An interview with Paul Joicey from Oxfam in Myanmar

Around World Humanitarian Day on August 19 the PK Forum is talking to a range of different people about the challenge of localisation in emergency response.

Today we present a conversation with Paul Joicey, Country Director of Oxfam in Myanmar.

PK forum: There was considerable support amongst local and international NGOs for the Charter of Change following the World Humanitarian Summit. The Charter contains some broad themes but also very specific target of 20% of humanitarian funding going to local organizations. Do you support the Charter of Change? What do you see the main focus now for Oxfam in Myanmar?

Oxfam in Myanmar has been providing emergency relief to over 150000 people affected by conflict or the impact of disaster across Myanmar. We work mainly in partnership with local organizations, providing funding and technical support which enables them to strengthen their own capacity to deliver effective emergency relief. In Kachin, for instance, Oxfam works with partners such as KBC and Metta to ensure that IDPs have access to food, water, sanitation and hygiene, and are well informed about their rights.

There has been an urge for changes in humanitarian system after the WHS. Oxfam is one of leading organizations in strong support of Charter for Change, we have practical vision in Myanmar to be more explicit in strengthening our local partners. We will ensure at least 30% of our humanitarian funding going to local organizations.

It is also an imperative that the agreements made in Charter for Change be discussed further and unpacked in Myanmar. Oxfam is initiating all signatories to the Charter for Change to hold discussion to adopt the commitments and their realistic implementation in Myanmar.

Given the historical dominance of UN and international agencies in the humanitarian aid sector, the localization of humanitarian aid call for lots of challenges. But we definitely need to overcome it. Oxfam believes that “If we had to build new humanitarian systems, we would strive to support national government leadership, supported and held accountable by local organizations with resilient communities at the heart of the system, and international actors providing support where needed”. To be able to do that - access to funding, capacity development and creating spaces are fundamental for local organizations.

PK forum: In the future humanitarian response there will be increasingly local leadership in humanitarian world in placed, what would be the main differences from recent responses?

Putting local groups at first hand can bring efficient delivery of relief since they can respond quickly and spread wide outreach through local networks. Localization of humanitarian aid is the grand step we need to go forward since it is the time to let go more of what they deserve for what they have been capable of.

Yet, it needs to be carried out in deliberate manner from process perspective because of different local contexts and political dynamics in particular affected area. Locally sensitive long term crisis like Rakhine State where the issue of inter-communal tensions put risks for local organizations to take actions as per requirement of humanitarian principles and the role of international actors to fulfill humanitarian need of affected communities could be relevant from time to time.

PK Forum: Are there any other subjects you like to highlight on "localization"?

Of course, there is one important aspect I shouldn’t forget is the inclusion of local women group. There have been tremendous evidences from Oxfam experience across the world showing that women play an important role in different aspects of humanitarian emergencies particularly in preparedness and disaster risk reduction. Working with local women groups in humanitarian system is under-addressed in current humanitarian thinking of Myanmar and we need explore more on this as critical aspect of localization discussions and actions.

“လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားမႈအကူအညီေပးေရးစနစ္အသစ္တစ္ခု တည္ေဆာင္ဖို႔လိုအပ္တယ္ဆိုရင္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာအိမ္ရွင္အစိုးရမ်ားကဦးေဆာင္မႈနဲ႔ တာ၀န္ယူမႈရွိတဲ႔ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားကို ဗဟိုျပဳတဲ႔စနစ္တစ္ခုအျဖစ္ ျမင္ပါတယ္”

ေအာက္စဖန္းျမန္မာမွ ေပါလ္ဂြ်ိဳက္စီႏွင့္ေတြ႔ဆံုျခင္း။

PK: ျပီးခဲ့တဲ့ေမလကျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ကမၻာ့လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈညီလာခံနဲ႔အတူ ေပၚထြက္လာတဲ့ “အေျပာင္းအလဲအတြက္ပဋိဉာဥ္” ကိုနိုင္ငံတကာအဖြဲ႔အစည္းအသီးသီး၊ ေဒသအဖြဲ႔အစည္းအသီးသီးက ေထာက္ခံခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ဒီပဋိဉာဥ္မွာ က်ယ္ျပန္႔တဲ့အေၾကာင္းအရာမ်ားပါ၀င္ေပမယ့္ အေရးၾကီးတဲ့အခ်က္တစ္ခုျဖစ္တဲ့ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈဆိုင္ရာရံပံုေငြမ်ားရဲ႔ ၂၀%ႏႈန္း ကို အနည္းဆံုးအေနနဲ႔ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔ေတြကိုေရာက္ရွိနိုင္ဖို႔ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေမးခ်င္တာက ဒီပဋိဉာဥ္ကိုေထာက္ခံပါသလား၊ လက္ရွိ ေအာက္စဖန္းျမန္မာ အေနနဲ႔ေရာ လက္ရွိဘာကို အာရံုစိုက္လုပ္ေနပါလဲ။

Paul: ေအာက္စဖန္းျမန္မာအေနနဲ႔ သဘာ၀ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္နဲ႔ပဋိပကၡေတြဒဏ္ခံရတဲ့ လူဦးေရ ၁သိန္းေက်ာ္ကို အေရးေပၚအကူအညီနဲ႔ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမႈအေထာက္အပံ့မ်ားေပးေနပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔အေနနဲ႔ ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြကုိယ္တိုင္ စြမ္းေဆာင္ရည္ေတြျမင့္တက္လာျပီး အကူအညီေပးေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကို ပိုမိုထိေရာက္ေအာင္လုပ္နိုင္ဖို႔ ေငြေၾကးနဲ႔နည္းပညာပိုုင္းေထာက္ပံ့ေပးျခင္းနည္းလမ္းနဲ႔ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပါတယ္။ ဥပမာ - ကခ်င္ေဒသမွာဆိုရင္ ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ KBC နဲ႔ ေမတၱာေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္းတို႔ကတဆင့္ ေရႊ႔ေျပာင္းေနထိုင္ရသူေတြအတြက္ အစားအစာ၊ ေရနဲ႔ သန္႔ရွင္းေရးတို႔ရရွိနိုင္မႈနဲ႔ သူတို႔တဲ့အခြင့္အေရးေတြကို နားလည္သေဘာေပါက္နိုင္ဖို႔ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပါတယ္။ ကမၻာ့လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားမႈညီလာခံအျပီးမွာ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားကူညီမႈစနစ္ကိုျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲရန္လိုအပ္ေၾကာင္း ေတာင္းဆိုမႈေတြျမင့္တက္လာပါတယ္။ ေအာက္စ္ဖန္းအေနနဲ႔ “အေျပာင္းအလဲအတြက္ပဋိဉာဥ္” ကိုဦးေဆာင္တိုက္တြန္းတဲ့ နို္င္ငံတကာအဖြဲ႔အစည္းတစ္ခုျဖစ္တာနဲ႔အညီ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာလည္း ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ရဲ့ မိတ္ဖက္ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားကို ဒီထက္ပိုျပီး ျမွင့္တင္ေပးဖို႔ လက္ေတြ႔က်တဲ့ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ရွိပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔အေနနဲ႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ရရွိတဲ့ ရံပံုေငြရဲ႔ အနည္းဆံုး ၃၀% ကို ပြင့္လင္းျမင္သာမႈရွိရွိနဲ႔ ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားထံေရာက္ရွိနိုင္ဖို႔ ရည္မွန္းထားပါတယ္။

တစ္ကယ္ေတာ့ “အေျပာင္းအလဲအတြက္ပဋိဉာဥ္”ကို ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာ က်ယ္က်ယ္ျပန္႔ျပန္႔ဆက္လက္ေဆြးေႏြးဖို႔ဟာ အင္မတန္မွ အေရးၾကီးပါတယ္။ အဲ့ဒီအတြက္လည္း ေအာက္စဖန္းျမန္မာအေနနဲ႔“အေျပာင္းအလဲအတြက္ပဋိဉာဥ္”ပါ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြကို လက္ေတြ႔က်င့္သံုးဖို႔ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ရန္ ၾကိဳးပမ္းေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကုလသမဂၢနဲ႔ နိုင္ငံတကာေအဂ်င္စီေတြ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားမႈအကူအညီေပးေရးမွာ လႊမ္းမိုးလာခဲ့တာ သမိုင္းရွည္ခဲ႔ပါျပီ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ပဲ ေဒသအဖြဲ႔မ်ားေခါင္းေဆာင္တဲ့ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားမႈအကူအညီေပးေရးကို သြားနိုင္ဖို႔ကေတာ့ စိန္ေခၚမႈအျပည့္ရွိိပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ကြ်န္ေတ္ာတို႔အားလံုးမျဖစ္မေနေက်ာ္လႊားၾကရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ေအာက္စ္ဖန္းအေနနဲ႔ ယံုၾကည္တာက “လူသားခ်င္းစာနာေထာက္ထားမႈအကူအညီေပးေရးစနစ္အသစ္တစ္ခု တည္ေဆာင္ဖို႔လိုအပ္တယ္ဆိုရင္ သက္ဆိုင္ရာအိမ္ရွင္အစိုးရမ်ားကဦးေဆာင္မႈနဲ႔ တာ၀န္ယူမႈရွိတဲ႔ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားကို ဗဟိုျပဳတဲ႔စနစ္တစ္ခုအျဖစ္ ျမင္ပါတယ္”။ အဲ့လိုျဖစ္ဖို႔ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ရန္ပံုေငြရရွိႏိုင္မႈလက္လွမ္းမီျခင္း၊ စြမ္းေဆာင္ရည္ျမွင့္တင္ျခင္း၊ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ရာတြင္ပါ၀င္နိုင္ျခင္းတို႔ဟာ ေဒသခံအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားအတြက္ အခရာက်မွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။