Evaluator perceptions of NGO performance in disasters: meeting multiple institutional demands in humanitarian aid projects.

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.

The impact of humanitarian context conditions and individual characteristics on aid worker retention.

High employee turnover rates constitute a major challenge to effective aid provision. This study examines how features of humanitarian work and aid workers' individual characteristics affect retention within one humanitarian organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Holland. The study extends existing research by providing new theoretical explanations of employment opportunities and constraints and by engaging in the first large-scale quantitative analysis of aid worker retention. Using a database of field staff (N=1,955), a logistic regression is performed of the likelihood of reenlistment after a first mission. The findings demonstrate that only 40 per cent of employees reenlist for a second mission with MSF Holland, and that workplace location and security situation, age, and gender have no significant effect. Individuals are less likely to reenlist if they returned early from the first mission for a personal reason, are in a relationship, are medical doctors, or if they come from highly developed countries. The paper reflects on the findings in the light of policy.

Combining Language Training and Work Experience for Refugees with Low-Literacy Levels: a Mixed-Methods Case Study.

Learning the host society's language and finding a job are important steps for the societal integration of refugees. Especially language proficiency is a key barrier for the integration of low literates. Often language training and gaining work skills are separated during the integration procedure. We investigated a 1-year pilot program for refugees with low-literacy levels in the Netherlands, which combined language training (daily classes, work-related language) with work experience in sheltered employment (second-hand shop) to facilitate language learning and prepare this group better for the labour market. Building on Ager and Strang's conceptual integration framework (2008), we expected that this combined program should improve agency (communication strategies, preparedness for the labour market) via intergroup contact at work. We used a mixed-method approach to follow the development of participants (N=10) longitudinally (baseline, after 6 months, after 11 months). We gathered questionnaire data, interviewed teachers and students, and observed interactions in classes and at work. Overall, use of communication strategies increased. Analyzing individual cases (profiles) offered nuanced insights into for whom and why the program seems to have differential impact, especially in terms of labour market preparation. We discuss results and the importance of creating intergroup contact to facilitate integration in a new society. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12134-023-01028-6.

Community Health Center Efficiency. The Impact of Organization Design and Local Context: The Case of Indonesia.

BACKGROUND: The decentralization of the Indonesian healthcare system, launched in the year 2000, allowed the authorities of local community health centers (CHCs) to tailor their services to the needs of their clients. Many observers see this as an opportunity to increase CHC efficiency. Building on the Context Design Performance Framework, this paper assesses the extent to which efficiency variations between CHCs can be explained by the degree of fit between their organizational design characteristics and aspects of the communities in which they are embedded. METHODS: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied to construct a measure of CHC efficiency for a sample of 598 CHCs in 2011, drawn from a publicly available Ministry of Health (MoH) dataset. Tobit regression analysis was applied to assess the impact of organization design and community characteristics and their interplay on efficiency. RESULTS: Large variations in CHC efficiency were discovered, suggesting that not all CHCs are equally capable of finding the optimal design to operate most efficiently. A significant inverted U-shape relationship was found for the organization design-efficiency link: efficiency is highest for CHCs with 1-2 horizontal units and decreases for CHCs exceeding or not reaching this number. No significant association was found between community characteristics (proportion of poor people, remote location of CHC) and CHC efficiency. CONCLUSION: Organizational design matters for CHC efficiency, but no evidence was found for the hypothesis that a better fit between community characteristics and CHC design increases efficiency. A potential reason for this might be that CHC management's main design challenge is how to cope with the scarce availability of well-trained health personnel.

"It's Not Always Possible to Live Your Life Openly or Honestly in the Same Way" - Workplace Inclusion of Lesbian and Gay Humanitarian Aid Workers in Doctors Without Borders.

In this exploratory study, we present findings from semi-structured interviews with 11 self-identified lesbian and gay (LG) humanitarian aid workers of Doctors without Borders (MSF). We investigate their perceptions of workplace inclusion in terms of perceived satisfaction of their needs for authenticity and belonging within two organizational settings, namely office and field. Through our combined deductive and inductive approach, based on grounded theory, we find that perceptions of their colleagues' and supervisors' attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizational inclusiveness practices play a role in LGs' perceived authenticity, but not belonging, in the workplace. However, these organization-level characteristics do not account for between-participant differences in perceived authenticity. Therefore, we inductively construct a typology of three groups, which we coined conscious first-missioners, authentic realists, and idealistic activists, based on how LG humanitarian aid workers assess and deal with not being able to be their authentic selves when they are in the field, because homosexuality is illegal in many project countries. Conscious first-missioners are separated from the other two groups based on having gone to the field once, whereby they felt in control over the decision on how to manage their sexuality. Alternatively, authentic realists and idealistic activists alike felt they did not really have a choice in how to manage their sexuality, but handled that differently. We find the importance of one's sexuality as well as adherence to the overarching organizational mission relevant individual-level factors herein. Furthermore, we find disclosure of sexual identity to be strongly context-dependent, as participants are 'out of the closet' in the office, but go back into the closet when they enter the field, with different country contexts even leading to different decisions concerning self-disclosure, thus demonstrating the importance of careful sexual identity management. This so-called disclosure dilemma, we find, may not be merely an individual choice, but rather a shared dilemma involving multiple stakeholders, such as the organization and fellow team members. We discuss the findings' contributions to existing literature on LGs' workplace experiences and implications for future research on inclusion of sexual and other invisible minorities in the workplace.