The prioritisation challenge in focus: WFP

In this episode of A Matter of Priorities, our host Alice Obrecht takes a deep dive into the ripple effects of unprecedented budget cuts to the World Food Program (WFP). With a shortfall of over 50% in its 2023 budget, WFP faced its largest financial crisis in its 60-year history, forcing it to make drastic reductions in food and cash assistance across the globe. 

We explore how these cuts unfolded on the ground, particularly in Uganda, and the human toll they’ve taken.  

The discussions highlight the structural challenges, the human impact of these cuts — including heartbreaking examples of coping mechanisms adopted by refugees — and the broader implications for the humanitarian sector. 

Guests:
Valerie Guarnieri: Assistant Executive Director for Program and Policy Development at the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Kristof Titeca: Professor of Development Studies at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp.
Roos Derrix: PhD student at the University of Antwerp.

Co-Host: 
Alice Obrecht, Head of Research & Impact, ALNAP
Emmeline Kerkvliet, former Research Officer, ALNAP

ALNAP’s A Matter of Priorities: a podcast on tough choices in humanitarian funding 

Join our WhatsApp channel

Transcript

Alice Obrecht: Welcome back to A Matter of Priorities, a podcast by ALNAP.

 I'm Alice Obrecht.

In our previous episode, we explored the real impacts that budget cuts are having on humanitarian agencies, focusing first on the ICRC.

In this episode, we look at the work of another major humanitarian, the World Food Program, which faced over 50% cuts to its targeted budget in 2023, the largest shortfall in its 60-year history.

This resulted in waves of cuts between 30 and 70% in individual country budgets in the many places around the world where the World Food Program delivers food and cash assistance.

How did WFP approach these cuts and what impact has this had?

This is what we'll explore today.

This episode contains sections of interviews that took place between December 2023 and the summer of 2024, two researchers who looked into the impacts of WFP ration cuts in Uganda and a short conversation with Valerie Guarnieri, the Assistant Executive Director for Program and Policy Development at WFP.

(Trigger Warning)
Just a flag to our listeners, one of the researchers we speak to in this podcast speaks in somewhat graphic terms about the impacts of cuts to humanitarian aid, including harm to children. So that's a particular sensitivity you may want to skip this episode.

This is episode four, the Prioritisation Challenge in Focus, WFP.

So let's start with our conversation with Valerie Guarnieri.

Valerie Guarnieri: I'm Valerie Guarnieri, and I'm the Assistant Executive Director for WFP. I've been at WFP for 23 years and served at our headquarters in Rome, but also ran our regional operations out of Nairobi, covering nine countries in East and Central Africa, and have worked at the country level, both in Southern Africa as well as in Asia.

Alice Obrecht: How would you describe from your perspective at WFP the resource prioritisation challenge that's facing the sector as a whole at the moment, and how specifically is this playing out in your organisation?

Valerie Guarnieri: I think we were a little slow to realise that this wasn't a trend that we couldn't turn around. We were still expecting that Hail Mary pass to come through that would allow us to continue and sustain the assistance that was being provided against what we call our crisis response programs and crisis affected people. And it was only around mid-year where it became very clear that that wasn't going to happen. And so what we have seen is our country offices around the world cutting rations really abruptly.

That has meant that people even, we use the integrated phase classification system, but in South Sudan, we've had to cut rations even for people who are in IPC5. These are just people one step away from famine. We've seen refugee cuts across the board. So initially the effort was really in maintaining support to people, but cutting the amount of support that they were getting, whether that was food or whether that was cash to meet their food and other essential needs. As we've come towards the end of the year, we've had to shift that towards more reducing the numbers of people who we are supporting. And we've been helping our country offices to do that in a way that supports them to direct the funding to those who need it the most, to prioritize programs that address those most essential needs, and to have really like a robust and coherent global approach but that can be adapted to country specific circumstances. I'll take Afghanistan for an example. In 2022, we were reaching 22 million people in Afghanistan. This year under a prioritisation approach, we would aim to reach 7 million people and really prioritise widows, children, and disabled people within that 7 million population, knowing that there would be many other vulnerable who wouldn't be assisted, but really targeting those who assessments and other information showed needed the assistance the most. But the reality of our current situation is we only have enough funds to reach 3 million people with any reasonable level of assistance. So we've had to cut far below the prioritization level. And this is what is hardest for our country operations where we work.

Alice Obrecht: So that's Valerie Guarnieri's high-level view of the prioritisation challenge faced by WFP over the past year. She talks about how WFP's headquarters office in Rome was helping its country offices make these difficult cuts in ways that help address the most essential needs while supporting a coherent global approach. And this is what really strikes at the core tension in the prioritization challenge for many international humanitarian agencies. The tension between what prioritization looks like at a global level, comparing populations and countries in a very macro way in order to make the most out of limited resources, is what, on the other hand, prioritization can look and indeed feel like at a very local level, particularly for the people who are being prioritized off of humanitarian targeting lists. When we get to this micro level, we also see how a single agency's efforts to prioritize, like WFP's, come into contact with the complexity of context, with other agencies' behavior and priorities and other factors that make matters even more complicated.

 We're going to turn now to understand a bit of those complexities from two academics who've been researching the impacts of WFP's cuts on the ground in Uganda.

Christoph Dieterica: My name is Christoph Dieterica. I'm a professor in development studies at the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp.

Rose Eriks: I am Rose Eriks, I'm a PhD student also at the University of Antwerp at the Institute of Development Policy. I'm conducting research on the refugee policy process in Uganda and power relations in that process, where I'm looking at actors on the international, national and local level.

Alice Obrecht: Emmeline Kerkvliet, my co-host for episodes one and two of this podcast, spoke with Christoph and Rose earlier in the summer of 2024 on the research they published in an article for the New Humanitarian, detailing the impacts of budget cuts on WFP services to refugees in Uganda. Here's their conversation, which will now play out in full to the end of this episode.

Christoph Dieterica: so perhaps as a background, it's good to take a step back on why and how prioritisation was introduced. So it was introduced last summer, but there had been debates for years to introduce this policy. So particularly from the donor side, so from the major donors to UNHCR and WFP, such as the US and the UK, there was pressure for a protected crisis, such as Uganda, but also for other protected crises. We cannot give blank support forever, which is a legitimate point to make. But so there was strong pressure on these agencies to well implement prioritization. So a whole range of studies were being commissioned as to how to implement this and also to see if this was feasible.

And so whatever, but what these studies concluded was, one, it's very hard to distinguish between levels of vulnerability in a situation such as the Ugandan one. And two, if it were to be done, it's prone to make a lot of mistakes.

And so from what I understood, so or from what I learned, there were tensions between UNHCR and WFP on this. UNHCR mostly set these levels of vulnerability while relying on these studies. They said, well, it's hard to distinguish between these levels of vulnerability, whereas WFP more wanted to implement this. But then fast forward to the world we live in today. So Ukraine happens, a massive inflation happens. So the overall humanitarian budget went down. And then basically they were forced to implement the prioritization. And they were basically forced to go against all these studies which were being commissioned before and which were basically saying, we can't do this. It's not the solution for this situation.

Emmeline Kerkvliet: So that leads nicely on to, can you tell us about what the impact of this was of the implementation and the rollout of these decisions? What impact did it have on the people receiving assistance?

Christoph Dieterica: Yeah, so that's a difficult one. So first of all, the rollouts had been postponed a number of times. First of all, because there were tensions mainly between WFP, UNH... There were tensions between, on the one hand, WFP, UNHDR and on the other hand, the INGOs, the broader INGO refugee humanitarian response.

And this mirrors a dynamic which you see within the broader humanitarian community with the UN agencies being...

Well, I was going to say being accused, but it's more than that with UN agencies functioning in a way in which UN agencies often function, which is largely bureaucratic, largely hermetic, non-transparent and so on.

In the sense that there was very little communication both to the refugees and to the broader refugee response, refugees weren't sufficiently prepared for what's coming.

Anyway, so because of that back and forward and because of those tensions, so the rollout was postponed a number of times. But then, first of July, it was being implemented. And maybe let me give you an example of one of these points of discussion. One point of discussion was, well, because this data collection exercise was that difficult and problematic, what happens if a refugee household ends up in the wrong category? What happens if you're seen as no longer vulnerable, but whereas you are vulnerable?

And so that's why WFP and UNHDR, they constructed what was called... What they called an appeals mechanism. So you could appeal during a period of three months and then they were going to look into your data. However, an appeal mechanism would suggest that a proper follow-up would be done, such as, for example, a visit to the household. But the only thing they would do is basically clean up data. They would go back to their database, they would look, "Did we miscategorize?" Yes or no. So then it was again, re-characterized as a... I forgot the exact name ... review mechanism rather than an appeal mechanism.

Moreover, since appeal would suggest that households would be given the chance to be reclassified, but there was no money for that. It was on a one-in, one-out basis.

Eventually, some bits of money were found because of which a slightly bigger pool of refugees could be reclassified. But yeah, that gives you an idea.

So the actual implementation. There were a number of very problematic and dramatic cases, which drew a lot of attention. And rightly so. We also mentioned it in our article. There was the suicide of a child who was heading a household and who had lost all its relations. Again, suicide is very complex. It's very difficult to directly pin blame on this exercise, but it did happen within those circumstances.

Yeah, as for the actual impact, it's very hard to know. I have just come back from a trip to Uganda where I worked further on this. And WFP had done one impact study, which on the one hand showed that in the end, the outcomes are pretty good. But on the other hand, again, this study was done at a very specific point in the agricultural cycle in the sense that the yield had just happened. People had a lot of cash and so on. And preliminary reports from the broader NGO community, they paint a different picture. They show problems with regards to food intake and so on.

Rose Eriks: The surveys that have been done by, I think, mainly the NGO community on the negative consequences of this prioritisation exercise. It highlights several negative coping strategies that households now adopt. They might have adopted them already before, but this is definitely something that has grown or that has increased since this time. So this is not to say that this didn't happen at all before. These suicides, unfortunately, are one of these assumptions that this is increasing, makes it very difficult because many coping negative coping strategies, I believe, also have a relation to each other. For example, if you have a child dropping out of school. It also makes girls, for example, more prone to early or forced marriages. It also makes children in general more prone to child labor.

There have been accounts that girls and young women have been engaged more in commercial sex, have been pushed to prostitution. Domestic abuse has gone up. And I went very briefly to Naki Valley refugee settlement in the southwest of the country. And I spoke to only a few people. So this is not enough to really make or paint a clear picture of everything that's happening. But when you talk to people, these are several topics that do come up, that do come up before. And people do.

Well, they do recognise or they do say that before, maybe they had two meals a day. And since July, they had only one.

Emmeline Kerkvliet: Thank you. Really vivid examples that you just gave.

I was wondering whether I think in the article there was a response from WFP saying that they had they had worked hard to try to use data and make this a needs based decision to make sure that the most vulnerable people were receiving the highest food ration.

And I wondered whether in the time since the publication of the article and in your research that you've been continuing to conduct since then, have you had any further interactions or comments from WFP about this, about how they went about the exercise? that you're comfortable sharing.

Christoph Dieterica: Yeah. So comments with WFP. So on WFP and other UN agencies largely talks about their bureaucratic nature, their lack of transparency and so on. Two or research or my ongoing research very much illustrate this. Actors within UN agencies are hard to reach, hard to interview and hard to take critique as well. So have I interacted or received much feedback? No. Have things changed on the ground? No. Things remained pretty much the same. That being said, the refugee response and also the response of WFP is dynamic, but that's not related to the article. But in relevance to this very theme and the theme discussed in the article, it's perhaps noteworthy is that WFP has started what are called livelihoods.

Projects in the sense that they now also implement projects to make refugees more sustainable and to support their well, to support their livelihoods, which again is another point of contention in the broader refugee response. Is it WFPs mandate to also implement livelihood responses? Many criticize it as a form of mission creep in the sense that WFP tries to legitimize its presence and look for funding in a rapidly changing humanitarian landscape.

Donors are much less inclined to invest in food support, which of course is the core business of WFP. So WFP needs to look for new ways to sustain itself and livelihood support is a major way of doing so. But do they have the skills to do so? Do they have the capacity to do so? So on the one hand, you've got humanitarian organizations which have been providing livelihood support for decades and which have a lot of expertise in this. And they know how to implement this. On the other hand, you could argue well, WFP has a level of scale which other UN-terrain actors don't have. So potentially an advantage there. But again, as much academic research has shown, the scale issue is also very much a disadvantage for UN organizations.
They're slow, they're bureaucratic, they're insulated, their learning processes are much more difficult. And all of this was very much illustrated by the whole prioritisation exercise. They very much started from scratch. There were no lessons learned taken from other cases, other countries, other organizations where it had already been implemented. They acted in a very insulated manner, not open for discussion, not open for critique and so on. And so you see the same repeating itself in this livelihoods exercise or these livelihoods programs.

Emmeline Kerkvliet: so many things I want to pick up on in your responses. But maybe the next logical question is, what do you think that WFP could or should have done differently? What do you think are the humanitarian actors, what would you like them to take away from what you discovered in Uganda?

Christoph Dieterica: All right, thanks. That's a very good question. And again, I'd like to repeat that well prioritization as such could be a good policy. But for it to work, one, it needs a very firm cross-sectoral, well-coordinated response. Meaning that, for example, and I forgot to mention that there was very little coordination in the way in which the current response was implemented. For example, there was no coordination with the broader health sector. There was no coordination with education and so on. So first coordination across sectors was necessary to coordination with all the other actors in the broader refugee response, which should have been involved from the very beginning. I'm talking about INGs, but I'm also talking about refugees and so on. WFP will say we've done that. But yeah, there was a lot of frustration and a lot of feeling of unease among all these other different levels of actors. And three, the data collection should have been done better. A major problem was the actual data collection.
Again, this prioritisation across levels of vulnerability as such could be a good thing, but you need to be really confident in your data and the way you treat those data. And there were problems there.

Rose Eriks: So if I may pick up on that, is that one of the things that I found most striking when I started just learning about this topic? This was last year in February. I was invited to a WFP regional meeting in the Southwest, which was one of the, I guess, one of the first meetings where different stakeholders were brought together and where the design of this prioritisation exercise was discussed. And in the room were also refugee leaders and a lot of the prioritization exercise was already thought out. So it was clear, for example, that an appeals mechanism in some way had to be implemented. It wasn't necessarily defined what that should be or how that should be rolled out.
But at that moment when I was sitting there, it struck me that until that moment, there was not really communication with refugees.

So afterwards, they were speaking about running sensitization campaigns to inform refugees of what was going to happen. But it never seemed that there was something like information sharing or sensitization or providing feedback before, which I think is a missed opportunity, especially in Uganda, because you have system. I mean, you can say a lot about the Refugee Engagement Forum, but it is a system which links refugee leaders to refugees in communities and also to the decision making body, so to the high level policy making.

And my guess would be, or I think it's a missed opportunity, that the Refugee Engagement Forum wasn't, for example, involved more in the design of this third phase, which could have created maybe also more understanding from the refugee community, maybe more in vulnerability or how refugees would define vulnerability. Because right now it's, well, it seems to me like a very much top down exercise agencies.

Alice Obrecht: So let's recap what we've heard across this episode and the past few episodes. We've been hearing a lot about how leading humanitarian agencies are grappling with prioritisation decisions and on how the sector as a whole has tried to improve the quality of data going into these decisions. On our next two episodes, join us as we take a step back with the esteemed humanitarian ethicist Hugo Slim to reflect on the values and norms that influence prioritisation and whether we need a total rethink on how we even define a humanitarian

Thank you for listening to Matter of Priorities, a podcast by LNAP. For resources and links related to what we've talked about in today's episode, please check out the description.

For more information on ALNAP, please visit our website, www.alnap.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe to our series, wherever you get your podcasts.