5 mins
I think things can get better
Thomas Baldwin meets Nick Guttman, head of the humanitarian division at Christian Aid.
WE’RE all familiar with the depressing feeling of waking up to radio headlines (or these days, notifications from our news apps) announcing that there has been a major earthquake somewhere in the world. Most of us will sigh and go about our day, possibly pausing to donate to a fundraising appeal.
When Nick Guttman, head of the humanitarian division at Christian Aid, wakes up to such news, he knows that his team will already be reacting.
In meeting him before the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic he said: “If it’s in a country where we are working, we have quite a well-oiled machine that can jump into action, just like all the other aid agencies,” he says. “The first thing is that we always have local partners in those countries, so we would get information from them about what was needed. We would allocate immediate funding – we have a reserve of funds we can release to partners to get the work going.
“Then internally within Christian Aid we would have an organisation-wide meeting to agree to level of response, and whether or not we should have an appeal. We would know because of our generous supporters we could get immediate funds in, and we could immediately plan what we will receive from the appeal to scale up the response.
“We would send in a team of people to support our partners – providing technical support for water and sanitation, for instance – but more often than not it’s providing cash to affected communities so they can use it for what they need to do.”
Nick began managing logistics for Concern Worldwide in the late 1980s, initially in Ethiopia and then for more than a decade in one trouble-spot after another: Iran and Iraq during the first Gulf War, Rwanda during the genocide, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Liberia, Mozambique, and Kosovo in the aftermath of the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
After that, by his own admission, he was burned-out – “I saw some horrible things in Kosovo and Albania and almost blanked them out. We did a very good, professional job, but the anger wasn’t there, the frustration about man’s inhumanity to man, and I thought ‘that’s wrong, it must make you angry’.”
Three years living in Kenya followed, before Nick and his family returned to the UK. He took a masters in development studies before joining Christian Aid, for whom he estimates he has managed the responses to over 50 situations – everything from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and typhoons to armed conflict.
When not dealing with immediate emergency response, a lot of the work is in helping communities to improve their disaster resilience, to leave them better able to cope with future events.
“If we look at Typhoon Haiyan, which happened in the Philippines in 2013, obviously the immediate thing is providing emergency humanitarian assistance: food, shelter, water, sanitation, healthcare, whatever is required.
“But at the same time, you’re thinking about how can those communities be stronger in the future. How can we get things in place so that if a similar thing was to happen in the future, they wouldn’t be so badly affected? So when you’re rebuilding houses you’re making sure there’s some barrier between them and the sea, or they’re on high land.
I think things can be made better… we have to do something about this suffering and we can. It’s in our power to do something, so we must do it.
“That also includes making sure the community themselves are involved in what is being done, talking to them, engaging with them, asking what are the things that make them more vulnerable, what can we do to make them stronger and better able to cope. If people are involved and engaged in the decisions that are affecting them, they will be stronger in the long run.
“It’s also about empowering and including the people who are often excluded from decision-making – women, the disabled. And that happens at a very early stage, and is something Christian Aid has pioneered and pushed very hard over the years.”
Nick Guttman
Nick visited Scotland in February to talk to Christian Aid supporters, encouraging them both in their fundraising efforts but also to engage in the organisation’s campaigning work, particularly on the climate emergency.
He draws in particular on the experience of Kenya, which is a country he knows well and the focus of this year’s Christian Aid Week campaign. “Throughout the Horn of Africa, there are ever-increasing severe weather events linked to climate change. Droughts are longer and more severe, people lose their livelihoods more frequently. In the past it used to happen once in 20 or 50 years, but we had intense droughts in 2006, 2011, 2017 and 2019. And that’s having a huge impact on people’s ability to survive and manage, and we need to be providing help to those communities, to help them get over each crisis but also to help them be more resilient to future ones.
“There’s always a lean period when water supplies are low and fodder is low, and we can do pasture protection, building sand dams which keep water in place. That’s fine for normal and slightly harder years, but when you get two or three seasons of failed rains even the things we’ve put in place won’t work. And these very extreme situations are happening more and more often, and the consequence is widespread animal deaths, human malnutrition and people basically starving.
“So you have to put in more expensive measures, for example deep boreholes with animal troughs, but then you have more people coming to those areas so you have to put in more of them. With the ever-increasing severity of these events, it’s getting harder to mitigate them and more expensive.”
He says that Christian Aid Week is ‘hugely important’, not just for the money donated directly but for the funding that can be leveraged from elsewhere. “It’s absolutely fundamental to the organisation, it provides us with the funding we need to enable the work to take place, and it’s an opportunity to really publicise what we do. And we can use the Christian Aid Week money to leverage support applications to governments, to the UN and to other organisations which will then give us an awful lot more.”
Having stepped back from Concern because he was losing the anger, these days Nick has no problem getting angry and frustrated – from seeing well-off people living next door to suffering, to corruption, and well-intentioned antiterror and money-laundering laws, which he says have had the unintended consequences of making it difficult for aid agencies to work in some of the hardestto-reach areas.
However, he describes himself as an optimist: “I think things can be made better… we have to do something about this suffering and we can. It’s in our power to do something, so we must do it.”
This article appears in the May 2020 Issue of Life and Work
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