Summary
In May 2009, Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province became the site of the world's biggest and fastest human displacement in over a decade - and the largest internal displacement ever witnessed in Pakistan's history. Within the space of only a few weeks, an estimated thre million Pakistanis fled their homes to escape their army's military offensive against armed insurgents.
The mass exodus of people triggered a major national and international humanitarian response. This paper attempts to assess the extent to which this response lived up to global commitments for providing enough aid, in the right place and at the right time, in a way that is appropriate to the needs of crisis-affected people.
Four years after the launch of the UN-led humanitarian reform process, the humanitarian system in Pakistan appears to have made some progress in terms of mobilising effective and principled humanitarian action -but still falls far short of achieving the stated objectives of the reform process.
With regard to the scale and speed of the response, Oxfam's analysis reveals that late and insufficient donor contributions prevented humanitarian agencies from responding on a scale that would have met the actual needs of affected communities. Oxfam, for example, had to dramatically revise its initial response plan after failing to receive sufficient donor funding, and was thereby forced to exclude 30,000 families (or more than 200,000 people) from receiving emergency water, sanitation and non-food items during the first three months of the response. Using various operational examples, this paper demonstrates that an overall lack of early funding for the Pakistan crisis resulted in fewer people receiving emergency assistance, and for a limited range of needs. An eventual increase of donor funds to the Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan and other emergency activities reflected a gradual acknowledgement on the part of donors of the scale of humanitarian needs created by Pakistan's displacement crisis. Unfortunately, this realisation came too late to allow aid agencies to reach their target number of beneficiaries, and some funding gaps persist today - for example, in the education, agriculture, and early recovery sectors.
In light of the volatile and sensitive operating environment, aid agencies have faced some challenges in terms of upholding their commitment to awarding aid purely on the basis of humanitarian need. While some agencies have taken relevant measures to establish themselves as impartial humanitarian actors, overall efforts to uphold and promote humanitarian principles (including the need to distinguish humanitarian action from military or political agendas) have suffered from a disjointed approach and the lack of a common strategy for engagement with government and other actors. This was particularly visible, for example, in the failure of some aid agencies to assist displaced families who were excluded from government-led registration processes due to unclear or unfair registration criteria.
While the UN-led clusters2 have improved since their initial creation in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, it would be hard to claim that they are currently operating at full capacity or delivering on their potential to ensure that beneficiaries are targeted solely on the basis of need. Needs identification, prioritisation, and gap analysis remains patchy at best, and does not always translate into the corresponding sectoral strategies or decisions.
Humanitarian agencies did their best to respond to a rapidly unfolding crisis with the tools and resources that they knew well or had at their immediate disposal. Unfortunately, as in many global emergency responses, the humanitarian response in Pakistan reflected a resourcedriven approach in which agencies' sectoral mandates and institutional agendas (including the kind of assistance that they would like to provide) has tended to take precedence over actual beneficiary need or preference, which in the case of Pakistan would have required a far greater use of cash-based assistance.
This paper argues that more could be done to ensure that humanitarian assistance in Pakistan and other countries is more adequate, timely, flexible, impartial and appropriate to people's needs.