Pour encourager les autres?

"In this country" Voltaire wrote of Great Britain in his 1759 masterpiece Candide, "it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time pour encourager les autres"

I was reminded of this famous reference to the court martial and execution of Admiral Byng on Thursday this week, when it was finally confirmed that Save the Children would follow Oxfam in "voluntarily" withdrawing from seeking new DfID funding. I am certainly no apologist for the actions and events behind the crisis that has befallen the country's two greatest international charities. But I am troubled at the nature and implications of this development.

Public outrage after the Oxfam Haiti revelations was genuine and widespread. Nuanced (though legitimate) assertions within the charity and the wider sector of Oxfam's status as something of a sector leader in safeguarding and transparency were trampled under a stampede of media, political and public opprobrium at the revelations from Haiti.

After DFID's quick suspension of new funding to Oxfam, a succession of institutional donors took the UK's lead and suspended their funding to other Oxfam affiliates around the world. Many private funders and public supporters were doing likewise, leaving Oxfam facing a massive ongoing challenge to maintain their humanitarian and long-term programme, policy and campaigning infrastructure and activities. As I write this, the word is that Oxfam is currently looking at a fall in their overall global funding of somewhere between 10 and 20%.

Within Save the Children staff circles, it had long been assumed that the allegations of harassment in 2015 would become public knowledge one day. Post Weinstein and then especially post Oxfam, it was clear that complex moral judgements in Fleet Street and Whitehall made over 2016 and 2017 after the murder of Jo Cox were quickly re-calibrating. The allegations duly all came out, with the consequences more or less as we would have expected.

In their aftermath, Save the Children now joins Oxfam in facing a major Charity Commission statutory investigation in the UK. This week, they too seem to have jumped before they were pushed by announcing they too would "voluntarily" halt applications for new funding from DfiD while that investigation takes place. Averaged out on the basis of the last five years' average, that may equate to some ï¿¡10m of forfeited new programmes each month.

Save the Children Chief Executive Helle Thorning-Schmidt now faces the challenge of rebuilding her Boardroom, along with the much greater task of rebuilding staff, partner and public trust in the integrity of the movement she leads. But will she also face the challenge of having to implement the same reduction in her federation's footprint as her counterpart in Oxfam?

Much will depend on what other donors do, whether they decide to again follow the UK Government's lead. I suspect this time they may not, perhaps already having themselves concluded that suspending their country's Oxfam affiliate funding at the height of the Haiti scandal was not, with hindsight, the most effective, nor the fairest nor the most intelligent policy response to a problem that clearly was universal to the whole sector.

The news about DfID funding will on its own be a huge blow to Save the Children's programme staff around the world. DFID's expertise and importance as a funder of child health, nutrition, education and protection work with children across the world's most vulnerable humanitarian and fragile state settings cannot be over-stated. There has been immense pride at global as well as national level in Save the Children at the ambition and impact of DfID-funded programmes in countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and, of course, in and around Syria. Aid in fragile states is seldom perfect, but many of the largest joint interventions have received encouraging evaluation scores and reports.

In both Save the Children and Oxfam, the failures were real and were serious and had very serious consequence. Women in disaster zones and head offices were exposed to abuse and harassment, and then seriously let down a second time by how the complaints appear to have been handled. Public interest in these stories is palpable and passionate. Individual supporters are aware, informed and clearly shocked. The accountability on which the sector has prided itself demands a robust response, most importantly from within the organisations concerned, but also a political and institutional response from the UK Government and other donors.

The idea that these two "admirals" of the UK INGO sector should not receive new UK taxpayer funds from DFID while they sort themselves out is neither outlandish nor vindictive. But is a funding freeze really the right response? Has it been closely thought through, in particular with regard to the likely practical consequences, and where and by whom they will be felt most? Or is the most important consideration that it represents the right response to media and political pressure that DfID and the Charity Commission are themselves feeling?

I worry that DFID's decision will help keep attention on these two household name charities, and won't address the systemic problems and challenges in the aid sector as a whole. But at the entire sector is where I think DFID as the world's leading humanitarian donor should be aiming. If I listed my main concerns, they would be as follows:

1. Will the consequences of a funding freeze on Oxfam and Save the Children be felt first and foremost by vulnerable populations? The risk being run is one of a Political Gain / Civilian Pain scenario, to borrow a title from a book written twenty years ago studying the humanitarian impact of UN sanctions. I have seen and indeed have some sympathy with others writing that this is precisely the kind of argument that has both created and reflected the complacency they perceive in the large global aid agencies. But, having worked in humanitarian assistance for 25 years myself, the idea that there are other agencies simply waiting to step in and provide the same services to vulnerable populations in disaster or fragile state as Oxfam and Save the Children offer is not one I personally give much credence to. These are genuine global leaders in their technical fields and, make no mistake, lives are saved each and every day by DFID's funding of these two charities.

2. Might it not be preferable for Oxfam and Save the Children not to forfeit DFID funding altogether, but instead to find a mechanism that best fits the current situation. For example, agreeing that applications would continue, all UK Government funding would be spent at national level, and explicitly avoiding any funds whatsoever going on direct or indirect overhead to head office costs while the charities put their house in order? If we revisit that ï¿¡10m a month figure from earlier in my article of average new DFID funding every month, it might lose Save the Children UK some ï¿¡1.5m-ï¿¡2m of direct and indirect head office overhead each month, a substantial sanction, and not a sustainable one beyond the short-term, but a potential workaround leaving their field operations largely unaffected. Would that be such a bad policy response to what is a head office and Governance matter in which no Save the Children field staff or office anywhere in the world has been implicated?

3. Further, is DFID's attention still be too focused on punishing past problems at Oxfam and Save the Children, to the detriment of initiatives to improve future safeguarding, transparency and accountability of the sector as a whole? DFID have the field footprint, the institutional knowledge and the expertise to know that there are so many UN and NGO agencies with at least as grave a set of safeguarding challenges and past cases, and far weaker records when it comes to reporting on them transparently than Oxfam.

Surely questions are being asked within DFID about the extent of the aggregate negative impact being borne by Oxfam in particular (given what they know to be true about Oxfam's relative strength in the aid sector on safeguarding and transparency). I would be surprised and disappointed if there weren't many DFID staff uncomfortable if their own response continues to accentuate the proportional cost to Oxfam of what they know full-well is a sector-wide problem, to which no agency supported by DFID funding is or has been immune.

4. Is the objective of the measure punitive, or preventative? How seriously do DFID and Secretary of State Penny Mordaunt actually rate the risk that, without further action on their side, that you could see a repeat of either of the two scandals in either of Oxfam and Save the Children? I would personally put that risk now at effectively zero. The painful, important lessons are already learned. The protagonists are gone. Whether you are a field worker, a Country Director, a CEO or a Board member, the most powerful imaginable incentives to avoid causing the next scandal are firmly locked in place.

Indeed, I would go as far to say that lasting, positive change is coming to these two charities as a result of their different scandals, as well as to the sector as a whole. Time perhaps not to forget, but to forgive?

I worked for Oxfam between 1995 and 2002, and for Save the Children between 2004 and 2014. Between 2011 and 2014, I had direct responsibility within Save the Children UK for their global DFID partnership. This article is written in an entirely personal capacity, with no prior knowledge or involvement of any past or present staff member from either charity, or from DFID.