Understanding why the UN fails in civil wars is crucial to improving how it operates.
It must have been sometime earlier this year, in the middle of a seven-month-long editing process, that I was told the word “failure” appeared too many times in the draft evaluation report on the aid response in northern Ethiopia. More than an editing issue, the report was expected to present examples of good humanitarian practice.
There is little good news to report, however. I led a team tasked with evaluating the inter-agency humanitarian response to the crisis in the northern Ethiopian regions of Tigray, Afar, and Amhara between November 2020 and April 2023. Our findings, published on 3 June, describe the UN-led collective aid effort as a systemic failure.Read more