Humanitarian Action in Ukraine today is a mix between Government-led operations, international humanitarian action and a myriad of grassroots initiative providing essential support to vulnerable populations. But how do these very different types of aid come together? Can “Big Aid” connect with “Little Aid” and can the grassroots initiatives be scaled to become “Little Big Aid?”
Lewis Sida has worked in the humanitarian sector for decades. In Ukraine he has gone rogue, become a “nutter” and is supporting a guy called Vlad who has some medical supplies and a couple of trucks.
Lewis and Lars Peter Nissen explore together the space between big and small aid and contrast the Ukrainian operation with humanitarian action in Yemen.
Transcript
Welcome to Trumanitarian, I'm your host Lars Peter Nissen. We've been quiet for a while and that's because it's been really busy, but also because I've been thinking about Ukraine and the way that we as a community have responded to that horrific and criminal situation. I haven't quite known how to go about covering that issue on the show. But when I heard that Louis Sida, who is on my top five list of all time favorite humanitarians ever was involved in Ukraine and that he had gone rogue, I got really curious. So I immediately called him and set up an interview. It turned out to be a brilliant conversation about localization, big aid, little aid, trucks, and a guy called Vlad and about Ukraine and Yemen. So buckle up! Like us, follow us, leave reviews, all of that stuff. Most importantly, listen and discuss, give feedback and share the show with your colleagues. Enjoy the conversation.
Lars Peter Nissen:Lewis Sida. Welcome to Trumanitarian.
Lewis Sida:Well, thank you, Lars Peter. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm very happy that you've invited me on, on a rainy morning in Geneva.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, it's miserable actually. Even for Geneva, you have to say that this is not a very good day. Anyways, Lewis. You are here because I am a bit worried about you. We've known each other for 10 years and, and last week I was speaking to one of our colleagues in Ukraine and I happened to mention your name and she goes, oh, you mean the rogue humanitarian. So, so what's happening, Lewis? Why, why are you known in Ukraine as the rogue?
Lewis Sida:Isn't it, isn't it fantastic. I have many images of myself Lars Peter, but never the rogue up until now. I think if I've achieved anything, just achieving the epitaph of being the rogue humanitarian is, something that I should be proud of.
New Speaker:So here's the story, I guess like many of us I've been working bit on Ukraine. I have a friend of a friend introduced me to a Ukrainian diaspora organization, individual. Who's been raising money for medical supplies. And I guess to what you can only really describe as a struggle for the words a little bit when I'm trying to explain this, but civil society, volunteer activist groups, I think we're all sufficiently familiar with the situation in Ukraine. Not, not obviously the military situation, but in terms of, I guess you can call it a mass mobilization.
Lewis Sida:It feels like the whole of Ukrainian society is mobilized for the war effort, but also to help their neighbors. And so you have the emergence of these civil society, volunteer activist groups, they're typically they've got a warehouse, they've got a few cars. they're collecting relief supplies and, and they're taking them to their elderly neighbors or young families or the inferm. And they're also collecting for hospitals and, and helping move those supplies around, Some in collaboration, obviously with the authorities, with the ministry of health, but some just as these sort of quite local or very local efforts. So anyway, my, my colleague now friend collaborator who was raising resources for these medical supplies was trying to work out how she could also connect these groups to more formal organizations. And I said, of course rather naively. Yeah, of course, that's what I do. I'll help you.
Lars Peter Nissen:It's interesting because the two of us have spent most of our careers in Big Aid, in the big established organizations. And I'm sure that you just like me in sudden onset disasters have been on the receiving end of a tsunami of useful junk that people happen to have in their garages or whatever, and that they saw something on TV. So they, you know, here is a tent, it only misses one of the polls, right. And have struggled with these unsolicited donations of just absolute garbage. And I think have an instinct against these things like: it's not professional. But what you're describing in Ukraine is a whole society who is mobilizing itself to support themselves, to be resilient. And you now certainly stand with them in support of them, not with one of the big organizations. And how has that experience then been of trying to connect them to Big Aid
Lewis Sida:You start off very naively. Yeah, of course. I can do that. Yeah. So you phone a few mates and you send some emails and you know, I'm chuckling to myself as you described that tsunami of unsolicited donations and being on the other side, because I reached out to a good friend of mine in UNHCR who's an absolutely great person and a fantastic thinker. And this individual had been up until very recently in Poland, on the border. And and they laughed at me and said, oh, you are one of those nutters now. And of course I am a little bit so yeah, the experience of being on the other side has being quite sobering as you might imagine because I went down the rabbit hole thinking it'd be quite easy and I'm still going down the rabbit hole.
Lewis Sida:And we still haven't really managed to connect big aid to little aid. And I even went to - You know, this is how I, this is how I became the rogue humanitarian - And I even went to, to, to Poland on the border to JE of it's very easy to jump on a plane on, on a plane from Gatwick near to where I live and go Krakow and went to the coordination meetings and felt awkward not being one of the branded entities at the coordination meetings and trying to explain what we were doing and that we didn't have this formal structure, but actually we did have all of these willing people with you know, with their own vehicles and their own time and passion and Goodwill. And I'm still struggling with making the connection if I'm honest.
Lars Peter Nissen:So is that because you are a nutter and it's simply wrong to do that. And then that this little aid, they should just wait until we get the stuff to the local municipality and go pick it up there instead of trying to organize their own stuff, or is it simply that, that we just don't have that interface and we should develop that, but I mean, where do you come down on that side?
Lewis Sida:So it's fascinating, isn't it? We talk about localization and here, here we are you know, started transitioning from Rogue humanitarian to aid speak. We've been talking about localization recently. We've been talking about localization for a while. We've probably been talking about localization all of my career. And I remember when I worked in South Sudan back in the late nineties and at that point I was working with Christian Aid and they were working with local partners as they do. And we worked with these very local organizations. I have a great friend and colleague Dan Collison, who was at Warchild quite recently. And they were a network of people who worked with these very local South Sudanese organizations in the Nuba mountains, and also in Northern Bahr el Ghazal where I was. And I remember getting on the WFP planes and then walking for hours and hours and hours with these enormous Dinkas, the organization we were working with was called supraaid.
Lewis Sida:And, you know, they were the ones working with their communities to help people. And of course there was a connection to big aid in that the supplies were coming via Lokichogio for people who remember that far back and WFP air drops and so on, but it wasn't the aid workers who were getting aid to people. It was the, it was the supraaid that were getting aid there especially in those really difficult places. So I think we've always intuitively known that it is the people affected and the communities themselves who are ones who are getting the aid people the last mile delivery. And in Ukraine, it's kind of starker because there's such mass mobilization. And perhaps because it's more important to the world because it's so scary and perhaps because social media amplifies it. So we're able to access it a little bit more, but I don't think I don't think it's any different to the way that it's always been. So I've always instinctively defaulted there. Does that make me a Nutter?
Lars Peter Nissen:Potentially, I think. For me my thinking around this was if we don't manage to truly localize in Ukraine, I think we should stop using the word because the conditions are there, right? It's quite a vibrant and assertive civil society as, as, as I see it and, and hear it described. We obviously from the formal aid system have great difficulties with access and the security management. So it's, it's difficult for us to operate. And as you say, it's all of society that has been mobilized. And so I think that. I think the interesting question is how do you scale from a guy with three and a half trucks to something that actually amounts to something, how do you scale it? Because there's such transaction, cause you know, this friend of a friend of a friend and you're on an individual learning curve, even you go into a rabbit hole in spite of having worked in the industry for a while. But how do you add it up? It is clear that something is emerging, it's clear that the outpouring of solidarity and donation of anything from bulletproof vests and drones to medical supplies is, is not a small thing here, but it's not a controlled thing. It's very organic. And so how, how do you scale that?
Lewis Sida:I think this is the question, isn't it? How do we... So the difficulty that we have in connecting big aid to little aid is a scale issue because, you know, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of Vlads and Sashas and Olgas organizing their communities and with a warehouse and a couple of cars. And on the other side, big aid the organizations that we've worked for rightly so have protocols so that they minimize aid diversion so that people don't, can't manipulate aid for political means or for reasons, abusive reasons. So we have this series of protocols to protect aid, again, sort of logically, rightly so. But those sets of protocols and rules and risk matrices prevent us from connecting with the vibrancy that we're seeing in aid in Ukraine, right. At the moment. So is it a scale problem or is it a, or is it a rules problem or is it how to connect scale and rules? Because I could see, I could see a situation where you just found out where all the warehouses were and you just delivered stuff to those warehouses on a no risk basis. And you could scale pretty quickly doing that.
Lars Peter Nissen:But you wouldn't necessarily know what happens after the warehouse.
Lewis Sida:Yes.
Lars Peter Nissen:Is that, is that principled humanitarianism in a country that is at war?
Lewis Sida:And here we face another, you know, fascinating dilemma. Don't we for, for all of us who are humanitarians and grapple with the, with the sort of philosophy of human humanitarianism, and, you know, sometimes we take at face value. The idea that these principles are, are, are sort of imutable, is that the right word, but, you know, they're that, that they're casting stone that we can't ever think about, you know, that these principles have a life of their own that they exist beyond us. And yet in many ways they are also slightly in contradiction with each other.
Lewis Sida:So we have this notion in international humanitarian law, right at the beginning of humanitarianism, when Dunant finds these Italian soldiers on the battlefield of Solferino that we call "hors de combat". And the idea is that you are no longer fighting and you are injured. Therefore we can help you that's humanitarianism, right. Help, help, help the people. And so implicit in that idea is that you can be at one moment a soldier, and at the next moment somebody is no longer a soldier and can receive humanitarian assistance. And I think that's one of the dilemmas when you have a mass mobilization situation like you do in Ukraine. I mean, you know, the same Vlads and Sashas and Olgas who are driving their cars around at night to get to the little old ladies in their bunkers, you know, after the days bombing Kharkiv may well be territorial army soldiers during the day. And we can give them all sorts of names. We could call them a militia. So now Vlad is a militia man and our humanitarian assistance is going to a militia man, or is Vlad a humanitarian worker taking a bag of potatoes to a little old lady in, in a, in a bomb out suburb of Kharkiv. Can we hold those two ideas simultaneously in our mind?
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, I think that is the question. And, but for me, there's also the, because I think about the principles as the, these lodestars, these things we should strive to to adhere to, but integral to my thinking about myself as a humanitarian is I know we are going to fail. And I know if we immerse ourself into a setting as messy and terrible as Ukraine, you don't come out smelling of roses. And I happen to think that's the very job is to figure out what do those principles mean for you here in this situation? And how can I do more good than bad? And then gloves off and get with it.
Lewis Sida:Yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm nodding away here because I think, you know, the principle number one is always humanity comes first or the idea of humanity in some sense. And then we have these other principles, which are mostly organizing principles around, you know, how we distribute, how we prioritize, how we gain access. And we tend to think of the two as seamlessly connected, but sometimes they may well be in opposition to each other because principle number one about humanity is ultimately about people. It's about helping people put people at, at the front and center of your thinking. And, you know, they are, are fellow human beings. We help them regardless of what we think about, you know, what they believe or what they're doing, just because they need. The other set of principles are around aid. And sometimes it feels to me like we put aid first and not people first that we are more about protecting the sanctity of aid than
Lars Peter Nissen:Of the institutions actually,
Lewis Sida:Quite
Lars Peter Nissen:Quite. So there's the we must be perceived as impartial, neutral, and so and so forth in order to be able to operate it's our ability to operate that that takes priority. And that is important. It's, it's not like that's not important, but it's, I think where we fail is we have to be honest about that tension and we have to make ourself accountable for the choices we make. And I think for me, that's what lifts, the thinking that, that I think we share and that lift it from the, the old fashioned cowboy where it's just, you know, rock and roll is just move those trucks, get them rolling, distribute, give me a bag of money. I'll come back with a bag of receipts. Right. That sort of thing. That's also not okay. But I sometimes sense that we've lost that the recognition that you actually do get dirty when you try to intervene in quite dirty situations.
Lewis Sida:Yeah. They're ultimately, they're risky places. Aren't. Places that are in conflict places where governance is weak or non-existent places that have just experienced an enormous catastrophe of one form or another, they're going to be risky environments. And we have, as aid has grown. And this is a sort of interesting theme for me through my, through my brief career in humanitarianism is that aid has aid has grown dramatically, at least humanitarian aid. I mean when I started back in the mid nineties global humanitarian... The, the entire global humanitarian spend was a couple of billion dollars a year. And it, and it was like that for a decade. And now we have $30 billion appeals. We have, we have country appeals that are larger than the global appeal was two decades ago. And
Lars Peter Nissen:You have agencies with a turnover that's bigger than the total budget back then
Lewis Sida:Exactly. And as you know, and that's not just because of inflation, right? I mean, inflation has actually stayed fairly steady. So we are talking about real terms, growth of a factor of 10 in the humanitarian sector. And of course, what that means is that as these organizations have grown, they've also had to protect their reputation, their introduced financial controls, introduce human resource controls. And that is an inevitable byproduct of that growth. And that growth's a good thing because it means that we're helping more people around the world. But now we are faced precisely with this situation in Ukraine, where we have these rather large rather well run corporate type humanitarian organizations, all of it, good, all of it, professional, the stuff that we've been lobbying for for a couple of decades. And yet now we find ourselves unable to connect to little aid and facilitate the, the, you know, the best of humanity in their moment of crisis. Or at least we are struggling. We're we are still trying to work out how to do that, that it feels to me the next evolution.
Lars Peter Nissen:And I, and I think my big thing is I don't think that can be done from inside the logic of a big organization. I think there's a reason as you say, why we are professionalized, many things are so much better than they used to be. Just take staff care, for example, the way we actually look after people significantly better than we, we used to believe it or not. Right. It used to be worse.
Lewis Sida:Oh yeah. Burn out and fail. used to be the model.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so I think you need, not nutters, or let me be precise. I think it's great to be nutter, and I'm sure you're helping Vlad with his trucks. And that's a great thing. It's not interesting from sort of systemic point of view, unless it's somehow connected and becomes something emergent that that actually has an impact at scale, which I believe it can, but I don't think it can be done from inside an organization who has to run a pipeline of the size that these organizations run or who have the level of institutionalization that they have. I think those things trips trip us up. And so there's a need to define an interface that enables that scaling and that allows for the Vlads of the world to operate without having to change himself and his operation fundamentally to fit into the pigeon holes that we have created.
Lewis Sida:Yes. So if the, if the volume of global humanitarian assistance has increased by a factor of 10 over two decades, which it has what is interesting is that the institutions that deliver that humanitarian aid and the structure of those institutions as they relate to each other has not changed significantly if at all, over that intervening two decades. And I think, you know, you on your show, you've had, you've had lots of interesting people talk about talk about the systemic problems. And you know, I don't propose that we cover all of that old ground, but clearly that evolution is overdue in the system to catch up with the different scale of ambition. I mean, I would argue that that, that, that factor of 10 increase in the volume of financing is not, it's not about inflation, but it's neither is it just about need? I don't think that the global tally of people in need has increased tenfold. I mean, it's increased, but if you look at the CRED database, you know, if you look at HRPs over time, we are not seeing a tenfold increase in the humanitarian caseload. What we are seeing is an increase in the level of ambition. We want to do more. We want to do more help people, and actually we want to do stuff that helps people structurally as well as just in terms of acute response. We want solve problems as well as just being the sticking plaster. And that is fantastic. That level of ambition is fantastic, but our institutions, our structures have not evolved along with the resources to deliver on that. The interesting thing now about a situation like Ukraine is I wonder if we are going to do that thing that Africa did of jumping over the landline?
Lewis Sida:So, you know, at one point nobody had phones and then everyone had mobile phones and we, and we actually didn't need the landline in the end.
Lars Peter Nissen:Sort of leapfrogging
Lewis Sida:Yeah. So maybe because what what's so fascinating Ukraine is we've got these, this highly educated population really capable. They're, mobilized at the moment, at least with a, with a sort of solidarity ethic, which means that they're helping each other, helping you know, their neighbors and they'll do it with us, or without us, they'll do it with big aid or they'll do it without big aid. And big aid may be left with an embarrassing surplus of resources in the bank account because little aid has found other ways to organize themselves, but they're also doing it with social media. They are just organizing themselves with their telegram channels, with WhatsApp groups. They're doing it in real time. And maybe that's a vision of the future where we have supply pipelines. And then we have dynamic distribution systems that are somehow facilitated by the tech that we've all been pushing away in the humanitarian sector and saying that it's a hammer looking for a mail. Mostly it is, but maybe it's time has come of age. Maybe we can leapfrog the landline.
Lars Peter Nissen:So maybe, maybe Ukraine will bring us little big aid.
Lewis Sida:it would be nice to think. So I'm an optimist. Yeah. So I, I I've spent 20 years wandering 20, 30 years wandering through the world's most dreadful places trying to help people are mostly failing, but you've gotta stay optimistic, right?
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I, I do think that there is a real chance for something truly innovative to emerge from this operation, because the disconnect between what we are and what they are is so stark and because they are more empowered than many of the civil societies we, we otherwise work with.
Lewis Sida:Yes. Yeah. They're certainly as assertive, if not more assertive than many of the other places, and they're more connected to mainstream Europe, which means they're more visible in a way. I mean, I I'm, as you know in my, in my real job when I'm not a rogue humanitarian as a, as a cog in the enormous machine and yeah, you'll know well that I've worked as a humanitarian consultant for the last 20, 25 years. So I'm just finishing up a big evaluation of Yemen. And what's fascinating about Yemen is all of the same issues are at play. I mean, maybe not the mass mobilization, civil society, but certainly the issues of big aid are very at play in Yemen. And yet it's a very invisible context.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think that's where your experience is really interesting because what we have spoken about so far has been little tiny aid, a couple of trucks, you know, the name of the people you're dealing with to in your day job. So to speak, being the team leader for the interagency evaluation of Yemen, which was the biggest humanitarian operation until, until Ukraine came
Lewis Sida:16 billion worth of humanitarian assistance, since it was declared an L3 in two thousand fifteen.
Lars Peter Nissen:There you go. So with that perspective, let's leave Ukraine behind with that hopeful thought that maybe we will see new thinking, new models of collaboration emerge from this, that we can leverage tech to actually scale little aid, to become big and, localized and driven by the people who we sometimes call victims. Right. That may, maybe all of those things can somehow come out of this dreadful situation. Let's hope so. And then let's have a look at Yemen, which...Big, big aid. What, what does that look like for you coming in as an evaluator?
Lewis Sida:Yes. So obviously the context is almost as different as it can be. So Ukraine we have for now nation United in solidarity trying to preserve its, its, its its very being and Yemen, we have a country fractured that does not agree with itself. We, we basically have two Yemens and actually until 92 it was two Yemens. Yeah. And then it was unified under Saleh terrible kind of corrupt kleptocracy and then eventually fell apart in the Arab spring of two thousand eleven unraveled until we find ourselves in the situation now where big aid is helping that country from falling off the edge. And that is, is a completely different, but equally fascinating facet of where our sector has grown up into in that Yemen is almost, I mean you could argue a bit Syria, but Yemen is almost the first place where we have more or less, you know, this is not my official evaluators perspective, but a personal one, we have almost stepped into replace the government wholesale.
Lewis Sida:So we have almost half of the population on some kind of general food assistance. So let's call that a safety net because it's been going on for six or seven years. We have the health system propped up by WHO who are delivering fuel to hospitals. And without that fuel, those hospitals would not operate. And then medical supplies and incentives for healthcare staff when they can afford it. When the donors give them the money, we have a similar sort of thing in the education system with UNICEF trying to pay, you know, a hundred million dollars worth of incentives to staff when they get money. We have a similar sort of thing in terms of nutrition, where we have somewhere between two thousand and four thousand and we can come to data and the flakiness of it later nutrition centers being, being supported by UNICEF and the food security cluster.
Lewis Sida:So, you know, the basic life supporting systems of Yemen, whether it be the water and sanitation system or whether it be the health and nutrition system or whether it be some kind of economic support to the most vulnerable is being provided by big aid. And you know, as an evaluator, it's always difficult, isn't it? Because you, you know, where do you get the balance you positive or you negative? So on the positive side, big aid has helped Yemen not fall off the cliff and that, you know, if nothing else is an amazing achievement, amazing,
Lars Peter Nissen:It's not a small thing
Lewis Sida:Achievement. Yeah. Right. it is still hanging by a thread, but you know, there is, when you get geeky with the numbers, you can see that the food security situation has slightly improved as a result of, you know, not as much as it should have done because of all of the underlying factors that are driving Yemen worse, but it's sort of slightly better than it would've been without the intervention, which is amazing. Right. On the other side, you see again, that the system is absolutely not configured to replace the state. It's messy. It's fragmented it works in very short planning cycles. And so again, in a completely different scenario, we're asking big aid, the big aid of 30 years ago, the out of date, big aid to step in and do something that it really isn't configured to do, which is be a replacement state.
Lewis Sida:I've left you speechless.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah for once
Lewis Sida:That's a first
Lewis Sida:Yeah. You rogue . I'm just thinking how to, I was trying to think through, because you know, if you look at, at the general assembly resolution that informs all of what we do, it says it reaffirms the, the responsibility of the state to be the primary responsible for its own populations. And I think that's, that's a principle we all think is right. So should the system be configured to replace the state?
Lewis Sida:Yes. an interesting one because then you have to ask the question who is the state in Yemen? And of course the state in Yemen, according to the Secuity Council resolution, I think it's twelve forty-six. I probably got that wrong is the internationally recognized government of Yemen, which has temporarily relocated itself to Aden because the capital of Yemen is controlled by the Houthis and the Houthis or the Ansarullah movement actually controls 75% of the population, even though not 75% of the geographical territory. And most of the internationally recognized government ministers actually aren't in Aden, because it's a bit dangerous they're in Saudi Arabia. So what we have is an internationally recognized government that doesn't even live in the country and and a not internationally recognized government that runs the place. And by the way just in case your listeners, haven't seen the Houthi flag. The Houthi flag, which is on every single building as you drive around in Ansarullah areas. So not just Sanaa, if you get out to Sadah and Al Hudaydah and those places, every single building along the way has got the Houthi flag. Its four lines in Arabic and it says death to America, death, to Israel, a curse on all Jews forward for victory. So that tells you something about the relationship between the Houthis and the rest of the world.
Lars Peter Nissen:So obviously an incredibly complex situation to operate in and as an evaluator, how, what is then fair? Yeah. Right. Because it's very easy to stand or sit here in Geneva, which is a pleasant place. Even when it's raining, it's very different to be in Sanaa and try to run a cluster or try to, to get an operation off the ground, worry about your staff's security, all of those things. It's a terribly different, difficult place to, to operate. So how do you as an evaluator? How, how can you be fair?
Lewis Sida:Yeah, I it's a real challenge to be fair. I think the question as an evaluator is not to be fair to the colleagues who are working in the context. As hard as it may be to say that because unfortunately, unfortunately for all of us, we are working in a sector where we are supposed to be helping the most vulnerable. And that presents a real challenge because you also have to say, are we achieving that goal or are we achieving some of that goal or are we achieving any of that goal? And that unfortunately has to be the measure by which you judge the operation, not the people, people are fantastic to go and live in Sanaa in those conditions or even worse in Al Hudaydahher or Aden or Sadah. I mean, every person who's doing that is a hero in my judgment. But what we are asked to do is evaluate this is say, is the collective operation having an impact? Is it helping those most vulnerable? And that's the thing that you have to, that ultimately is the test that you have to apply to the system and, you know, the judgment is that in some cases, yes. Rather imperfectly but overall there's a lot of work that needs to be done to get it up, to scratch in Yemen.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so if we say that the hopeful message coming out of Ukraine is that maybe we will find little big aid. Maybe that network centric way of operating will emerge from that situation. And maybe we can learn how to support those efforts. What's the message from Yemen?
Lewis Sida:Well, firstly, because I just wanna circle back to the question that you asked me about whether the state should be, should be providing the services. Cuz I think that is an important one. And what we have in Yemen, what we have had in Yemen for a while is that the non recognition of the state, which is, and we even use the terminology defacto, their defacto authorities, the non recognition of the state means that we are using big aid to bypass the state that we don't like. And to a certain extent, humanitarianism has been used this way by the big powers for most of our career. I always think Sudan and how we basically used the humanitarian system as an off government financing mechanism to provide services in Sudan when we didn't agree with the regime and that's more or less what we've been doing in Yemen.
Lewis Sida:And that's what we are about to do in Afghanistan with the Taliban as well. So there, there is something about the humanitarian system being used instrumentally by the big powers that also finance it. And you know, you talked earlier about us getting our hands dirty and you know, we have to accept that. We have to accept not only that we get manipulated by actors with ill intent on the ground, but also by actors of, ill intent globally,who have political you know, are using us to politically manipulate. And we have to find our way through that somehow. And I trust the UN colleagues and the international NGO colleagues with masses of experience to, to try and navigate those murky waters. I think setting that aside for a moment that, you know, to a certain extent the system is an off financing system for political means the hopeful message that comes out of Yemen is that big aid can scale almost to the point of being a state.
Lewis Sida:But again if, if you really wanted to do that, if you really wanted to fix problems, not just be an enormous sticking plaster, you would have to again, think about some reconfigurations. Because ultimately what we have is a bunch of big professional agencies doing their own thing. And despite the best efforts of our, of our colleagues who try and be the glue in between them all that isn't enough to make it coherent and yet you know, really if you want to be a state rather than just a bunch of truck and chuckers , I don't mean that then you need to be more coherent.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah. Clearly a key difference between a traditional state setup. And what you see in Yemen is that there's a clear hierarchy between line ministries. And coordinating ministries and, and, and the prime minister. We know who the bus is and who can get rid of ministers of sanitation or whatever. Right. And it almost is the other way around in our system.
Lewis Sida:Yeah. And in a traditional state, you collectively allocate resources and you prioritize resources according to a collective will. And you know, sometimes you even have democratic accountability that informs that prioritization of resources. Whereas we have a bunch of agencies that largely don't work together and do their own thing. In fact, you know, our system, if we're honest, incentivizes those agencies to compete with each other and work against each other or, or, or at least the collaboration is that much more difficult because of the incentive situation that pulls them apart.
Lars Peter Nissen:So if I had to sum up our conversation, it is the hopeful message coming out of Ukraine in terms of potential for new thinking, new methods, new organizational expressions, and from Yemen, it is the message that we can actually make a real difference at scale, but that we have a few architecture problems that actually we have to fix. In order for us to really be functional at that level.
Lewis Sida:Yes.
Lewis Sida:Lewis Sida, thank you for being a Rogue thank you for coming on Trumanitarian. Best of luck with all of your projects. It's such a pleasure to do business with you.
Lewis Sida:Pleasure entirely mine. Thank you, Lars Peter. And enjoy this rainy morning in Geneva.