Effectiveness With increasing experience of providing aid, it has become more and more evident that provision of aid for humanitarian relief can be hugely complex. Effectiveness and efficiency of aid is a priority; This section will examine some of the problems and challenges associated with aid. "Although aid agencies often seek to be neutral or non-partisan toward the winners and losers of a war, the impact of their aid is not neutral... When given in conflict settings, aid can reinforce, exacerbate, and prolong the conflict; it can also help to reduce the tensions and strengthen people's capacities to disengage from fighting and find peaceful options for solving problems. Often, an aid program does some of both… But in all cases aid given during conflict cannot remain separate from that conflict."
-Mary B. Anderson
An effective and timely humanitarian relief operation has the capacity to save thousands of lives. It is also, however, an extremely difficult undertaking. Potential beneficiaries may be located within the zone of conflict, making it extremely dangerous for humanitarian agencies to deliver assistance. This problem is exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure. In a conflict situation humanitarian agencies are often allowed to operate only at the mercy of fighting parties, putting them in a difficult situation and limiting their activities to those they are allowed to carry out. One result is that efforts may be concentrated in areas with greater access, with potential beneficiaries with equal needs being neglected. Neighbouring countries are often unwilling to host refugee populations because of the destabilizing influence that they can have on their own regimes. Agencies will have to deal with - and even make agreements with - the very warlords who are responsible for the conflict. During the siege of Sarajevo, 1992-95, UNHCR was able to deliver food convoys and airlifts that were vital to the approximately 250,000 people living there. As a pre-condition to letting this aid go through, the UN was forbidden from helping people escape from Sarajevo. As a result it came under heavy criticism for maintaining the siege without doing anything to end it.
Here are a few of the main challenges that humanitarian agencies face in dealing with these problems: - Effective coordination is one of the biggest challenges facing humanitarian operations. The ever-increasing number of agencies on the ground, the difficulty of obtaining accurate intelligence, and the unpredictability that is inherent to humanitarian crises, make management and coordination of efforts extremely challenging. With so many agencies out there it is inevitable that some will be duplicating the work of others, while some issues may go neglected. In order to tackle this there needs to be better intelligence-gathering capabilities and sharing of information, as well as tight leadership and coordination by the appropriate agency. Often this will be a UN agency (usually UNHCR), executing a master plan; without such a master plan, effective coordination is much more difficult.
- Intelligence and communication is vital for adequate levels of preparedness and effective response, and is a problem particularly with refugee and IDP flows. Lack of intelligence can also lead to inappropriate responses to the situation, for example short-term provisions when long term would be better. Intelligence gathering is extremely difficult, but improvements in information sharing would go a long way to improve the use of intelligence. Although information sharing is vital, is may be limited by institutional deficiencies: even within the UN, information sharing between different UN agencies could be greatly improved. Competition and poor relations between agencies can affect working relationships and therefore communications.
- Although the military of third parties can sometimes provide an important logistical contribution to dealing effectively with humanitarian emergencies, there are problems with being too closely associated with a government or military. When working alongside the military humanitarian agencies, and especially NGOs, risk losing the neutrality that characterises their approach and gives them their advantage. As well as the moral dilemma involved, being associated with one side can endanger the work and the staff of NGOs. Here there is clearly a balance between practicality and compromise, with aid agencies having to accept that, in some circumstances, the end may justify the means.
In Kosovo, Rwanda and Somalia, relief agencies complained that they "became indelibly associated with a belligerent side, [their] supposed neutrality tainted by partisanship" . In Kosovo, while NATO forces were bombing Belgrade, NGOs were working alongside British troops on the Macedonian border providing aid to Albanian refugees.
In the face of the criticisms noted in these pages, the debate in practitioner and academic circles over how to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian aid and development assistance is ongoing and intense. Initiatives like Mary B. Anderson's Collaborative for Development Action attempt to promote discourse on how to improve the effectiveness of aid, as well as asking probing questions about the role that humanitarian agencies play in conflicts. With the increasing professionalization of humanitarian and development assistance, and more and more academic institutions offering it as a field of study, now is an important time for the subject's development. | 
