Aid agencies care more about meeting the demands of donors who control their purse strings than those of the disaster survivors they're supposed to help. That's a widespread perception in the relief sector highlighted in a new report on humanitarian accountability.

In the latest poll by the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP), which runs a global quality assurance scheme for humanitarian agencies, just a quarter of respondents rated relief groups as being highly accountable to intended beneficiaries, compared with 74 percent when it came to official donors.

HAP surveyed 658 people from global and local non-governmental organisations, donor agencies and host governments for its 2008 report, which was published this month. It did not poll recipients of aid.

"There remains an inescapable and consistent result ... that the pecking order for accountability is always towards institutional donors first and disaster survivors last," the report said.

No doubt part of the reason is increasing competition for funds at a time of global recession, even as the number of conflicts, natural disasters and military operations in 2008 that required humanitarian assistance was as high as ever.

The year started with ethnic violence in Kenya triggered by a disputed presidential election that uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and ended with Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip which destroyed thousands of homes.

In between, military operations in Georgia, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan among others forced civilians to flee their homes, seek shelter and food aid. Natural disasters notably in Myanmar, China and Haiti also created massive needs for aid.

"As funding gets harder to access, agencies are more interested in competing for funding than meeting the needs of the beneficiaries," HAP quoted one respondent as saying.

HAP, the humanitarian sector's first international self-regulatory body, was set up in 2003, partly in response to the longstanding debate about whether humanitarian resources were being efficiently and effectively managed.

Overall, only 38 percent of the respondents in the 2008 survey felt their organisation was sufficiently aware of and doing enough to ensure humanitarian accountability, compared with 70 percent who in 2007 expressed satisfaction in their agency's efforts to improve accountability.

"There needs to be an emphasis on the commitment to the culture of respect, feedback and wanting to be accountable to beneficiaries," another respondent was quoted as saying.

"There are still too few people that genuinely believe in the value and benefits to beneficiaries and their organisations of being accountable."

PRESSURE TO USE FUNDS QUICKLY

Quoting widely from the "Listening Project" - an extensive consultation with beneficiaries of aid in 13 countries - HAP highlighted the confusion over who was responsible for what in delivering assistance with international aid agencies increasingly subcontracting work to local charities.

"For their part, donor and aid agency staff also reported that they feel hurried by tight time-frames for proposals and pressures to use funds quickly and, as a consequence, spend less time in communities," HAP said.

It cited several shortcomings uncovered by the Listening Project, including the distribution of hygiene kits by an international NGO in response to Cyclone Sidr which swept through Bangladesh in 2007.

An evaluation team found that the kits did not include key items needed by women, such as sanitary towels, because the kits were designed after a consultation with a community group that allegedly included few women.

In another case, an evaluation of a large emergency drought relief operation in Kenya from 2004-2006 found that some families went hungry because many food distribution programmes provided standard family rations with no variation allowed for differences between the actual family size and the average family size.

Despite aid agencies stressing the importance of consultation with the people they are meant to help, many beneficiaries of aid said they had little input in programmes and opportunities for feedback were limited.

HAP also said there were still some problems monitoring and reporting on sexual abuse by aid workers and challenges eliminating corruption.

HAP's 27 members include CARE International, World Vision, Oxfam and Save the Children.

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