Covid-safe food distribution

How standards change lives

By Daniel Mbugua Wang’ang’a

The quality of your food, the medicine you take, the car you drive in, the water you drink, the clothes you wear… there are many places where we expect and trust that standards exist and have been met. Standards might not be the thing that occupies our minds every day, but when you stop and think about it you will realise how often you take them for granted.

My first degree is in engineering and I can tell you, there is no place that standards are important and valued, and against which people are judged, than in the engineering field. With good reason. Engineers design the bridges we drive over, the dams that stop water flooding entire communities, the buildings we work and shop in. Standards in engineering save lives. Nowhere has better examples of this than my country of Kenya, where we have seen entire buildings collapse because someone altered the ratios of sand to concrete to save money. And lives were lost.

Standards guide the work of each industry. They bring confidence. They protect lives.

It took us a while to realise this in the humanitarian sector.

For a long time we had no agreed-upon standards. Like the description in the book of Judges (21: 25) in the Bible where it says “in those days Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit”, there was a time we had no king, no standards, and everyone did what they wanted.

The aftermath of the horrific Rwandan genocide was a major wake-up call for us. The huge movement of people as they fled into neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo saw large amounts of money mobilised by donors, and we were all doing what we thought was right. But without a ‘king’, without agreed-upon standards, nobody could go to another organisation and say “why are you giving this much, in this way, why are you doing that that way when we are doing it this way?”. It wasn’t complete chaos, but it was clear that we needed to put some effort into industry standards.

This is one of things I love about standards – they help us hold each other accountable, and ensure fairness in the help we give to people in need. In Zimbabwe a number of years ago, I saw a distribution where a church group in charge lined up people to give them 2kgs of maize per person – we were able to intervene, because it was clearly well below the minimum standard of the 16kgs per person they should have been receiving.

What we do for a family in distress must be done in the right way, done with dignity, and done to meet their specific needs. As I’ve written about previously, we have learned a lot about what people need in crisis, and how to adapt our responses to ensure their needs are met.

Three years after the Rwandan crisis, Sphere was launched – standards that set minimum requirements for humanitarian responders. This was game-changing. The first set of standards covered Food Security, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Health, and Shelter. Since then, new standards have been added, covering areas such as livestock, education, market assessment and analysis, child protection, and inclusion of specific vulnerable groups, and others have been reviewed and updated to reflect our ongoing learning.

I was lucky to lead the work around the food security standards chapter of the latest Sphere Handbook (2018). Here’s what I want you to know about that work:

  • the process takes about two years, involving a working group of 20 people
  • the final standard reflects hundreds of consultations, debates, conversations, questions, concerns, drafts, redrafts, and reviews; at one stage I had 180 pages of comments to sift through, each needing to be accepted or rejected with full reasons why
  • it can be contentious!

In the end, what we have are minimum standards. They are the starting point, or in some cases, they are what we aspire to reach. The standards take into account the various restrictions and contexts we face around the world. For example, when providing water in any humanitarian setting, we need to ensure every household has access to at least 15 litres per person per day, for drinking, washing, and food preparation. This is the starting point, and in an extremely hot climate, for example, it won’t be nearly enough. Likewise, with food distributions, the standard says people should not have to walk more than 5km one way to a distribution point, but it’s better if they don’t have to walk 1km, or at all! And when we look at refugee and displacement camps, standards set out the minimum square metres needed to ensure a family of five, for example, has basic privacy, space to breathe, and some dignity.

Standards help to keep us and our work professional.

Personally, I am really pleased that as a sector we are striving to be more professional – people at the lowest points of their lives deserve nothing less.

It brings me so much joy when I visit a food distribution and see the standards being applied – I’ve had people say “we have changed this because we saw it in the Standards Handbook”.

Above all, standards matter because they enable people to be treated like human beings, to be helped in a way that allows them to be humans. In their time of need, they are vulnerable and hungry and have no clothes or water, but they are human beings. Standards help us to right some of extreme imbalances of power we see – it means people with power can’t keep them waiting, can’t effectively punish them for being poor.

Standards help us to people at the centre of our work – what could be more important?

Daniel Wang'ang'a leads World Vision’s Disaster Management technical team. Follow Daniel on Twitter @Wanganga_Daniel