Chapter 12: Working with Humanitarian Actors¶

On November 8, 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, which Filipinos call Yolanda, crosses the Visayas. It kills more than six thousand people. According to the review carried out the following spring for two coalitions of humanitarian organizations, the Disasters Emergency Committee and the Humanitarian Coalition, it damages some 33 million coconut trees and about 30,000 fishing boats.

In the focus groups the evaluators bring together, women explain what has become of work. With no boat, many men and women hire themselves out as farmhands on nearby farms, for about 80 pesos a day. The minimum wage, depending on location, ranges from 260 to 327 pesos.

Very early in the response, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) appoints a coordinator for the cash working group. The organizations that pay residents to clear roads, unclog drains, or repair boats then align on comparable daily wages, pegged to the minimum wage: 260 to 327 pesos depending on location, for members of the two coalitions. A few organizations outside these networks pay much more. The review notes that this distorted those cash for work programs and, according to the accounts it gathered, drew people away from their regular jobs.

In Concepcion, in Iloilo province, the NGO Concern works with the mayor to find land for a boatyard. With fishermen, fisherwomen, and boat builders, it sets up a temporary boat-building production line. The beneficiaries are the people who lost their boats, and they finish the boats themselves: they sand them, paint them to their own taste, fit the bamboo outriggers. A quality check follows the work. Those who lost their nets, lines, or outboard motors receive them too.

Two acts of coordination, one at the scale of a region, the other at the scale of a town, and both focused on the local economy: the price of labor, the fishermen's trade.

What the scene teaches¶

Coordinating starts with setting prices. A wage paid by an aid organization is a price on the local labor market. When farmhands earn about 80 pesos a day, a program that pays far above the minimum wage pulls in workers, including those who still had a job, and that job will still exist when the program is over. The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS) describe this risk: cash for work wages must take the local market into account to avoid "poaching," luring workers away from lower-paid but more lasting employment. The same reasoning applies to the value of a cash transfer or the interest rate on a loan.

Coordination works when someone is put in charge early. According to the review, OCHA's early appointment of a coordinator whose job it was helped organizations harmonize their practices just as programs were starting. The excessive wages came from organizations outside the two coalitions studied.

The right level is often the town. In Concepcion, the boatyard starts with a conversation with the mayor. The same review reports that on the island of Samar, organizations found the large coordination meetings remote and preferred to coordinate at the municipal level; one of them asked a mayor to host these meetings in his town, "that is where the action is." Mayors, for their part, valued cluster meetings as a chance to meet NGOs and present their requests.

Coordinate without taking over. Rather than delivering ready-made boats, the Concepcion line puts boat builders to work and leaves it to the fishermen to finish their own tool. Chapter 5 showed what boats handed out without counting cost in Sri Lanka; Chapter 8, how to restore a value chain rather than replace it.

Your club is not a humanitarian agency. It often arrives after them, and it stays after them. In between, it works alongside them: this chapter explains how.

The principle: the authority leads, the others fit in¶

Authorities first¶

Every source agrees on one point. The MERS put it plainly: "It is the primary role and responsibility of the government of the affected state to respond to and coordinate humanitarian responses from assisting organizations." The guidance note of the interagency working group on early recovery stated as early as 2008 that state structures must lead the coordination of recovery, and that recovery must be "owned and led by national actors." The Philippines review makes this its ninth recommendation: coordinate "with and through government at all levels from the beginning."

In practice, the leader is a person and an office your club can identify. In Nepal in 2015, the government created a National Reconstruction Authority (Chapter 2); the recovery program that Rotary District 3292 drafted in August 2015 cites it, along with the shelter cluster and a recovery and reconstruction working group led by UN-Habitat, whose purpose was to give organizations a space to discuss the housing reconstruction program with the government. Elsewhere, it will be a prefecture, a town hall, a national disaster management agency. The Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) itself is only carried out at the government's request (Chapter 3).

The humanitarian system as it works today¶

Alongside the authorities, the international humanitarian system is organized by sector groups, the clusters. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) created nine of them in 2005, each entrusted to a lead agency; early recovery was one of them, led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

If your club has read in older documents that there is an early recovery cluster led by UNDP everywhere, that description is out of date. Since the global cluster's 2016 guidance note, early recovery has been built into the work of all clusters, and the main mechanism for coordinating it is coordination among those clusters. The note is categorical: "Creating a new coordination body for early recovery is never advised." A dedicated group is created only case by case, when needs remain unmet, and its name varies from country to country. In the Philippines in 2013, the review mentions an "early recovery and livelihood" cluster.

Two details of this review are of direct interest to a club. First, the chamber of commerce co-chaired the livelihoods cluster, a notable exception in a response where the private sector carried little weight in the clusters: a business network can have its seat at the table. Second, the cash working groups, like the one that aligned wages, are where the prices of aid are set.

The common tool: who does what, where¶

The tool you will run into everywhere is called the 3W, for "Who does What Where." OCHA describes it this way: it serves to show "the operational presence by sector and location within an emergency," to identify possible partners and, roughly, duplications and gaps. Each cluster keeps its own detailed table; OCHA compiles the shared information. Some versions add a fourth question, "when": the MERS speak of "4Ws (who, what, when, where)."

The table is only as good as what organizations report in it. An organization that is not in it does not exist for the others, and it cannot know who is already working in the village where it plans to act.

What the standards require¶

The MERS devote their second core standard to coordination. Its key actions and indicators come down to three verbs. Take part, from the outset, in existing coordination meetings, "and avoid creating new structures where possible." Inform coordination bodies of your mandate and programs. Report your gaps: organizations that cannot meet an identified need "make gaps known, so that others may assist."

The standard's other indicators are precise: no duplication between organizations in the same sector or area; transfers and distributions "coordinated, sequenced, and aligned with the local economy to avoid responses undermining each other." The standard gives an example of what happens without this: organizations that, in the same area, give grants and loans to the same people for the same purpose, but at different rates and on different terms. For a club that funds credit (Chapter 6), the warning is direct.

The Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS), in its 2024 edition, frames its sixth commitment from the point of view of affected people: they have access to "coordinated and complementary support." The first requirement of this commitment asks that an organization's work be coordinated with, and complementary to, actions carried out locally and by the community. A note on wording: the standard allows any organization to write "We are working towards the application of the CHS"; any other claim of compliance requires recognized verification. Your club can draw on the CHS and say so in those terms; it does not write that it "applies" or "complies with" the standard.

On the Rotary side, the rule fits in three words, already seen in Chapter 3: "Collaborate, don't duplicate."

A precedent: one agency, certificates¶

Chapter 5 told the story of the surplus boats in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. The answer the Ministry of Fisheries eventually wrote, in its 2006 strategy prepared with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is a coordination rule. It calls for coordination by district and information sharing between boat suppliers and fisheries services, so that the pre-tsunami number of boats is not exceeded. And it sets two conditions: boat replacement is handled by a single agency, and it depends on entitlement certificates issued to the fishermen who lost theirs.

The lesson goes beyond fishing. When a productive asset is replaced by several donors at once, you need a single register of those entitled and a single point of contact. That register is almost never kept by an NGO or a club: it belongs to the authority.

What the club does¶

Map the actors¶

The first task is to know who is there. The table below gives the outline of the map your club will keep up to date; adapt the rows to your area.

Actor	What it does	What the club asks of it	What the club brings it
Town hall, reconstruction authority	leads, authorizes, keeps the lists	priorities, zones, local rules	knowledge of businesses, outreach
Humanitarian coordination (OCHA, clusters)	meetings, 3W table	who does what, where	reporting your activities
Cash working group	sets wages and values	the agreed rates	your alignment
Red Cross, Red Crescent	relief, transfers, assessments	market assessments	list of merchants
Local and international NGOs	field programs	partnership, know-how	targeted funding, employers
Chamber of commerce, trade associations	represent businesses	data, access to owners	network, lasting presence
Local lenders (banks, microfinance)	credit, savings	state of their clients	liquidity funding (Chapter 6)
District, Rotary Action Groups	support, funding	advice, outreach (Chapter 11)	field information

For each row, note a job title, a phone number, and the date of last contact. This map is the first version of the piece this chapter adds to the file.

Joining coordination in nine steps¶

No official procedure describes how a small civil society organization fits into the coordination of a recovery. The method below is a synthesis proposed by this book, drawing on the guidance notes on early recovery, the MERS, the CHS, Rotary's assessment guide, and the Philippines review.

Introduce yourself to the authority leading the recovery, before launching anything: who you are, what you know how to do, what you do not know how to do.
Find the right meeting. Depending on the country, a cluster, an inter-cluster group, a livelihoods working group, or a cash working group. For a local project, the municipal meeting is often the most useful.
Read the 3W before choosing a village or a sector. Adjust the project to fill a gap rather than duplicate an actor.
Report your activities in the format in use, even modest ones.
Align your prices: daily wages, transfer values, loan rates and terms. Ask for the agreed rates before setting one.
Share your assessment data (Chapter 3) to spare disaster survivors repeated interviews.
Report your gaps. The MERS give an example: an organization finds strong demand for credit and savings that it cannot meet; it introduces staff from a local microfinance institution to community leaders and flags the demand to other organizations. A club plays this matchmaker role well.
Fit the project into the local plan. For an emergency preparedness project, the Rotary Foundation's community economic development guidelines (April 2024) even require approval from the relevant local or national authorities.
Report regularly, including on your exit. A map that is not updated misleads the others.

flowchart TB
    A["Local authority"] --> B["Coordination meeting"]
    B --> C["Read the 3W"]
    C --> D["Choose a gap"]
    D --> E["Align prices and rules"]
    E --> F["Report and share"]
    F --> G["Report back, then exit"]
    G -.->|"at every meeting"| B

What the disaster guide taught you, and what changes¶

Chapter 22 of the disaster guide gave five actions for the first days: make yourself known, declare your capacities, ask for a zone or a role rather than taking one, attend the meetings, report within the common framework. It also offered a daily "who does what where" sheet, a field version of the 3W, and recalled that Rotary complements, supports, and funds, but does not direct operations. These principles are confirmed by the MERS and by the guidance notes on early recovery.

Three things change with recovery. The pace, first: the daily meetings of the acute phase give way to less frequent meetings, often at the town level. The counterparts, next: relief services move to the background, while the town hall's economic services, the chamber of commerce, the lenders, and the livelihoods groups move to the front. The subject, finally: you no longer coordinate distributions but prices, beneficiary lists, and timetables.

Chapter 20 of the CED guide, for its part, covers the internal coordination of a project in normal times: steering committee, project meeting, dashboard, decision log, shared directory. These tools remain valid after a disaster. What gets added is the external coordination described here: your project is no longer alone in its area.

What your club brings to humanitarians¶

Humanitarian organizations have the experience, the logistics, the methods. They often lack two things your club has. Detailed knowledge of the local economy, first: who sold what to whom, which suppliers survived, which lender knows its clients (Chapter 3). Staying power, second: humanitarian organizations leave, your club stays.

In practice, a club can offer the organizations present a list of local merchants and artisans, employers ready to take on apprentices (Chapter 7), a meeting room, contacts in local banks, and a memory of the projects once the international teams have left. The Philippines review also reports that a network of Philippine NGOs criticized international organizations for arriving with responses decided in advance, often in other countries, before any discussion with local organizations. Its eighth recommendation is to discuss recovery plans with all actors and share them locally, with this question: "whose disaster is it?" Your club, rooted in the area, stands with those to whom the disaster belongs. If it is a foreign partner club, the question is aimed at it.

Working with an NGO in a global grant¶

A partnership with an NGO can be part of a Rotary Foundation global grant, under specific conditions. The Terms and Conditions in force in July 2026 define cooperating organizations as reputable governmental or nongovernmental organizations, or educational institutions, that take part in carrying out a project or make sure its goals are met and its finances sustainable. An agreement signed by both sponsors and the organization must include verification that the grant is "initiated, controlled, and managed by Rotary members," and an implementation plan that sets out each party's responsibilities.

Two limits follow. The grant does not fund "activities primarily carried out by an organization other than Rotary": your club cannot simply pass money on to an NGO. And a cooperating organization cannot make a cash contribution to the grant budget. Chapter 10 covers the rest; always check the Terms and Conditions in force on My Rotary.

The pitfalls¶

Pitfall	Why it happens	Remedy
Creating your own coordination meeting	you want to keep control	join what exists; a new body is "never advised"
Paying a wage other than the agreed rate	you want to be generous	ask the cash working group for the rate
Bypassing the town hall to go straight to neighborhoods	it is faster	go through the authority; in the Philippines, towns complained
Going where the others already go	familiar places and main roads are easier	read the 3W; target forgotten areas
Delivering goods outside coordination	members want to give	no distribution without a place in the 3W (Chapter 5)
Deciding the project from the foreign partner club	the money comes from far away	decide on site, with local actors
Writing that the club "applies" the CHS	the phrase sounds reassuring	"we are working towards its application"
Not announcing your exit	you leave quietly	announce the end at the meeting, update the 3W

The fourth pitfall has a name in the Philippines review: the "Tacloban effect," the widespread belief that villages far from the main intervention sites received aid later; a local partner sums it up: "Most NGOs focus on popular areas." The review notes in counterpoint that several organizations worked to reach more isolated communities, for example on islands in northern Panay. The fifth is not theoretical either: the same review describes lines of trucks loaded with donations, several kilometers long, at a ferry terminal, and the doubts raised about the transparency of aid delivered this way.

What your club now has in hand¶

At the end of this work, your club has an actor map of its area and a short list of coordination commitments: report yourself, align with the agreed prices, share your data, report your gaps, report back, announce your exit. This is the piece this chapter adds to the recovery file, next to the organization chart from Chapter 11; Appendix B gives the template.

After Haiyan, the wages that did not climb and the land found with the mayor of Concepcion take up a few lines in the review. Successful coordination leaves few traces; it gets noticed mostly when it is missing. Yet reporting to the other actors means knowing what you did and what it changed. Measuring, without wearing out the people you help, is the subject of the next chapter.