Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Humanitarian assistance – Africa'

The aim of this research is to highlight both the conceptual and practical factors that constrain attempts to link humanitarian assistance and development aid in political emergencies in Southern Africa by using the case study of Mozambique in the period between 1975-1995. Extensive use and reference to Norwegian relief and development aid during the above-mentioned period is made. Although cross-reference is made to other donor countries such as the Like-minded Group (comprising of Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland) and UN agencies that supported Mozambique's transition from war to peace, the major focus is on Norway as she has traditionally been the sixth largest bilateral donor by the early 1990's and incorporated long-term development priorities in her programs.

The emergence of regional security organisations during the 1990s in Africa proved to be of great significance for the lives of many Africans, including those living in conflict-torn countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire or the Democratic Republic of Congo, but, at the same time, this phenomenon has been understudied. This dissertation explores why regional security organisations with an agenda of democratic governance emerged in Africa in the 1990s. This question is answered with two in-depth case studies on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Driven by an empirical puzzle, this study is both hypothesis-testing and hypothesis generating. The study starts by laying out the different possible factors put forward by several bodies of theory in international relations to explain the emergence of ECOWAS and SADC as security organisations. These hypotheses are then tested throughout the history and the evolution of ECOWAS and SADC in order to highlight the circumstances of their creation and their qualified failure as economic communities. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the security and democracy mandates entrusted to ECOWAS and SADC by its member states based on the study of the legal texts that outline the specific objectives of each regional security organisation and the tools they were given to implement their mandates. The study finally analyses the implementation records of ECOWAS and SADC in order to assess the commitment of their member states to their new democracy and security mandate. The research concludes with the two following hypotheses: 1) A security agenda cannot emerge without the involvement of the regional hegemon. 2) What the regional hegemon can do, including affecting the speed of the transformation, is constrained by the acceptance of its leadership by its neighbours (legitimacy) and by state weakness (capability).

This thesis examines the role of international organizations (IOs) at the domestic level. While International Relations (IR) offers an extensive literature on IOs, with understandings of IOs ranging from instruments of states to autonomous actors, it tends to ignore the role of IOs working at the domestic level, with an 'on-the-ground' presence of their own, and what this means for the IO's relationship with the state. The thesis develops a heuristic framework for understanding what is called IO 'domestication', which outlines a range of ways an IO can work domestically. It then focuses on one type domestication in particular: surrogate statehood, or cases where an IO substitutes for the state by providing services, executing functions of governance, and assuming authority in a given locale. The framework identifies indicators of surrogacy, the conditions for IO surrogacy, and reasons why it is sustained. It also considers the various types of relationship that can emerge from IO surrogacy between the IO and the state, ranging from states that willingly choose to abdicate responsibility to the IO, to states that partner with the IO. Empirically, the thesis examines these relationships through the case studies of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which present a spectrum of UNHCR’s surrogacy over time. Ultimately, the thesis puts forth a counterintuitive claim: IOs that take on surrogate state properties actually have less influence on the states in which they are working. The analysis draws on two mechanisms to help explain this outcome: marginalisation of the state, and responsibility shifting.

This dissertation focuses on the sub-national impact of foreign aid on civil conflicts by asking the question: How does foreign aid committed to contested areas affect the intensity of violence in those areas? The main theoretical contribution is to focus on how aid influences warring parties’ decisions to engage in contests over territorial control and how that in turn influences violence intensity. The study introduces two concepts: funding concentration and barriers to exploiting aid. A contested area has greater concentration of funding if warring parties expect a high value of aid to be distributed to only a few locations. Funding is instead diffused if the parties expect aid to be spread over many locations. A low barrier to exploiting aid is present if it is of a type that both state and non-state actors could potentially misuse. There is a high barrier if territorial control is required in order to exploit funding channels. The theory introduces three testable implications: First, greater funding concentration encourages conventional contests over territorial control, which increases military fatalities. The second proposal is that if there is a low barrier to exploiting aid (e.g. humanitarian and food aid) then there will be increased competition between warring parties and civilians, and hence more civilian fatalities. Third, high barrier funding (e.g. education aid) will motivate contests over territorial control and increase military fatalities. This dissertation uses geo-coded aid commitments data and introduces data of warring parties’ battleground control in sub-Saharan Africa, 1989–2008. The research design relies on propensity score matching where pairs of observations are matched based on a range of covariates. The results concerning barriers to exploitation are partially supported. High barrier aid increases military fatalities whereas low barrier aid has little impact on violence. Greater funding concentration increases military fatalities substantially compared to if there is low or no funding concentration. In line with theory, greater funding concentration does not increase civilian fatalities.

La Direction générale responsable de l’aide humanitaire de la Commission européenne(DG ECHO) est un acteur particulier des relations internationales. Sa singularité est marquée par une institutionnalisation progressive et par un fonctionnement distinct au sein des institutions européennes.L’étude de la stratégie qu’elle a élaborée pour lutter contre la malnutrition au Sahel révèle tout particulièrement les forces, les faiblesses, mais aussi les opportunités et les contraintes de l’aide humanitaire de la Commission européenne. À la lumière de cette stratégie, la DG ECHO est parvenue à promouvoir une approche crédible et reconnue afin de combattre la malnutrition. Néanmoins, l’enjeu sécuritaire que représente ce phénomène expose les vulnérabilités de la Commission européenne, à plus forte raison dans le contexte volatil du Sahel. Le manque de cohérence des actions extérieures et l’administration de l’Union européenne se révèlent particulièrement contraignants.Pourtant, l’autorité et la maturité dont fait preuve la DG ECHO, notamment dans la dimension nutritionnelle de l’aide, lui offrent la légitimité d’exister et le privilège d’être devenu un acte urfondamental, voire incontournable, du système humanitaire. La plus-value qu’elle apporte repose sur l’expertise de son personnel mais aussi sur un partenariat original avec des opérateurs spécialisés. Au terme de deux décennies d’existence, la DG ECHO s’affirme et exerce une influence croissante sur la scène européenne, où elle contribue à la construction de l’identité de l’Union, mais aussi internationale
The European Commission Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) has become a unique actor in international relations. Its singularity is defined by a progressive institutionalisation and a proper functioning within the European institutions. In particular, the study of the strategy ECHO has developed to fight malnutrition in the Sahel reveals the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the constraints of the European Commission humanitarian aid system. Indeed, ECHO has succeeded in promoting a credible and recognized policy to combat malnutrition. However, the security challenge posed by malnutrition exposes the European Commission’s vulnerabilities, which are heightened in the volatile environment of the Sahel. The lack of coherence of the EuropeanUnion external actions and administration are particularly constraining. Though, the authority and maturity displayed by ECHO, specifically in the nutritional dimensions of aid, has increased its legitimacy to exist and to be a key player in the humanitarian aid system. The added value it provides is based on the expertise of its staff,but also on a unique system of partnerships with specialized operators. Twenty years after its creation, ECHO has asserted itself and has a growing influence on the international and European scene, where it contributes to the construction of the EU identity

Defence date: 29 September 2000
Examining board: Prof. Philip Alston (EUI) ; Prof. Thomas Risse (EUI) ; Prof. Rodolfo Ragionieri (University of Florence) ; Prof. Allan Rosas (European Commission)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)
Logistics management has been extensively researched and implemented in the private sector, but it is gradually gaining traction in the humanitarian sector. Most humanitarian organization operations involve a mix of many activities. Some of them are involved in disaster relief, as short-term operations carried out immediately after a disaster, while some are involved in continuous aid work aimed at restoring normalcy to the disaster ravaged society and such efforts are longer term. Humanitarian organizations, particularly Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are the primary vehicle through which donors channel their contributions, but it is unfortunate to note that many of these organizations face challenges with the logistics of effectively getting the relief aid to the intended users. The purpose of this study is to improve the understanding in humanitarian logistics (HL) and identify the key challenges affecting aid agencies during humanitarian action. The study adopts a quantitative approach; data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was used to identify the most outstanding subjects and areas of interest in line with humanitarian logistics challenges identified in the literature. The findings from the research survey shows that there is an awareness of the importance of humanitarian logistics in the sector, but the results also show that only half of the participants of the survey reported that they have a logistics professional employed in their organization. Furthermore, only 50% of the participants of the survey indicated that their organization has a preparedness plan in place in the event of an emergency. Other challenges identified are: lack of fund; difficulty to obtain real time information and poor knowledge management. The author identified unavailability and tagging of funds as the most critical challenge the humanitarian organizations face because it hinders capacity building and organizational development. The study also suggests that learning and forging closer ties with private organizations is an effective means of overcoming some of the identified challenges.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Technology: Industrial Engineering, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2014.
The SADC region has seen both man-made and natural disasters killing over 90 thousand people and affecting millions in the past 33 years. Most of these deaths were as a result of lack of infrastructure and preparedness. Looking at the challenges for providing relief to victims/evacuees throughout the entire disaster and post-disaster periods in the region, the emphasis of this thesis is on last mile transportation of resources, victims, emergency supplies, aiming to optimize the effectiveness (quick­I response) and efficiency (low-cost) of logistics activities including humanitarian supply chain. A survey was used for data collection. Statistical analysis helped determine the impact of disaster relief chains and lead to the development of a mathematical model that shall equip the region with mechanisms for response and recovery operations. An EXCEL optimization tool was used to find the optimal way of transporting relief in the region in case of a disaster.
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Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Technology: Emergency Medical Care, Durban University of Technology, 2011.
Earthquakes are the most frequently occurring natural disaster around the world and it is associated with a large outpouring of humanitarian assistance from the world. Existing models for humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGO) focus on a variety of preparation and response decisions for aid distribution, but tend not to discuss medical rescue teams responding to international disasters and where they would fit into. Aim The aim of this study was to explore the preparedness of South African Non-Governmental Organisation relief teams for international earthquake response. The ultimate aim was to develop a framework for SA NGO teams responding to international earthquake disasters. Methods This qualitative study made use of a range of data collection tools including documentary sources and interviews, so that it could illuminate the study from all sides and to ensure all relevant data from people and organisations that span the globe could be collected. Conclusion and recommendations The result of the study was a conceptual map of the study recommendations which can be used in the development of a framework for improving South African NGO relief teams‟ response efficiency and effectiveness to international earthquake disasters. The research concludes with a series of recommendations which include: assigning the teams under a leading international academic and operational body and to identify qualified, well prepared and professional personnel on a database for rapid deployment.

M.A. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, Forced Migration Studies, 2012
The phenomenon of internal displacement dwarfs the refugee crisis world-wide. Forced migration, and more specifically internal displacement, looms as one of the largest and most poorly understood humanitarian challenges currently facing states and the international humanitarian aid community in Africa. This research project aims to increase our understanding of internal displacement by factoring in the discourse of states and the international humanitarian aid community as a key contributing factor to our conceptualization of this phenomenon in Africa. Discourse analysis may demonstrate various “sites of struggle” as important messages and ideas from the various actors compete. The well-established notion of discourse framing and containing the responses of certain actors and institutions is at the heart of this research project. The international humanitarian aid community and Africa states have been described in various documents related to the 2009 Kampala Convention as playing leading roles in the provision of protection and assistance to internally displacedConvention as its discursive locus, analyzing selected texts (documents) that are related to the production, adoption and ratification processes of the Convention. This research report will include diachronic and synchronic analyses of the ID discourse, in the form of documents, for the purpose of exploring the key messages and ideas, which will then be contextualized with the incorporation of academic literature and information related to the phenomenon of internal and forced displacement in Africa. This research report will attempt to demonstrate the various ways in which the limits of the internal displacement discourse are constructed and negotiated by states and the international humanitarian aid community, in order for us gain a better understanding of the role that is played by this growing platform for international deliberation. persons. This paper uses the Kampala

abstract: Armed violence is a contemporary global challenge especially in the developing world. It impacts immigration policies locally and internationally. Uganda experienced a twenty-four year -long civil armed conflict, which the president of Uganda declared ended in 2008. Following government instruction, displaced persons have been returning home since then. Despite this official closure, in the course of resettlement, youth specific needs and concerns have been ignored. Female youth have been the most affected due to the interlocking nature of their undervalued gender, age, and marital and reproductive statuses. Despite the complexity of female youth’s social location, research and frameworks about armed violence have focused on men as the perpetuators, marginalizing the impact armed conflict has on young women. Using the case of northern Uganda, this dissertation draws on feminist and indigenous epistemologies to examine the experiences of formerly displaced female youth. First, I deconstruct the western dominant construction of the stages of human growth and development including childhood, youth and adulthood. In this research, I prioritize local perspectives on human development; emphasizing the ambiguity of the concept youth, highlighting its age and gendered limited applicability to northern Uganda. I also examine the local understanding of armed conflict centering its forms and causes. Further, I explore the challenges female youth face, and the strategies they adopt to cope in situations of distress. I argue that studying formerly displaced female youth from their standpoint is critical since female youth have been marginalized in previous research and programs with gender-neutral perspectives. They thus provide a new perspective to armed violence given their multi dimensional standpoint. Female youth have different needs and concerns, which may not feature in mainstream programming largely informed by traditional male dominated systems and structures. Young women’s experiences thus deserve to be acknowledged if female youth are to benefit from the post-conflict reconstruction phase. To fulfill this objective, I used qualitative methods of data collection and analysis.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Gender Studies 2016

This study is concerned with Canadas policy towards peace, security and development in Africa. It examines Canadas response to these issues in relation to the New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD), the African Union Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Security Mechanism. With the intensification of violent conflicts in parts of Africa and their impact on individuals, communities, and socioeconomic development, African leaders transformed the OAU into the AU and established APSA to promote regional and human security in Africa. At the sub-regional level, West African leaders established the ECOWAS Security Mechanism to address the (human) security deficit in the West Africa region. These institutional transformations coincided with the launching of the NEPAD, which became one of the central instruments of engagement between Africa and the international community to address the peace, security and development challenges on the African continent. Canadas response to the NEPAD under the Liberal government of Jean Chrtien came in the form of a $500 million Canada fund for Africa (CFA) that among other things supported the capacity building of APSA and the ECOWAS Security Mechanism. The promotion of human security played a key role in Canadas approach to the AU and ECOWAS peace and security capacity building. I use a non-imperial internationalist approach that draws on the theoretical insights of a constructivist approach to international relations to provide an understanding of the Canadian governments policy. I argue that the Canadian governments policy towards the AU and ECOWAS can be understood in terms of the moral identity that Canada has built or acquired over the years in Africa. While this moral identity provides the means through which Canadian interests are pursued in Africa, it appears that the interest in maintaining this image has overshadowed the need for the Canadian government to craft an overarching policy and put resources behind the rhetoric of promoting peace and security, particularly human security in Africa.

Text in English
This study analyses the application of a community based intervention, the Care Group (CG) model, in relief work in Somalia and South Sudan. On the basis of expert interviews and a variety of documents it was researched whether the CG model is applicable to the context mentioned or if adaptations would be necessary. An increase in prolonged crises challenges humanitarian action to adapt relief work to longer-term interventions. The concept of combining the strengths of development cooperation and humanitarian action - Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development - is looked at in this study. Furthermore, for example, the asset-based community development approach, humanitarian work and characteristics of a protracted crisis were explored as the theoretical back-ground. The findings and the conclusion of this research may provide inputs for other humanitarian NGOs that are working in chronic conflict situations and being confronted with the need to introduce a long-term method for Behaviour Change Communication.
Development Studies
M.A. (Development Studies)

Focusing on humanitarian aid to refugees in the Nyarugusu Refugee Camp in Western Tanzania, this dissertation argues that humanitarianism has shifted from the care of the bodily and immediate material needs to a form of moral care inflected by contemporary human rights discourse. The camp, in operation for over 17 years, became the site of a pedagogical intervention aimed at teaching refugees human rights. Informed by essentialist understandings of Congolese culture, aid agencies enforce a version of human rights in which only women’s rights are human rights. Refugees respond to this in a variety of ways, by contesting, appropriating, or exiting the framework of rights entirely. In reading human rights discourse as a site for an anthropology of ethics, this dissertation argues against simply understanding humanitarian confinement in terms of biopolitics, and looks to black feminist theorizations of the “human” to gesture beyond human rights. It shows how Nyarugusu residents make claims based on bodily vulnerability to decolonize the “human” of “human rights,” and how, in doing so, they point us towards a politics of vulnerability grounded in an ethics of sincerity.

In this volume, I present a collection of three articles that are representative of my research on the targeting of humanitarian & development aid. These papers focus on highlighting the role of non-targeted, non-elite community members in fostering or hindering the process of aid distribution to vulnerable community members. In the first paper, “Allocating Resources To The Poor: The Effects of Targeting Instructions, Community Involvement and Monitoring”, I use a lab-in-the-field ex- periment to examine resource allocation at the micro-level. More specifically, I study how small groups within rural communities in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo — each composed of elites, poor, and non-poor village members — decide to share money among themselves. In a dictator-game like setting, I vary whether the groups are provided with instructions to target the poor, whether the decision-making process is private or public, and whether it is monitored by a third-party or not. I find that (1) by themselves, instructions to target the poor seem to actually benefit both the poor and the non-poor, but that (2) the effectiveness of targeting instructions in reaching poor group members is largely moderated by the presence of community members during the decision-making process, while (3) by contrast, monitoring does not contribute much to the effective allocation of resources to the poor. In the second paper, “Inside & Out: The Role of the Non-Poor in Targeting Resources to the Poor”, I use a similar experimental set-up to study further the nature of the community dynamics that affect the allocation of resources to the poor. More specifically, I look at the role of non-poor, non-elite community members in influencing how elites choose to allocate resources to the poor. I find evidence that (1) community effects have to do with bargaining dynamics more than peer-pressure; (2) non-elite, non-poor members of the community have an significant role in fostering the allocation of resources to the poor, and that (3) their influence on resource allocation depends crucially on existing alliances or rivalries between various group members. Finally, in the third paper, “Is Bigger Always Better? How Targeting Bigger Aid Windfalls Affects Capture and Social Cohesion”, co-authored with Laura Paler & Kohran Kocak, I model the provision of targeting instructions as enforcing a bargain- ing environment in which three groups - the target group, the elites, and the excluded group - compete over the aid windfall. I predict that success in aid targeting depends primarily the size of the windfall, the relative influence and the historical relationships between these three groups. Poor, vulnerable groups are more efficiently targeted in environments in which the elites and the excluded group are rivals, as they will then both prefer for the windfall to be allocated to the target group rather than for it to be captured by one another. I provide support for these predictions using a regression discontinuity design and original survey data from an aid program implemented in Aceh, Indonesia. With these three articles, I aim at providing a substantive theoretical and empirical contribution to the growing literature on aid targeting effectiveness by bringing light to the role in the targeting process of a part of recipient communities that is otherwise largely overlooked, namely all those community members that are both in the community, yet left out of targeted aid programs.

This dissertation is based on two years of field research in Sudan, in Khartoum; the three capitals of Darfur; and Bentiu, Unity State, at the border between North and South Sudan. Building on a now substantial literature in critical humanitarian studies, my work focuses on the emergence of new economic forms, circuits, and entitlements that accompany humanitarian aid. These include the influx of ration cards, trade routes that deliberately shadow humanitarian convoys and draw in aid recipients, and entitlements based on kinship ties to injured or displaced victims of conflict. For well over a decade anthropologists have studied the social and political work humanitarianism does in excess of its stated intention to relieve the suffering of civilians in regions of national and political disasters. As numerous scholars have shown, humanitarian discourses and practices intentionally and unintentionally transform local and regional political values and institutions by altering the social relations that subtend them. I pursue how these transformations intervene into core categories of how people understand themselves to have status in a social world. The manuscript focuses on the one ways in which people and events are evaluated as having status within humanitarian logics. It explores the nexus between this logics and the creation of novel economic subjects, values, and institutions that are neither foreign nor local, neither neoliberal nor traditional. They are, rather, a glimpse of something the manuscript refers to as humanitarian economies, with all dimensions of the economic intended. These include new forms of dependency and altered structures of political authority. But they also include new strategies of local speculation based on humanitarian rubrics of recognizing need. For instance, I track the circulation and resale of objects of material necessity, such as grain, cooking oil, or work tools distributed by aid agencies. I demonstrate the ways in which such objects begin to function as general equivalents; they become a form of currency, and a vehicle for the storage, accumulation and transmission of wealth. But on the other hand, the manuscript is just as focused on the circulation of universal values of protection, and their transformation as local actors pick them up and deploy them in their social worlds. In other words, as local actors come to understand how humanitarian actors assess crisis, they produce a second order assessment of where aid is likely to go and thus what would be a profitable investment. They also produce second order deployments of how injury and livelihood is evaluated. Such practices transform basic dynamics of social entitlement. And they also change how people think of themselves and their neighbors as economic and political subjects. Meanwhile, critical infrastructures - from irrigation channels to pharmacy supply routes to radio transmitters - become the objects of heightened ethical scrutiny. Infrastructure comes to stand in for good governance, stability, and sustainable political relationships. What we witness is the emergence of what I call a speculative investment in crisis that binds crisis, livelihood, and life-value into a troubling knot.