) service provision, guarantee self-sufficiency or achieve any other ‘development’ gains, all of which require different kinds of responses. Nevertheless, if humanitarians are perceived as the main actors responsible for addressing these issues, then they are held accountable when no substantial improvements to a situation are achieved, to some degree absolving other actors (such as politicians), who should equally be held to account for their share of responsibility, and reducing pressure on them to act. Most importantly, with humanitarians being unable to address a large part of people’s needs in crises and no other response being implemented, many of these needs remain perpetually unaddressed.

For this reason, it has been argued that humanitarians hold a responsibility to accurately frame their own role and its limitations in crisis response within the context of a broader response to crisis, to admit where they cannot address people’s needs, and to strengthen complementarity across different types of (humanitarian and non-humanitarian) responses in an attempt to sustainably and effectively address people’s needs in a dignified manner in the long term. This may start with how we understand ‘humanitarian crises’, and interpret the ‘evidence’ on these crises and the ‘humanitarian needs’ they entail. For instance, continuous undifferentiated reporting on humanitarian shelter, education or livelihood needs (as far as they are framed by humanitarians) may give the impression that humanitarians can actually address these needs. At the same time, any reporting that has conceptually reduced the wide range of people’s needs potentially captured by a needs assessment to only ‘humanitarian’ needs is unlikely to incentivise any broader response, in the absence of which people’s needs will always only be partially addressed.

What does impartial and humane response to crisis mean?

For a needs-based response to crisis, how can and should we then interpret and report on identified ‘needs’ that are beyond the immediate humanitarian realm, if at all? The imperative of needs-based assistance – for which needs assessments and analyses are meant to provide an objective evidence base – is usually derived from the principle of impartiality. This principle requires humanitarian action to be non-discriminatory, and to be carried out according to need, giving priority to those in most urgent need. Hence, in the context of humanitarian action, needs assessments allegedly provide a basis for decision-making that is independent from political, institutional or any other objectives other than relieving suffering, and are solely based on an understanding of the needs of affected people. But which ‘needs’ are we referring to?

In the past, when I discussed assessment results before publication, implementing agencies would often argue that the needs that were captured but outside their control to meet (e.g., due to legal or political barriers) should not be reported in the context of a humanitarian needs assessment. Others with a focus also on advocacy would argue that such results provided advocacy material, i.e., a means of trying to induce others to meet those needs. Both arguments implicitly recognise that we may have captured needs that were not purely humanitarian in that they required others to act. Do such needs then have a place in humanitarian needs reporting or not?

The principle of humanity highlights the moral obligation to address human suffering wherever it is found. It puts an emphasis not only on the protection of life and health, but also on ensuring respect for human beings. This is often linked to safeguarding human dignity, e.g., in the Sphere Handbook. Clearly, for a life with dignity, more than physical subsistence is required. In fact, people affected by crisis describe dignity in terms of stability and self-reliance, or the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Similarly, during an acute emergency, people’s needs may primarily centre around immediate survival, physiological and safety needs. However, following the initial emergency phase, needs related to esteem and self-actualisation quickly gain importance. As such, in many contexts, and especially once the initial emergency is over, the principle of humanity seems to require safeguarding human agency, or more broadly the recognition of a set of human needs and aspirations beyond physical needs.

This of course becomes increasingly relevant as crises become protracted. During the initial stages of an emergency, the provision of humanitarian assistance and protection to those affected by conflict or disaster can likely be understood as a valuable step towards safeguarding their dignity, while meeting their immediate needs. Moreover, the relatively limited service provision that humanitarian assistance can achieve, as well as the lack of a true political voice (or agency) for those affected, may be considered acceptable or legitimate as long as humanitarian action is understood as an exceptional response to exceptional circumstances of limited duration. However, as a situation ceases to be exceptional – becoming protracted – several things need to be questioned: the dignity of temporary humanitarian solutions permanently implemented, the dependence on the continuation of this type of support, and the degree to which they truly continue to meet people’s evolving needs.

Living in emergency shelter may be dignified immediately after having lost or been forced to flee your home, but it is not dignified to remain in such shelter for multiple years without a long-term solution. Having access to informal NGO-provided education may be of great value and enhance a child’s dignity following a traumatising event, but it is not dignified if this is all the education that they will receive for most of their childhood. More broadly, receiving assistance may enhance dignity following a shock, but depending on such assistance for years on end is undignified – and not what people striving for self-sufficiency want. Following an initial emergency, the principle of humanity therefore seems to require placing the principle of impartiality – and the needs-based response it demands – into the context of a broader, not only humanitarian, response to crisis.

Can we make better use of our data for an impartial and humane response to crisis?

How then can analyses of humanitarian needs avoid feeding into a humanitarian alibi, while also supporting a broader understanding of crises and crisis response? First of all, we can understand crises for what they are: complex political crises with humanitarian consequences. When interpreting data we often hide behind neutrality as an excuse for conducting apolitical analyses. However, being neutral and being apolitical are not the same, and adopting an entirely apolitical analytical lens to a political context is unlikely to yield accurate analysis. In turn, being able to recognise crises for what they are should allow us to develop a slightly more nuanced – more accurate and more honest – understanding of the needs we see, to stop overstating their humanitarian nature and to start accounting for their political dimension whenever relevant.

Whether more actively accounting for the political dimension is sensible will depend on the expected impact. This means weighing up whether the political argument will incentivise needed action and lead to the implementation of responses beyond a humanitarian response, against the risk of negative backlash that may arise due to a perception of non-neutrality and unwarranted advocacy. Nevertheless, not overstating the humanitarian nature of the needs we report on is always possible – at a minimum by not labelling as ‘humanitarian’ those needs that cannot be addressed by humanitarian action.

In addition, we should remind our audiences of the limited scope of our data and reporting in the context of a broader needs-based response to crisis. We primarily report on ‘humanitarian’ needs. This does not mean that other more far-reaching – and equally if not more important – needs do not exist.

Those needs may only show up indirectly in humanitarian needs assessments, and we may not be mandated to further ask about or address them. However, even with the existing data, we can frame our narratives a bit more broadly, considering the whole crisis, not just the humanitarian dimension. Our analyses could become more responsive to shifting time horizons. Despite collecting largely the same data in the same crises every year, we do not tend to conduct much longitudinal analysis. Rather, every year, analyses are conducted as if we were at crisis onset, with reference to the time dimension of a crisis usually limited to introductory paragraphs. This fosters a narrative of continuous ‘emergency’ (and hence an emergency response), even if crises have long stabilised. While such analyses continue to be relevant in relation to remaining emergency needs, they fall short of trying to provide meaningful understanding of people’s needs as they have evolved over time.

In any crisis, following an initial response and in the absence of major contextual change, indicator results are likely to stabilise at a certain level of need, below which the humanitarian response is not going to make them drop. Looking at these results each year in isolation provides a static picture of such needs. Putting results into context over time would be a more honest representation of a situation in which people’s ability to live in dignity, rather than being static, may change over time, even in the absence of – or because of the absence of – visible or measurable changes in outcomes, while also highlighting the limits of humanitarian assistance in still being able to do little more than maintaining the status quo.

Our analyses centre around the concept of ‘severity of need’. We apply this concept to any need, ranging from more acute immediate survival-related needs, to needs related to the access to basic services and infrastructure required for a life in dignity. While this conceptual alignment of a wide range of different needs may be driven by the desire to be able to account equally for different types of needs, it may in the long term achieve the opposite.

Specifically, the focus on ‘severity’ also fosters a narrative of ‘acute need’ and ‘emergency’. This may be appropriate at the onset of an emergency and in relation to acute needs that remain, and become chronic, for parts of the population in protracted contexts. However, after a while, analyses based solely on severity are likely to fall short of being able to capture the increasing severity of long-term lack of access to basic services.

In order to incentivise a needs-based response to crisis both in the short and long term, we should improve our ability to distinguish between severity that is reflective of two situations. The first situation is one of a more or less urgent need for immediate emergency measures to ensure survival and minimal access to basic services. The second is instead a lack of access to basic goods, services and infrastructure, or ‘deprivation’ more broadly, which is reflective of a more or less urgent need for the (likely not just humanitarian) response required to ensure a life in dignity. The longer a situation lasts, a response to both dimensions of need becomes equally important for a healthy life in dignity. However, in terms of their impact on people’s lives, as well as the response required, these needs likely remain very different. Conceptually dissolving them into a single description of ‘need’ is unlikely to do justice to both, and with the focus (justifiably from a humanitarian perspective) on ‘severity’, it is likely the ‘deprivation’ dimension that will be inadequately understood and remain unaddressed in many protracted contexts.

Similarly, we rarely distinguish between the underlying drivers and outcomes we may have captured in our needs assessments. Both are usually simply considered ‘humanitarian needs’. We should conduct more analyses aimed at discerning ‘drivers of need’ in the data we collect. Such drivers often likely relate to a lack of livelihoods, or a lack of safety and security. For instance, in a context in which humanitarian needs are driven by an economic crisis, any needs assessment will likely find high proportions of people having experienced an impact on their access to livelihoods. It may further find that more acute needs (e.g., acute food insecurity) are related to, and may be driven by, the greatest gaps in access to livelihoods. We might conclude that everyone who has experienced some impact on their livelihoods are in need of humanitarian livelihoods assistance, while some facing more acute needs as a result (e.g., acute food insecurity) are in need of more immediate life-saving assistance. However, instead of reducing the lack of access to livelihoods, or even acute food insecurity, to a purely humanitarian need, we could also report the lack of livelihoods as a potential driver of humanitarian outcomes: some people will already be in need of urgent life-saving assistance; others will be in need of temporary humanitarian stopgap measures to prevent a further deterioration of their ability to meet their needs; while for most (who have been impacted but are still able to meet their needs), the major need might be a more systemic response addressing the economic crisis as a means of preventing the humanitarian crisis from deepening.

This kind of analysis does not deny the existence of a crisis: neither the impact it is having on most, nor the humanitarian outcomes it is causing for some, nor the role of humanitarian action to address some of those needs. It instead allows us to at least pose some questions: are all the needs we might have captured really humanitarian? And, if so, is a largely household-level humanitarian response really the best investment for everyone affected and in need of some kind of response?

As such, presenting humanitarian needs in relation to underlying (non-humanitarian) drivers should support viewing the required humanitarian response – and its limits in the absence of other forms of action – in the context of the broader response required to address a crisis. This of course does not mean that other types of response (e.g., developmental) can always be implemented, which also has to be recognised. However, at a global scale, the question then remains: whether investments into a marginally effective humanitarian response where (political or diplomatic) efforts towards other types of solutions are instead required presents an impartial use of humanitarian resources, when in contexts where a humanitarian response could be more appropriate and effective, there are needs left unaddressed for a lack of resources.

Finally, and most importantly, we should try to do a better job at ensuring that people’s voices are heard by all relevant actors – such as political and developmental actors – not just humanitarian actors. Sometimes, in addition to large-scale household surveys, we collect qualitative data, which gives people a bit more space to voice their thoughts beyond the confines of a structured questionnaire, in particular on topics related to how assistance is or is not meeting their needs and maintaining their dignity. However, we then usually frame those results in purely humanitarian terms, mostly in terms of ‘Accountability to Affected People’, reducing the discussion to ways in which the provision of humanitarian assistance could be improved. While this certainly is part of the required discussion, we should also acknowledge people’s voices when they tell us that, while being grateful for the humanitarian assistance they receive, they would prefer to be able to care for their families themselves, and ensure that these voices are heard by the political (and developmental) actors who could create the conditions to make this possible. Qualitative data usually provides some direct evidence not only of improvements required to the provision of humanitarian assistance but of the humanitarian solution in itself being insufficient. In order to do justice to these voices, such evidence has to be framed and communicated beyond the humanitarian response.

Conclusion

In sum, aside from more accurately framing contexts and analysis results, the existing data often provides opportunities to frame needs in a way that does more justice to reality – and may therefore be more relevant for a needs-based response to crisis – than simply reducing entire countries to ‘humanitarian crises’ and large parts of their populations to being ‘in need of humanitarian assistance.’ While the focus of humanitarian needs analyses would always be on understanding the prevalence and severity of humanitarian need, conducting such analyses in a more nuanced way – and based on the understanding that, at some point, an impartial and humane response to crisis may be beyond what humanitarians alone can achieve – should allow the results to also speak to other actors and the need for a broader response to crisis.

This may be most relevant when communicating humanitarian crisis narratives to major donors. For the purpose of making best use of resources for a needs-based response, donors could even be assumed to have an interest in viewing any humanitarian response within the context of a broader response to crisis, while likely also being among the actors that can support meeting needs that humanitarians themselves cannot meet. The International Crisis Group published an article on the situation – and needs – of the Rohingya populations in Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the humanitarian and political or diplomatic response required to meet those needs. In addition to the need to sustain the humanitarian response, the article highlights the urgent need for political action from the European Union as a major donor to the crisis to allow the current response to move beyond the increasingly undignified (and unsustainable) provision of emergency relief. As humanitarians, providing our own narratives on the ‘crises’ we work in, we should be able to support such narratives, or at the very least not undermine them by reducing ours to narratives of ‘humanitarian crises’ and ‘needs for humanitarian assistance’ when the data reflects much more than that.

Cara Kielwein is a former NGO employee, where she implemented humanitarian needs assessments