“Communities affected by disasters have rights” – Elmehdi Ag Wakina

In 2012, Norwegian Church Aid – a member of the ACT Alliance – introduced Elmehdi Ag Wakina and his colleagues to the Sphere standards and principles. Photo © Richard Mané / The Sphere Project

“We were really struck,” Elmehdi explains, “because when they talk about accountability, organisations generally think about donors, those who provide the resources. Thus they tend to forget that they’re also accountable to the beneficiaries – those whom donors who support their work are targeting.”

A member of Mali’s Tuareg ethnic minority who is a teacher by training, Elmehdi taught in primary and secondary schools before joining the NGO sector.

“I left school teaching for adult education,” he says. He was attracted by the energy of the development sector that offered him the possibility of “creating, innovating, and opportunities to change the ways of working”.

In 1996, he joined the Malian Association for Survival in the Sahel (Association Malienne pour la Survie au Sahel, AMSS), a small NGO active in development. His first job was to train animators; six years later he became the organisation administrator and two years after that, he was named Programme Director – the post he holds today.

The AMSS started working in humanitarian response about three years ago. “In March 2012, our country underwent a multi-dimensional crisis: security, food and political,” Elmehdi recalls. Northern Mali was the theatre of an uprising by Tuareg rebels which was followed by a takeover by militant Islamist groups.

“The country’s three northern regions were occupied for almost a year by armed groups. Which pushed a quarter of the population to be displaced either internally or to other countries. Those who stayed put were in a very precarious situation without basic social services while economic activities were brought to a halt.”

Faced with this situation, the AMSS and its partners decided to participate in the emergency response. They began by distributing food and providing nutritional support for children, pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers.

In this context, Norwegian Church Aid – a member of the and AMSS partner – introduced the organisation’s staff to the Sphere standards and principles.

The first training workshop focused on humanitarian principles as well as quality and accountability and included a review of the Sphere Handbook’s sectoral standards. Five coordinators and the Programme Director were trained who, in turn, trained the animators responsible for implementing projects in the field.

In addition to accountability to beneficiaries, Elmehdi also found “extremely important the emphasis on rights – rights and not needs. People should know that communities affected by disasters have rights and that these rights must be respected.”

“We’re not here to dispense charity but as humanitarian actors. The communities are actors as well. They can suggest what might be improved. In the past, it was considered that communities had nothing to say about their situation, that what was required was simply to intervene. Communities were just consumers. So this has really improved the quality of the interventions, the manner of doing things, of acting at the community level.”

What has changed since Sphere standards were incorporated in their work? “Now, we see that we’re not the only ones to use the standards. We form a group of actors who must work hand in hand with each other to improve the quality of our actions,” says Elmehdi.

He sees the Sphere standards as a tool to help overcome one of the challenges to humanitarian work: the lack of coordination. “Sometimes each humanitarian actor has its own agenda. Which means that sometimes they lack the spirit of coordination – which exists to ensure the quality of humanitarian response.”

That is why, according to Elmehdi, “effective dissemination of the Sphere standards at national and even regional levels could have a real impact on the quality of our response”.

What is needed, he concludes, is “a holistic effort to disseminate the standards at all levels wherever catastrophe strikes, and even where one hasn’t yet happened, because it’s important always to be prepared.”

[Elmehdi Ag Wakina participated in the 28-29 October .]

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