Humanitarian aid NGOs’ accountability towards large donors: the case of the European Union’s DG ECHO

Abstract

Directorate-general ECHO of the European Commission is one of the largest humanitarian aid donors globally. Projects which it funds are often implemented by its NGO partners. This article studies how ECHO’s system for assessing such projects’ final results works and to what extent it provides useful information to the donor. Theoretically, it seems likely that evaluative data produced in this context is of little value, given the financial interests of the NGOs which submit the information, methodological issues related to collecting it, and the donor’s limited capacity to process it. However, based on in-depth interviews and document analysis, we conclude that ECHO usually has sufficient human resources to analyse reports which NGOs submit to it. These documents are also informative about projects’ direct effects, but they seem less capable of assessing long-term impacts. Furthermore, such reports seem less important to ECHO than the field visits which it conducts. These findings imply that consistent monitoring of humanitarian aid projects on the ground helps to mitigate the main weakness of a system of self-evaluation by NGOs.