How We Make Certain That Our Efforts Pay Off

You can parachute crates of food from helicopters into starving communities—but if you then fly on to the next community without following up on the ground, you can't know whether you're really helping to eradicate hunger and malnutrition.

At Action Against Hunger, we want to verify that our aid pays off, so we keep checking to ensure that we're doing the job right. We make every effort to track the changes we've made in a community and evaluate whether they match our intentions and local needs. We try to confirm that our intentions were appropriate, that we used our resources efficiently, and that the community we've targeted can cope independently in the future without our assistance. And if we find that we've slipped below our own rigorous standards, we analyze why and take action. Our workers, our beneficiaries, and our donors deserve no less.

For example, our field missions are often launched when surveys of communities find an unusually high proportion of children and adults displaying symptoms of malnutrition. But once we begin assisting a community, we maintain scrupulous records for everyone we treat. At our Therapeutic and Supplementary Feeding Centers, for example, where we treat seriously malnourished beneficiaries, we scrutinize progress reports patient by patient, and we calculate fatality rates to see how close we've come to our standards of cure. Our officers in the field and at our five international headquarters study these records, and if we see signs that we're not meeting our expectations, we'll huddle with our field staff by email and telephone or send in our top experts to analyze why we've fallen short. If necessary, we'll retrain or switch personnel. And we'll keep surveying the larger community to reassure ourselves that we're making progress in our overall commitment. We hold ourselves to higher standards than those of any outside observer.

Similarly, when we make distributions of food or tools, we later interview every tenth recipient (approximately). We ask our beneficiaries, for example, whether their share was sufficient for their families and whether its quality was acceptable. Then we ask how they used their distribution: Did they eat it, store it, sell it, barter it, give it away? If they sold it, how much did they receive, and what did they do with the proceeds? If they bartered it, what did they get in return? And so on. This helps us decide whether we should rethink the materials we distribute. We also ask recipients how many meals they ate daily before the current crisis turned them into beneficiaries and how many meals per day they eat now. This helps us track whether they're regaining their self-sufficiency and, if they're not, what kinds of further assistance they need.

When we dig wells or install water-and-sanitation systems, we sample water from hand-pumps periodically to make sure the water remains drinkable and hasn't been contaminated by mechanical deterioration or mishandling of the pump. Other follow-up is automatic while we're working in the field because our teams share the beneficiaries' systems, and they can immediately detect problems with quantity or quality. In addition, we train members of local communities to join water committees and to maintain water-and-sanitation systems. Then we provide the committees with refresher courses on a regular basis. We never just dig a well and move on.

Our rigorous self-checking helps us fulfill our commitment to ending hunger and malnutrition throughout the world. It's inextricably a major component of our humanitarian effort.