of Congo, with others from Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, other African and even European nations. I recently visited a refugee camp where most of the people have lived for 15 to 25 years. One of the things I found shocking relates to nutrition. People receive 50 US Cents a day for food. If they have been in the camp for 20 years, then for 20 years they’ve had to learn how to live on $0.50 a day. The model for keeping people alive does not make sense in such refugee situations. Ideally, the services should reflect their changing needs as they grow or age – not just in terms of nutritional needs but also progressing from getting an education to raising a family. They must be more than alive. They must live. They must move on. The question becomes how you facilitate that. That means pushing the boundaries of humanitarian assistance to have more forward-looking models that account for these realities. CONSIDER THE BIGGER PICTURE More broadly, even if humanitarian organisations, by definition, deal with temporary crises, they must be strategic in decision-making to ensure they maximise value and achieve the best outcomes for populations in distress. A systems perspective is crucial: how do different parts influence each other; what are the long-term effects? That is a weakness of the current humanitarian system. Humanitarian organisations must consider how their actions in responding to a crisis can impact long-term programming. For example, is the organisation or the crisis situation likely to be there for a long time? If so, from a shelter perspective for instance, it makes no sense to use tents; a decent lasting structure works out cheaper. But there are also other considerations to be made. For example, displacement can be temporary. If a permanent structure is built in the wrong place, it will evolve into a white elephant. If things return to normal and populations dissipate, you have a structure in the middle of nowhere because nobody ever intended to stay. If we had a different mindset in accepting that most of these crises will be long-term, and that the impact for the people who live through this is going to be over a lifetime, then that changes how we think. One of the biggest issues we see in this field relates to the donors who determine what is important and, therefore, what gets funded. They do not always have the long-term view; they do not think about the effects of a decision made today across the system and for a long time to come. Over the last year, we have seen the diversion of funds from humanitarian agencies to the Ukraine conflict – this was evident even in the refugee camp in Zimbabwe. Different stakeholders in the humanitarian space need to work together more to better understand the impact of their decisions and actions over the lifetime of displaced people. They must plan further into the future, consider events beyond their immediate geographical scope, and involve those affected. Only then can the millions of displaced people worldwide have a brighter future. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 7 Dr Nonhlanhla Dube is a Lecturer in Operations Management in the Department of Management Science. Her research focuses on the humanitarian and public sectors, including an exploration of the implications of insecurity for operations strategy, supply chain management, and logistics in the humanitarian sector. n.dube@lancaster.ac.uk Image by Nonhlanhla Dube
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