The lack of transparency in where and how humanitarian WASH funding is spent on Syrian refugees in Jordan impacts the potential to plan a more sustainable, cost-efficient response and raises questions for the sector.

There is an oft-repeated anecdote among humanitarian actors in Jordan, that while camps only house 20% of Syrian refugees, they receive 80% of humanitarian funding. This discrepancy in funding and attention between camp and urban populations was the initial trigger for a research project undertaken by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) posing the question: what could be achieved for sustainable infrastructure and improved basic services for all (displaced people and hosts) if camps were never built? The research team chose to focus on WASH – water, sanitation and hygiene – which is a particular concern in Jordan, one of the world’s most water-scarce countries.

The project set out to compare the actual costs of WASH in Zaatari camp with estimated costs of a range of water and sanitation scenarios in a refugee-hosting neighbourhood of Mafraq City. At the start of the original project, it was thought feasible to obtain financial data on the WASH spending in Zaatari. This article documents how this information appears to be ultimately unknowable and the implications for the design of a more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable refugee response. The failure to record financial data in a transparent and comprehensive way hampers reflection and improvement in the delivery of an important service like WASH. More broadly, the tendency to record expenditure by sector, rather than location, precludes any form of cost-benefit analysis on support for different populations of refugees (e.g. camp-based compared with urban).

WASH in Zaatari camp – political tensions and costly decisions

Jordan hosts one of the largest per capita populations of refugees in the world. Since the creation of the Jordanian state, many different nationalities have sought safety within its borders. The most recent large-scale arrival has been of Syrian refugees, since the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2012. To date, the UN has registered over 630,000 Syrian refugees; the Government of Jordan estimates the total, including unregistered refugees, as over one million.

As the number of people crossing the border began to rise exponentially in 2012, the Jordanian government, supported by the UN, built Zaatari camp. At its peak in April 2013, it had a population of approximately 200,000. Many refugees left the camp either through Jordanian ‘sponsors’, allowing them to settle in host communities, or leaving without formal permission. Zaatari’s population stabilised in 2014 and remains approximately 80,000. The government built a second camp, Azraq (opened in 2014), that houses around 40,000 people. Roughly 20% of the Syrian refugee population in Jordan is living in camps, with the remaining 80% largely in the urban areas of Mafraq, Irbid and Amman.

UNICEF has been responsible for WASH for refugees in Jordan since 2012, when it took on this responsibility at the request of UNHCR. During the early years, UNICEF was operating in the face of stiff resistance as the Jordanian government wanted to avoid the construction of permanent infrastructure. This was because the government feared it would convey the message that Syrians would be present in the country for the medium to long term. This contributed to enormously expensive early-phase temporary interventions.

Firstly, UNICEF was dependent on contractors to put temporary facilities in place rapidly at an elevated cost. Secondly, initially, drinking water had to be provided by trucks and wastewater and sewage trucked away – an expensive solution in itself, which was exacerbated by widespread fraud on the part of trucking companies. In addition, rapid decision-making on the location proved very costly: Zaatari is sited over one of Jordan’s largest aquifers and there was a danger of wastewater leaching into it.

Resistance from the Jordanian government did diminish, and planning for water and sewerage networks began in 2013. By mid-2019, both the water supply distribution system and the sewage network were running, and trucking inside the camp for water and wastewater was supposed to have been phased out. However, while all shelters in the camp are connected to the water network, a survey in 2022 showed that 30% of households said the water supply was not enough to cover all their needs. Key informants noted that water trucking was still necessary in the summer months.

Searching for financial data on WASH spending in Zaatari

Following these early challenges, UNICEF has continued to supply WASH services to Zaatari, moving from a temporary to a more permanent, networked system of provision. But at what cost? And how does this compare to the cost of WASH provision in an urban area? The research team deployed multiple and intensive efforts to answer these questions.

Between 2021 and 2024, researchers made repeated requests for interviews with UNICEF staff in national, regional and international offices. Only one staff member agreed to be interviewed. He was not, however, permitted to furnish the research team with cost data.

It became clear that the team would have to estimate these costs. They thus undertook an in-depth internet-based search to locate publicly available data on expenditure in Zaatari. They aimed to develop a timeline of WASH infrastructure in the camp, identify cost drivers and estimate costs of WASH infrastructure investments, operations and maintenance. These searches were complemented by semi-structured interviews with key informants working for NGOs and other agencies involved in WASH response.

Finally, the research team made enquiries with representatives of the Jordanian government about the flow of international funding to Zaatari. From 2015 onwards, the Jordanian government, with the UN, has regularly issued Jordan Response Plans that reflect ‘resilience’ needs (i.e. the country as a whole) as well as ‘refugee needs’ (in both camps and host communities). They include costs for WASH but do not include expenditure and do not always disaggregate between the two camps. The Jordanian government was not able to provide disaggregated data on funding flows or expenditure.

The online document review raises doubts as to whether UNICEF itself has access to reliable expenditure data with which to judge the efficiency of its response. Note the following from the independent evaluation commissioned by UNICEF of the first five years of its WASH response in Jordan and undertaken by International Solutions Group (ISG):

“Neither UNICEF Jordan nor the WASH programme track expenditures for management purposes. The evaluation team could not obtain documentation that demonstrated expenditure by year, activity, programme component, or beneficiary group. Also, the programme does not track its indirect costs or general and administrative expense rates related to the programme, making it difficult to know the resources required to manage and execute the programme or to compare that to other similar programmes.”

The evaluators estimate the WASH programme’s budget to have been approximately USD 355m from 2013 to 2017. They conclude that 63% of the total spend over the period was on camps, as compared with refugees living elsewhere in the country. The evaluation could not provide disaggregated data on the cost of WASH provision in Zaatari alone.

A second evaluation covering the period 2018-2022, carried out by IQVIA, contains very little on expenditure. It states that the overall budget for the Jordan WASH programme for the period was USD 139m, but no further breakdown is given. The report provides a table showing yearly planned versus funded amounts for the four years of the programme, but inexplicably, neither the total planned nor the total spent is equal to USD 139m.

Finally, the research team turned to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Portal. IATI provides a common standard for publishing information related to aid programmes and hosts an online portal to hold the data.

There was no data on IATI for the years 2011-2014, although UNICEF took over the provision of WASH in Jordan in 2012. There are some figures for 2015-2020. The totals recorded under UNICEF’s projects were far lower than the overall costs estimated for the response by ISG (in the first evaluation report). Many line items (totalling USD 5.7m), could not be tagged by type, and those with a total value of USD 60m had no data on location. Almost no spending on sanitation was recorded or identifiable. Finally, UNICEF data itemised trivial amounts spent on ring binders and posters for donor visits but contained no breakdowns for large construction tenders or framework agreements. This suggests that it is possible to keep records, but that they are either not kept or are not shared with IATI.

There are a number of reasons why data on expenditure may not have been kept in the early phases of the response, including the massive scale of the Syrian crisis, the large number of donors and implementing organisations involved, rapid turnover of staff and the lack of institutional incentives outlined by ISG above. It is also possible that institutional embarrassment at the elevated costs of the WASH response has prevented the publication of existing cost data.

Why does the lack of data on WASH spending matter?

At a programming level, a lack of transparency around the costs of the camp precludes a discussion about the efficiency of the technical WASH solutions put in place or the long-term implications of decision-making in the emergency phase. Lessons from Zaatari for WASH specialists and programme managers may not have been learnt. But there are also national and global implications.

Within Jordan, without a full understanding of the historic and current costs of Zaatari, it is not possible to perform a cost-benefit analysis of refugee hosting in camps, as compared with urban areas. This would be an important exercise for all sectors but is particularly critical for WASH given that the population increase since 2012 and climate change have exacerbated Jordan’s chronic water scarcity. Investment in WASH in Jordan’s cities, where many households only receive water once a week, could reduce huge water losses from ageing systems, and relieve pressures on women and girls who are responsible for water management: filling water tanks, doing laundry on ‘water day’ and collecting and storing grey water for reuse

This is a study of one camp and one sector, but the lack of transparency and the failure to record location data for humanitarian spending are not unique either to Jordan or to the WASH sector. Even basic data on the populations of refugees in camps globally is considered unreliable. This makes it very difficult to compare the cost per capita of hosting refugees in camps to hosting refugees in urban areas.

Globally, as pressures on humanitarian aid mount, greater transparency on spending would provide evidence to the international system to make informed decisions and recommendations on the most cost-effective response to protracted displacement crises. In addition, a gradual shift away from refugee hosting in camps, which are hugely resource-intensive and environmentally unsustainable, towards a more development-oriented response could bring much-needed financing to refugee-hosting towns and cities in the Global South, benefitting long-term residents and displaced people alike. This has the potential to open up alternative funding and/or insurance mechanisms, relieving pressure on humanitarian budgets and providing more sustainable interventions for refugee populations in situations of protracted displacement.

 

Lucy Earle
Director, Human Settlements Groups
IIED, UK
lucy.earle@iied.org
X: @lucyurbanearle

Kate Crawford
Technical Director
KLH Sustainability, UK

Margarita Garfias Royo
Lecturer in Infrastructure and Development, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London, UK
m.garfias@ucl.ac.uk
linkedin.com/in/margaritagarfias/

 

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