When needs grow and resources shrink: Why cooperation across the UN system matters

It is easy to get lost in Afghanistan. Cities like Kabul are filled with labyrinthine networks of choking streets and alleyways with few street names and even fewer signposts. The remainder of the mountainous splendour of Afghanistan’s vast landmass is not generally mapped; knowledge of how to assure safe passage through the infamously perilous troughs and peaks is kept in the minds of the custodians of this ancient splendour. It is also easy to get lost and bogged down in the Kafkaesque web of compounding and intersecting vulnerabilities that render Afghanistan one of the largest non-conflict-driven sources of humanitarian need in the world.  

Beyond the headline-grabbing erosion and denial of female liberty and autonomy lies widespread food insecurity, drought, collapsing purchasing power, stalling and now declining public service provision – including essential health services - driven in part by humanitarian aid cuts, compounded by restrictions on the de facto authorities’ ability to borrow on international financial markets. Sitting on the ubiquitous richly decorated carpets that line the adobe floors of traditional homes found in highly rural settlements across Badghis province – afflicted by drought for many years - it is easy to get so lost as to become despondent. The scale of the challenge facing households who have shown nothing but warm generosity toward our team is sobering and humbling, both on a human level and through a policy lens. How can we find a way through this tangled web to effective – and cost-effective – programming?

Finding a way through

The problem does not lie in Afghanistan alone. An ever-greater number of people are living in humanitarian need in settings that grab the headlines. In non-humanitarian settings, the unequal distribution of income and wealth, precarious employment, and large-scale shocks to fuel and food systems put livelihoods at risk globally. Simultaneously, governments have retrenched social programming at home and abroad in response to straitened government revenue, rising borrowing costs, and a narrowing political horizon for both international development assistance and national programming. This puts the programming at risk of retrenchment along ethno-nationalist lines as populism and anti-intellectualism foment.

Going further together

They say the person who goes furthest goes alone.  

Travel in places like Afghanistan is characterised by waiting for and assembling multi-vehicle convoys, and at times this idiom feels true. Thankfully, it is not true in the policy space, where collaboration across agencies and disciplines is not just welcome but essential. It is easy to see the scale of the challenge; it is perhaps less easy to find the way through to the most effective possible solutions.  

Vulnerability is highly intersectional. To begin disentangling vulnerabilities, identify opportunities for a coherent policy agenda, and meet the technical and microeconomic challenges and requirements, a partnership is needed. Research organisations like UNU that sit between policy and research can bring together the state of the art from an enormous portfolio of research to create accountability and use-focused innovative policy solutions. Not only does our external positioning mean we are free from the institutional path-dependency of policy-setting organisations, but it also means our reputation for expertise can help implementing organisations secure buy-in for proposals. Moreover, our extensive experience as evaluators enables us to establish rigorous evaluation frameworks to build accountability and advocacy materials for future programming. Our work with WFP in Kenya’s sprawling and long-standing refugee camps in 2017 helped to build a pioneering (at the time) evidence base on the effectiveness of cash as a modality of delivering humanitarian assistance, working with our partner to deliver the independent, advocacy-focused work they needed to continue essential programming.  

The pressure to retreat

The humanitarian reset is asking humanitarian agencies to foster greater collaboration, coordination, and efficiency to meet the increasing humanitarian need with a devastated resource base. Yet simultaneously, the swingeing cuts to agency funding put partnerships and multilateralism under threat and policymaking under pressure. Reduced budgets challenge the positioning and legitimacy of agencies, which may inspire a natural tendency to retreat as close as possible to an organisation’s mandate and a desire to create institutional visibility to secure future funding in a tight market.  

This can reduce effectiveness. We may exacerbate existing inequalities and vulnerabilities by excluding harder-to-reach populations, or risk double-targeting certain populations without proper coordination. By working in siloed isolation, we also risk losing the opportunity to find the most innovative solutions to complex poly-crises by building on the strengths and mandates of different organisations.  As both the complexity of the challenge and the frequency and intensity of shocks increase, there has never been a greater imperative to work in concert with other agencies and, in particular, to engage innovative research partners to bring order to the multi-dimensional and incalculable hardships.  

Putting partnership into practice

Our work in Afghanistan with UNICEF stands as a testament to this. Since early 2024, a team of researchers at UNU-MERIT has been working with UNICEF Afghanistan to create effective programming for some of the most at-risk people globally. Afghanistan is a dangerous place to be a pregnant woman or a young child, with a high under-five mortality rate and a neonatal mortality rate in an environment characterised by weak public service provision, including healthcare. Food security and access to nutrition are undermined by disrupted food systems resulting from drought, border closures, and declining purchasing power, alongside ill health, poor access to safe water, and limited access to healthcare. In response to these challenges, UNICEF and their donors, working in concert with other development partners, including WFP and the World Bank, implemented a coordinated pair of cash transfer programmes – along with social and behaviour change activities - to bring essential relief to targeted households across selected provinces in Afghanistan. The programme, called the Mother and Child Cash Transfer programme (MCCT), delivered 60 USD per household quarterly over the past 18 months, alongside community-led dialogue sessions on key topics related to health, pregnancy, vaccination, and nutrition.  In addition to our role as evaluators – coordinating data collection in three waves across four provinces of Afghanistan – we worked with UNICEF to implement an innovative component of the MCCT programme, based on best practices identified in the literature. This new component involves using specially trained community health teams to visit selected households to deliver in-depth, individual-level discursive sessions designed to encourage the reinterpretation of social norms related to women’s access to healthcare and their position in the household. The inclusion of these sessions in the MCCT programme and the subsequent evaluation allow us to give greater visibility to the complex and intersecting web of vulnerabilities, social, and micro-economic pressures facing households, enabling better, cost-effective policymaking for some of the hardest-hit people on earth.  

With people and for people

We have been doing this for years at UNU-MERIT and across the UNU system, working with partners across the policy space, but critically also with affected populations: with them, and for them. Getting out of the office and into the field is not just a privilege of the job but essential to hearing the perspectives of the most important partners of all. This is a legacy we are proud to carry on at UNU-MERIT with partners around the world, and long may it continue.