Changing Tradition in the Humanitarian Sector: The Business Model Approach of the Kenya Red Cross

OUP accepted manuscript

“…Funding for complex humanitarian contexts is built on traditional business models, which emerged from the need for an increased accountability of humanitarian organisations over thirty years ago following much needed critique of the incalculable suffering and losses from humanitarian crisis at the time. Although there have been some important in-roads made in expediating humanitarian assistance and firming up important logistical arrangements in very complex settings ( Zolnikov and Zolnikov, 2018 ), the model’s original aims to ease global suffering and to continue to respond to consistently elevated humanitarian needs have been thwarted by the enormous growth in some UN humanitarian agencies over others, and by those organisations that are the most effective in promoting their mandates. This might be more defensible if the mandates were shared across all UN agencies but instead, they are inconsistent, promulgating fragmented assistance, weak co-ordination and exclusion of local populations from meaningful involvement in decision making.…”