After the full-scale Russian invasion, my partner and I became full-time volunteers for the first couple of months. We devoted all of ourselves to volunteering and also used a considerable amount of personal savings for this cause. We bought tactical and medical equipment, delivered different things all over Ukraine, fundraised among our colleagues, rehomed stray animals, etc. In the last eighteen months, we also encountered a number of big organizations and foundations willing to help Ukraine. Unfortunately, cooperation with these institutions wasn’t usually as productive as we would have liked. Big organizations, it seemed, existed in a different reality from us, local volunteers. We couldn’t afford to be slow because every hour of inaction costs lives. We couldn’t afford to be indecisive. This text, thus, is a reflection on this experience of volunteering. It is about the different social realities of big humanitarian players versus local volunteers and grassroots initiatives. It is also about fundraising inequalities and who is more efficient after all is said and done.
This text was initially written for a zine “Zamotka” (a project run by Freefilmers NGO) but has been updated for online publication on the website of the Ukrainian Feminist Network for Freedom and Democracy NGO.
How it all started
Henry is twenty-seven. I don’t know if he has any complaints about his life. It seems to me that he shouldn’t. Yet, I won’t be surprised to learn that he thinks his life is an endless series of problems. You see, most probably, I wouldn’t understand his troubles. Because for the last year and a half, my country has been fighting an all-out war. My friends and I volunteer a lot. We fundraise for the military and civilians, order necessary medical equipment, and rehome stray dogs while striving not to go mad. At the same time, we’re also trying to devote at least some time to work that actually pays money, enabling us to do it all.
Henry lives in London. He graduated from Cambridge (yes, that is very Cambridge) and now works for a big company. He earns a few thousand pounds a month and doesn’t work after 6 p.m. or on weekends. Undoubtedly, he feels useful because his employer is a significant player in the humanitarian industry and a subcontractor of the almighty United Nations (UN) themselves.
Unfortunately, Henry and I can’t find common ground. I sincerely hate him, his employer, and the UN. I don’t care if people who grew up in the First World think that Ukrainians are now emotional and unstable. Indeed, I have been pretty emotional and not quite stable as of late.
Henry sincerely doesn’t understand why his request is “a problem.” He’s looking for volunteers in Ukraine who’d be willing to drive food packages beyond the demarcation line, i.e., straight into the hands of the enemy. From his point of view, he doesn’t understand why this apparently innocent question makes my blood boil. “These Ukrainians are really unstable,” he thinks, probably.
When this little misunderstanding of ours happened, the world had already learned about Russian troops shelling an evacuation route from Irpin’ (Kyiv region), a humanitarian corridor from Mariupol’ (Donetsk region), and a corridor from Kamianske in Zaporizhzhia region. Maybe Henry doesn’t know about it. He sincerely does not understand why his contacts in Ukraine, including me, are not responding to this apparently easy question of his about volunteer drivers.
Distributed humanitarianism vs. Fordism of big NGOs
Henry and I had this fight in early May 2022, almost two and a half months into the full-scale invasion. The Russian military has already made its first “gesture of goodwill” and retreated from northern regions of Ukraine. Chain supplies have already started to renew, but local volunteers continue to fill in the gaps left by the state institutions. These individual volunteers are continuously aided by different grassroots initiatives, including feminist ones. Initiatives like these have played a major role in helping people living in the occupied territories or territories where hostilities take place. For instance, thanks to feminist volunteer networks, women in the occupied territories were supplied with personal hygiene items and emergency contraception. Researchers will later describe this volunteering phenomenon as “distributed humanitarianism.” Big humanitarian players like the World Food Program (WFP) are still nowhere to be seen in Ukraine. Yet, Henry continues to assure me that they, meaning the World Food Program, will definitely come and help. They just need some more time to think through their logistics.
Of course, it’s not Henry himself who is the problem. The problem is that big international players, such as the WFP, do not work with their beneficiaries directly. They rely on a series of intermediaries and subcontractors instead. This makes the process of providing humanitarian aid slower, clumsier, more expensive, and less efficient. It becomes more expensive because the work of each subcontractor (such as the company that employs Henry) is pretty well-paid. It becomes clumsier because the more intermediaries you have, the more time you spend on communication. The more intermediaries there are between a donor and an end recipient, the more difficult it becomes for a donor to be flexible and prompt in reacting to the changing needs of the beneficiaries. Moreover, many big international humanitarian donors often do not bother to ask those they’re helping about their preferences and needs. Big international NGOs often prefer to provide one-size-fits-all kind of aid that is not tailored to the needs of a particular social group.
Anthropologists Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Iwona Kaliszewska compare this way of aid provision by big NGOs with the Fordist production system: “To source, store, and distribute aid, humanitarian agencies adopted Fordism’s centralized bulk logistics systems. With its emphasis on long production runs of standardized products, Fordism relied on a distribution system that put equal emphasis on economies of scale. Rather than delivering products irregularly and in small batches, large Fordist producers pumped out large quantities of products that were delivered and then held in distribution centers and warehouses, waiting to be used for further production or distributed for consumption.” Similarly, big humanitarian players such as the UN tend to operate in bulk using a one-size-fits-all type of aid that can be stored in a warehouse for an extended period of time before being given to beneficiaries.
So, who’s more efficient after all?
It is important to remember that humanitarianism is also an industry. For the year 2021, its total worth was estimated to be 31.1 billion USD. Yet, big international humanitarian organizations are not as efficient (including not as efficient financially) as we would want them to be. Elizabeth Dunn, a researcher in the humanitarian industry, claims that for each dollar received by such organizations, only about 37 cents make it to the final beneficiaries. The remaining 63 cents stay with the subcontractors. The Center for Global Development — an independent think tank researching the humanitarian industry — paints a similar picture. According to them, only 32% of humanitarian funds make it to the local governments, NGOs, and businesses in the countries of aid destination. Again, almost two-thirds of the funds stay with the subcontractors. It is important to note here that quite often, these subcontractors — such as the London office of the United Arab Emirates-registered company that Henry works for — are located NOT in the countries that need humanitarian aid in the first place.
It is understandable that many Ukrainians are angry and frustrated with big international organizations. And these organizations do deserve the criticism that has been aimed at them. They haven’t been able to respond promptly and help Ukraine, either at the beginning of the full-scale invasion or after the Russians blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. According to an independent research team, Humanitarian Outcomes, during the first six weeks of the full-scale invasion, local organizations and volunteers provided almost all humanitarian aid to those who needed it in Ukraine. These researchers claim that “with a few exceptions, even the international agencies with prior presence inside Ukraine needed at least five weeks to re-enter and ramp up before they began any aid delivery. The handful of internationals that had teams inside Ukraine in April were just starting to become operational, but not reaching non-government-controlled areas or highly contested areas like Mariupol.”
These researchers also point to an important and telling discrepancy in funding between big international organizations and local volunteer groups. They note that even though local volunteers provided almost all the necessary help at the beginning of the all-out war, such initiatives received only 4.4 million USD in direct funding, which is only 0,003% of all Ukraine’s humanitarian aid funding. Yes, we are talking about three thousandth of one percent. In other words, they received significantly less than one percent of all direct funding. Instead, the giants of the humanitarian industry, like the UN, received 71% of total Ukraine humanitarian aid funding. This disbalance is striking.
Instead of conclusions
Given that the modus operandi of big international organizations renders them inflexible and ill-equipped to adapt to the quickly changing needs while they continue to receive the lion’s share of funding, it is unsurprising that many voices are calling for reform in the humanitarian industry. Changes in the humanitarian industry are long overdue. However, while we wait for these changes, we can already do small things to restore some semblance of balance in this sphere. For instance, supporting local organizations and volunteer groups is usually more sustainable and efficient. These groups and initiatives shoulder the burden and do most of the work. Moreover, local initiatives and groups cannot afford to burn out and leave the country because they are tired of the war. Being rooted in the context, they have been living through the war together with their loved ones and friends and have been feeling and experiencing the everyday consequences of the invasion on their bodies. So, they continue to work. They help people whose villages and towns have been de-occupied. They will continue working after the war, helping rebuild cities, villages, and lives. They — and not big international organizations — need our help the most, including financial support.
By the way, the aid from the World Food Program that Henry had promised in May finally arrived in Kyiv in September 2022. Who delivered it, you may ask? That is a damn good question. At least a few dozen of those really heavy boxes were delivered to people with disabilities by the author of this text and her partner. Yes, we did it on a Saturday, in our free time, using our personal cars and paying for gas out of our own pockets. I wouldn’t be surprised if Henry was sitting in a pub on the same Saturday, somewhere in London, drinking a pint and thinking how lucky he was to work for an organization that really cares about other people’s misfortunes. I would really like to believe that the international humanitarian system will change. Furthermore, I would like to believe that the humanitarian industry will learn from local initiatives’ experience in handling the challenges created by the full-scale invasion. The sheer scale of volunteering in Ukraine, various creative ways to organize logistics, and the fact that small and often grassroots initiatives have dominated the Ukraine field have greatly interested many researchers worldwide. Ukrainian initiatives do have a lot to say about humanitarianism. Fortunately, they have recently started to voice loud and clear all injustices and problems that exist within the humanitarian industry. I really want to hope that the current interest in Ukraine and the readiness of Ukrainian initiatives to share their experience and teach others will be an impetus to change.
Dafna Rachok is an anthropologist, social activist, and volunteer. She’s a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dafna’s research interests are public health policies and state bureaucracies.