IN 30 YEARS John Rynne has seen a revolution in crisis responses to humanitarian catastrophes.
In a career spanning three decades the Louth man has spent much of that time in Africa responding to crises in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere.
He is now the regional director managing the African-based teams of Irish aid agency Goal.
We accompanied Rynne recently on a tour of a number of sites in South Sudan. What we found was an aid effort stretched to the point of full capacity as refugees cross the porous border from war torn Sudan.
We sat down with him in the chaos of capital Juba to speak about his career, how new methods of responding to crises saves more lives and how, in the past, some NGOs desperate to help have caused more harm than good to the people they are trying to assist.
It is not just aid work Rynne has done – he has also worked in child protection in places such as Dublin’s Darndale, Oliver Bond Flats and Ballymun communities as well as Tower Hamlets in London.
But the intensity of that work led him towards the role that he performs now as one of Ireland’s most experienced humanitarians.
“Frankly, I didn’t want to spend the next 30 or 40 years of my life dealing with child abuse and child neglect,” he said of his decision to move towards Aid Agency work.
“I also felt that if I had an opportunity to do something like aid work it would be something that I thought I would enjoy, and would be a real opportunity for me to learn, and also a bit like doing the social work, and not to sound trite, but to give back as well.”
This led him to first become an unpaid volunteer and spend two years working in Ethiopia in the 1990s.
He describes that experience as being a “brilliant university”.
He came back and worked in social work again but would ultimately become an employee based in Ethiopia, where he worked in a mix of urban and rural programmes.
His mettle was tested most however on the Somali border at the height of that country’s civil war.
“The people would have been the same position then, but our ability now to support and help is dramatically different, much more effective,” he added.
Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda he travelled to that African country where he worked with those left behind after the horrific blood letting. There was also work in Zaire and Tanzania as country director and then for 13 years he lived in Ethiopia as the country director managing day to day services.
“Ethiopia, it’s a fascinating country to work in, and it’s a huge learning opportunity,” he added.
There were projects in urban areas and a return to his social work style of working with street children.
He also worked on rural projects which are based around long term development – lifting up communities.
Rynne has also seen other changes – the food technology advances that now mean that high energy pastes for children and biscuits for adults are saving lives.
“I would have worked in the 90s, very close to the border with Somalia, where we had all the traditional feeding centres, and literally, six to ten children a day died in those feeding centres.
“The approach now is much more sophisticated, even though it doesn’t look it, but that’s part of the genius of it,” he added.
He said the advances in feeding technology used to solve malnutrition are part of a broader effort by humanitarians to learn from past crises.
Another advance is the giving of cash to people, particularly women, so that they can buy food and clothes or whatever they need once they cross the border.
“I really would draw a distinction between the scale of the problem, which easily is comparable to Ethiopia in the 80s and 90s but the sophistication of the scale of the response mutes and mitigates, to a significant degree, the worst aspects, not all aspects, but the worst aspects as regards the number of people dying.”
Rynne said that while the humanitarian response has changed so has the environment they respond in. He said the effects of climate change are now “vivid” and having a huge impact.
He said the most obvious impact of it is in the lives of pastoral or nomadic herders in Ethiopia – Rynne said their livelihoods are centred around the animals foraging and getting water but successive droughts have meant their way of life has collapsed.
More broadly he also said that there is clear evidence now that tensions that exist in general among groupings, tribes and clans in many areas across Africa are spilling over because of those effects of climate change.
He believes that Africa is at a critical juncture where the borders drawn by former colonial countries a century ago are now being redrawn by the people living there. It has resulted in tensions across the continent – notably in Ethiopia, Sudan and across the Sahel and west Africa. He believes this disturbance in nationhood combined with climate affects will drive greater instability.
“I do think more and more we’re seeing that the the maps drawn in colonial times are starting to erode and, and ethnic divisions are coming to the fore, and it’s very difficult to put that back in the box once it’s got out of the box,” he said.
Those tensions will make life harder for humanitarians to operate but Rynne has said that they have already adapted.
In times past the response was simply to deal with the emergency in front of them but now a more holistic approach, using connections with governments and communities is beginning to reap rewards.
“Unfortunately, I think over the past number of years there’s been increasing awareness and acceptance that sometimes, even though you want to do the right thing, you can inadvertently cause damage to to the normal infrastructure and of society,” he said.
Rynne uses the example of how aid agencies can come in to assist a large displaced population. He said within that society there may be small vendors such as someone selling buckets and blankets to those displaced people.
He said the effect of a blunt intervention of aid agencies handing out goods to refugees has the impact of destroying the local economy that allows people to have agency and independence – in other words it is the inadvertent consequence of unthinking aid operations that makes the situation worse.
“What we’re really trying to do is understand how we could be clever, and how we can have multiple benefits and multiple impacts and really make money and resources go as far as possible,” he added.
One key response Rynne said is the provision of cash directly to displaced people to help support those locals who have businesses in areas where camps crop up.
He said that doesn’t remove the need to directly feed and shelter people in “phase one” of a response to starvation but it does help when events calm down after the initial shock.
“We definitely don’t profess to have all the answers, but we would work very closely with local communities to understand how their livelihoods work, how the market systems work, and what the vulnerability points are,” he said.
Goal is achieving this by keeping it local with aid workers and a massive network of people from the area working closely with local governments.
Rynne said they have projects supporting farmers, creating fishing communities and other initiatives that are designed to empower the local communities to build a resilience for the next crisis.
Goal is using systems to map the needs of individual communities and “vulnerability points”.
Goal’s main source of funding is from the Irish Government’s Irish Aid, as well as US Aid, the European Union and various UN agencies as well as private donors.
While the fighting is raging in Sudan, Goal has been able to keep working because of connections its workforce has established with loca entities and officials.
One example The Journal saw was how one of the workers in Renk, a local man Deng Wek Deng acts as the liaison between Goal and the local South Sudanese regime.
It builds resilience Rynne said but it is a difficult task given the crises gripping South Sudan and Sudan.
Rynne said that there is a lot to be proud of with the work of Goal in the region and they are making a difference but he said he is “conflicted between optimism and pessimism”.
“What we’ve seen in the last couple of days is the best of people, yeah, the people who responded, who were there in the front line, who were working seven days a week, working on really remote areas, and you can’t help but admire people like that.
“I think the way Goal works is we have to focus on the optimism side, and we have to work to ensure that people’s lives are better, but we also have to acknowledge the extreme cruelty and the fact that the world does seem to be a more insecure place, that there’s more civil war, there’s more more unrest – that’s not the reality,” he added.
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