13/04/21
News
Helene Juillard is the Course Director of our new Executive Short Course, “Cash and Voucher Assistance in Humanitarian Crises: What works?”. We spoke with her about the increasing role of cash and voucher assistance, her views on the status of the humanitarian sector and its key challenges, and the must-have skills for humanitarians.
You are the Director of the Centre’s new course “Cash and voucher Assistance in Humanitarian Crises: What works?”, could you tell us more about the course?
In recent years, Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) has emerged as a critical game-changer in implementing humanitarian assistance, especially as CVA is becoming a standard modality to deliver relief. However, despite this favourable global environment, the State of the World’s Cash Report highlights that seven out of ten humanitarian organisations have difficulties finding staff with this skill set.
The course develops participants’ practical skills to design, implement and monitor projects using CVA. Even more importantly, the increased uptake of CVA triggered passionate and fascinating debates that go beyond the simple operationalisation of the modality. These span from data protection and machine learning for targeting to the effectiveness of the sectoral and siloed nature of the humanitarian system.
So, this class is also meant to build participants’ critical and reflexive skills on key themes related to CVA, themes that, I believe, are likely to have implications on the future of humanitarian assistance.
How is the course structured?
The programme is organised around themes. Each day we tackle a different topic, including CVA feasibility, delivery mechanisms, risk management, data protection and compliance vis a vis anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism regulations.
The course will host several external speakers from various academic centres, private sector organisations, and aid organisations. They will bring a diversity of experiences so we can get a non-conventional perspective on these themes.
You have been working in the humanitarian sector for more than ten years. In your opinion, what are the key challenges today for humanitarians?
A pragmatic challenge lying ahead is the risk for funding to drop in the context of increasing needs. It is encouraging to see that the EU has just expanded its aid budget by 60 per cent. Still, the economic crisis that may result from the coronavirus pandemic and nationalist stands toward international aid present a risk of global decreased funding of humanitarian actions.
Another challenge is the polarisation of debates in an increasingly complex humanitarian world. Humanitarians are accountable to act rapidly because of needs urgency, while at the same time, they are bound to do no harm. However, the realities covered under the do no harm principle are getting more complex and difficult to grasp. For example: giving cash to women is a way to empower them, or does it expose them to increased risks? Or is the use of digital technologies a way to reach more people more rapidly or the genesis of “surveillance humanitarianism”?
Bridging the academic and humanitarian worlds could help tackle this challenge by giving humanitarians access to grey matter and specialists on these topics.
Why did you choose to work in the humanitarian sector? Could you tell us about your background studies and how you started your career?
The humanitarian sector offers quite an unmatchable diversity through the possibility to regularly change contexts or organisations to work with and incredible encounters. I also felt the sector has less of a tendency than others to put people in boxes: your responsibilities evolve based on the context, the programme and the services delivered to crisis-affected households. Being agile is a necessary quality and not a trait that makes you seem unstable in the eyes of an employer.
I studied law and art history to become an auctioneer. A very long story allowed me to do a gap year during which I travelled to India, the Philippines and Mauritania. I was 19, and my parents trusted me to travel alone. I’ll always be grateful for that. Upon my return, I decided to finish law school but ended up doing a master in international humanitarian law. My first job was with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a job I got by sending emails to all UN offices around the globe for which I could find email addresses for. Working with the disarmament, demobilisation and reinsertion programme was an exciting experience. It also made me realise that I was not ready yet to work for such large organisations. So, following one year in Kinshasa with UNDP, I joined Solidarités International in Eastern Congo.
The humanitarian sector offers quite an unmatchable diversity through the possibility to regularly change contexts or organisations to work with as well as incredible encounters.
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to enter the humanitarian sector? Which are the key skills one must have?
Being humble is, I believe, one of the key skills a humanitarian practitioner should have. The real added value of a given programme is often less than what we claim it is. We always talk about need assessment and covering needs but often forget that no crisis-affected household is helpless as everyone brings its own strengths and weaknesses. The term “the most vulnerable” is something that just does not make sense. Nobody is vulnerable per se, we are all more or less vulnerable to specific events depending on who we are or what our capital and our background are. Listen to and learn from crisis-affected households: you will design better quality and more accountable programmes!
Besides teaching at our Centre, at the Manchester University and Science Po Paris, you also head a consultancy firm. Could you tell us more about Key Aid Consulting?
The job I am the proudest of is being a mum! It sounds very cliché, but my kids forced me to pause and learn things, including about myself, that I had always avoided before. Family aside, I created Key Aid four years ago with Clement, a former colleague and friend I met in Bangladesh.
Key Aid stems from our acknowledgement that there was a gap (and still is) regarding affordable quality at scale humanitarian evaluations. You mostly come across individual consultants or large generalist consultancy firms in the evaluation sector. The latter can provide large-scale quality evaluations at a cost that is often unaffordable by NGOs, let alone community-based organisations and with recommendations often not rooted in the reality of a humanitarian programme.
On the other hand, individual evaluators can deliver great services but may lack the opportunities and capacities to team up to deliver large-scale evaluations. So, Key Aid was created to fill this niche: an agile consultancy firm specialising in humanitarian settings delivering evaluation, action research, and adult learning services. Our team is now 15 members strong with an amazing network of 100 consultants based across the globe.
Our values are a commitment to learning, sharing and improving accountability toward crisis-affected households. This materialises, among other things, via this new course delivered at the Center.
The next edition of the course “Cash and Voucher Assistance in Humanitarian Crises: What works?” will be online from 6 to 17 June 2022. More information is available here.