4.4.1 United Nations Agencies and Donor-recipient Partnerships

As of February 2020, there were six United Nations agencies involved in the Rohingya response at the camp level, namely the International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNHCR, the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Entity for the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) (OCHA, 2020). In addition, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank supported the Cox’s Bazar District Administration with coordinating humanitarian and development projects in the host communities (ISCG, 2020, p. 29). All United Nations agencies rely on INGOs and NNGOs to carry out activities at the field level. The number of implementing partners varies per organization and sector, but large organizations "will have about six to ten partners" per sector in which they operate.31

The United Nations assumes a leading role in promoting the inclusion of persons with disabilities, and as mentioned, adopted a Disability Inclusion Strategy in 2019 "to strengthen system-wide accessibility for persons with disabilities and the mainstreaming of their rights" (United Nations, 2019). The strategy builds on previous disability-mainstreaming tools that individual United Nations agencies have published over the course of the last decade (see UNICEF, 2017; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], 2017; UNDP, 2018; UNHCR, 2019b). Against this background, it is not surprising that the United Nations agencies in Cox’s Bazar demonstrate a firm commitment to the inclusion of persons with disabilities, for example, by hiring disability inclusion experts to support their work. Yet not every United Nations agency has a donor-recipient partnership with a disability-focused NGO, and some are more advanced than others in terms of collecting disaggregated data, removing barriers and promoting the participation of persons with disabilities. In fact, many United Nations agencies have just started to change their processes and are still struggling to include persons with disabilities in their humanitarian operations.

Interviews with United Nations staff suggest that organizations that had substantial support from their headquarters were more advanced in promoting the inclusion of persons with disabilities and were more likely reach out to disability-focused NGOs for enhanced collaboration and capacity-building. These organizations often benefitted from the support of their own inclusion experts and relied on dedicated financial resources to make necessary changes at the strategic and operational levels.

However, it is not possible to determine whether some United Nations agencies are more disability-inclusive than others. Respondents highlighted that the level of commitment varied across different missions worldwide.

In Cox’s Bazar, one United Nations agency is particularly active in pushing for changes within their humanitarian operations. It engages in large-scale staff training, has developed a draft action plan on disability inclusion for two organizational sectors, maintains partnerships with disability-focused NGOs, regularly participates in ADWG meetings and creates advocacy material to document good practices on disability inclusion. Most recently, one of its departments redrafted its community feedback mechanism to make it more accessible for persons with disabilities. Its protection unit initiates most changes and is responsible for monitoring progress in other organizational departments. For example, protection staff will conduct regular site visits to determine whether newly built service facilities are accessible for persons with disabilities and whether persons with disabilities participate in consultation and community meetings.

The organization’s donor-recipient partnership with a disability-focused NGO is centred around bringing about change. Thanks to this partnership, staff from different departments at different levels have benefitted from comprehensive training on the collection and analysis of disaggregated data, identification and removal of existing barriers and promotion of the participation and empowerment of persons with disabilities. Furthermore, the disability-focused organization helped draft the action plan on disability inclusion, which formed the basis for a mission-wide, multi-year operational action plan that started in 2020.32

However, there is always room for further improvement, even in the most progressive organizations. Research in Cox’s Bazar shows that most change happens at the programming level but not within the organizational structures of the organizations themselves. Although organizations are increasingly including persons with disabilities in cash-for-work schemes and income-generation programmes, for example, their compounds are not accessible to persons with mobility restrictions. One respondent explained:

Moreover, respondents agreed that until now, organizational-change processes depended on the efforts of just a few individuals. More sustained energy and support is therefore needed to institutionalize disability inclusion within the mission’s wider structures:

There is reasonable doubt that all humanitarian actors will continue to pursue the inclusion of persons with disabilities with the same level of enthusiasm. It takes significant time to raise awareness among staff, engage them in training to build their capacity, develop a mission-wide action plan and follow through with its implementation. In dynamic environments, such as Cox’s Bazar, time is a scarce resource.

To be most effective, training should therefore be well planned, tailored to the participants’ needs and build on their previous knowledge. Training courses often last several days and involve follow-up surveys to assess whether the participants could improve their skills on disability-inclusive humanitarian action. This raises the issue of whether organizations can afford to exempt their staff from their daily tasks to participate in multi-day skills training. Raising awareness among a few line managers is not sufficient; organizations need to ensure that staff from all levels benefit from capacity-building, especially since most staff (particularly those in the field) are unfamiliar with international standards on the inclusion of persons with disabilities and corresponding commitments (which many United Nations agencies have made).33 One respondent explained:

However, many United Nations agencies and NGOs already struggle with everyday demands in the camps and host communities, and some managers perceive disability mainstreaming as an additional burden in an already challenging environment (interviews 5 and 13).

Further complicating organizational change is the fact that competition for qualified staff is high and many organizations in Cox’s Bazar struggle with frequent staff rotations. Staff training will only have a lasting impact if the trained individuals stay in their jobs for a substantial amount of time. At present, expatriates rarely stay longer than a year, if at all, and qualified Bangladeshi nationals usually look for attractive job opportunities in organizations that pay higher salaries or offer additional benefits. The level of funding and overall spending on administrative and overhead costs varies among United Nations agencies (NewAge, 2019) and some respondents stated that they had lost qualified staff to organizations with more decision-making powers in the humanitarian response (interview with a United Nations staff member).

According to two respondents, developing mission-wide, multi-year organizational action plans on disability inclusion is an excellent entry point to mainstream disability within the organizational structures. So far, however, no United Nations mission in Cox’s Bazar has developed such a plan and the motivation to create one largely depends on requests from donors and does not intrinsically derive from the organizations themselves. One respondent explained:

The development of a mission-wide action plan requires technical knowledge, good organization and prior planning. United Nations missions that have firm support from their headquarters and employ their own technical experts are therefore best placed to achieve this. Disability inclusion should be part of an organization’s regular functioning from the start of a response, otherwise organizations will always be late in implementing disability-inclusion projects and programmes during humanitarian emergencies. Nevertheless, even the most progressive action plan will only have a lasting impact if the organization can ensure its effective implementation. This depends on the organization’s capacity to mainstream disability in its own programmes and structures, in addition to its ability to monitor the activities of its implementing partners. According to respondents, despite benefitting from capacity-building on disability inclusion, INGOs and NNGOs had not been proactively monitoring their partners’ attempts to include persons with disabilities in their activities at the camp level, indicating that there is room for further improvements in monitoring.

Implementing partners simultaneously complained about the lack of uniform standards in UNHCR and IOM-led camps.34 Different rules and regulations complicate the removal of physical barriers for persons with disabilities and should therefore be harmonized. The literature and responses from respondents in the field indicate that coordination between the two organizations has improved compared with the early phase of the humanitarian response (Sida and Schenkenberg, 2019). However, sustained efforts are still necessary to facilitate smooth coordination and harmonize diverging standards.