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Evolution of a crisis: A Save the Children UK perspective
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6. SAVE THE CHILDREN UK's ADVOCACY WORK IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
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Save the Children has long realised that the value of the direct work it does on the ground must be balanced by concerted advocacy to allow the sharing of ideas and initiatives based on a solid base of experience. Critical to this approach is that it is imperative that we fully understand the communities with whom we work. This has a particular resonance in crises if we are to respond appropriately to the food and non-food needs of a population.
Within Save the Children UK, programme activities are guided by the Organisational Advocacy Plan which has five key priority areas. The Emergency priority area includes the Food security sector whose goal is:
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To prevent and mitigate food and nutrition crises affecting children through timely, appropriate and cost-effective responses based on quality information and analysis.
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Key advocacy targets to achieve this goal vary by region but, in the southern Africa context, are primarily WFP, EU, DFID, USAID, the national governments and SADC.
Save the Children UK was the first NGO to alert the international community to the impending food crisis in Southern Africa, based on data from the Household Economy Approach together with nutrition surveys. HEA allows assessment of the food security vulnerability of communities in a predictive way, whilst being reinforced by nutrition surveys which describe the current situation. Nutrition surveys alone have only limited predictive capacity; in fact, changes in acute malnutrition prevalence are often a late indicator of a crisis.
Using the data we had collected, we were able to lobby vigorously with each of the key target groups with a strong degree of confidence in our own position. In many cases this led to strained relationships with the target audience (who were also, in a real sense, our potential partners) but it did successfully force the issues into the public domain and allow debate to take place.
The data indicated a worsening food security environment in both Malawi and Zimbabwe with high levels of stress within the rural economies. Household assets were becoming rapidly exhausted and food access was becoming increasingly precarious. SC UK secured an early response from DFID for food aid funding in Zimbabwe (August 2001) and only later in Malawi (February 2002).
Intensive lobbying began in Malawi in late 2001. Through a variety of meetings, letters to key individuals and press statements, pressure was brought to bear on WFP and the EU (both unsuccessfully) and DFID for an early food aid response in Malawi. Advocacy was conducted at all levels; national, regional and international ether directly or through influential agencies such as OCHA. By early 2002, WFP were responding positively to the crisis whilst the EU continued to prevaricate.
SC UK will continue to lobby governments, donors and UN to ensure that recovery and rehabilitation work will invest in mitigation programmes which will strengthen rural livelihoods and reduce vulnerability. As the crisis unfolds so the emphasis of our advocacy may change but will continue to include elements that are impacted by the food situation such as the re-settlement of Internally Displaced Persons in Angola and the plight of commercial farmworkers in Zimbabwe.
In Angola, SC UK has constantly lobbied the UN to be more effective in its humanitarian co-ordination and the donors to respond more generously to Angolan humanitarian appeals. Part of this lobbying work took SC UK to the UN Security Council in March 2002.
SC UK has remained an influential voice through its food security assessments in Malawi, Swaziland and Zimbabwe with WFP and SADC member governments. SC UK's regional food security adviser sits on the SADC regional Vulnerability Assessment Committee in Harare allowing us a very strong regional overview of food security and early warning issues.
At a local level, SC UK ensures its voice is heard at all levels. For example, it attends the fortnightly WFP/NGO meetings in Johannesburg. It continues to raise key issues with OCHA and UNICEF in regards to the regional humanitarian crisis, including the plight of Zimbabwean farmworkers and the need to safeguard principles of neutrality, appropriate attribution of aid and safety of humanitarian personnel.
SC UK has taken the lead within Zimbabwe in providing guidance and information on food security to the British NGO group. In Mozambique, a group representing the DEC agencies has also met regularly to examine food security and co-ordination concerns. SC UK is part of an influential NGO consortium in Malawi, which works alongside WFP and UNDP and sits on several governmental Task Force committees to address food policy needs. SC Swaziland currently chairs the NGO Drought Consortium, which handles all negotiations between the NGOs, government and WFP. These activities and meetings are mirrored by similar groupings and meetings held in the UK amongst the relevant agencies.
Press and media elements of the crisis
The scale of the disaster made it incumbent on Save the Children as an international agency to ensure that the facts were made as widely known and that they were subsequently acted on. A key vehicle for this was to engage with the media.
Initially it was extremely difficult to get them interested in the crisis; to many it was simply 'just another annual food crisis in Africa'. Interest at the outset from other agencies was also relatively limited although Concern and the World Food Programme were, by the beginning of 2002, clearly doing what they could. Coverage was sporadic and came nowhere near the level required to move reluctant donors to prompt and decisive action. Save the Children worked closely with other UK NGOs to increase the profile of the crisis with intermittent isolated successes.
Save the Children decided to capitalise on a pre-arranged trip to Malawi by the Mirror newspaper to increase the profile of the crisis and invited the journalist concerned in for a specific briefing. The coverage generated by the trip was of a sensational and sometimes quite critical nature but it provided an opportunity to dramatically increase the profile of the issue. On the day the Mirror published, on 21st May 2002 we took the decision to use a line that Save the Children had been debating internally, which had been independently used by the Mirror. The line compared the potential scale of the emergency in Southern Africa to the famine in Ethiopia in 1984-85. It was not suggesting that the same numbers of deaths would be seen but that many millions of people over a huge geographical area would be seriously affected and that deaths would undoubtedly occur. Although this risked conflating two wholly different events it did dramatically illustrate the scale of the potential crisis and resulted in two days of intense follow-on coverage from TV, radio and print media.
Coverage since has been better but still sporadic. There have been two other main peaks of coverage during this period. The first was the launch of the DEC appeal, on 25th July, where Save the Children was able to provide spokespeople visiting from the region in London and a UK spokesperson in Johannesburg. The second was around the land reform process in Zimbabwe where the highly politicised approach taken by most of the UK media frequently resulted in misleading comment about the nature and particularly the causes of the humanitarian crisis.
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