The delivery of humanitarian aid to crisis-stricken communities is often marred by corruption, particularly in active conflict zones where organizational oversight and due diligence may seem, to aid organizations, like unaffordable luxuries. Consider, as an example, Yemen, where 4.5 million people have been displaced by a nine-year civil war between Saudi-led forces and Houthi rebels. In 2019, more than a dozen U.N. aid workers were accused of enriching themselves with WHO and UNICEF aid funding. In one case, the deputy head of WHO’s Aden branch, Omar Zein, funneled several hundred thousand dollars in aid to his personal bank account. During his tenure with the WHO, he also served as the health minister of one of the warring factions while holding a $1.3 million contract with the U.N. for his private nutritional program NGO, which did not even have a ground operation in the city it purportedly supported. And it appears these are not isolated anomalies. A 2021 report by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies found that aid workers in Yemen perceived corruption in the humanitarian aid sector as widespread and deeply entrenched. While civilians keep complaining about missing aid and international organizations keep reaffirming their zero-tolerance policy on corruption, there seems to be an unmitigated accountability gap between affected local communities and international aid agencies.

At the core of the aid corruption epidemic in Yemen and many other conflict zones (including Ukraine, Sudan, and Syria) is the disconnection of the organizations providing aid from the community in need. International organizations have not been able to provide sorely needed accountability and oversight of their local field offices. Additionally, there is often no direct social connection between local communities and these field offices. The intermediaries between the field offices and the local population are typically local NGOs, but these alleged “aid distribution partners” are often suspected of being established by political factions to attract international funds and channel those funds to specific regions for political and military advantage, or for personal gain. (Omar Zein’s NGO is an example.)

While there is no perfect solution to this problem, international aid organizations should consider greater strategic engagement with local religious institutions (such as mosques, temples, or churches) as an alternative to relying on international staff stationed in field offices or partnering with (often newly-created) secular NGOs in distributing and coordinating aid resources. There are a number of reasons why partnering with local religious institutions may be an effective way for international donors to increase accountability and reduce corruption in humanitarian aid delivery:

• First, local religious institutions typically have a long history and deep roots in the community, predating the infusion of humanitarian aid. (In Yemen over 99% of the population identifies as Muslim, and mosques are not only places of worship but centers of community social life.) This history of engagement with the community in a variety of settings contributes to a relationship of trust and understanding within the community. Through working with these institutions, international organizations bring the decision-making of aid allocation (what resources and how much of it is needed) closer to the impacted community, thus improving the transparency in aid delivery.
• Second, leaders of local religious institutions (both the clergy and the lay leaders) are themselves members of the community, and there is organic accountability rooted in their ongoing moral leadership. The personal connections these leaders have with community members make it much more difficult to evade accountability if supplies or funding go missing.
• Third, religious institutions have a far deeper reach and access in a community than any international organization field office or local NGO. There are existing networks of relationships within a faith community, which makes it much easier for these institutions to identify people’s most pressing needs and constantly changing priorities. Even though local NGOs are also locally managed, their single functional focus on charity makes them more removed from people’s everyday lives, thus reducing the informal oversight from everyday interactions with local residents.
• Fourth, the distribution of humanitarian aid is a good fit for the larger mission of religious leaders, as most major religious stress the importance of charity and support for those in need. Islam, for example, emphasizes the obligation of farḍ kifāyah, collective duty, with social services and welfare as key aspects of this obligation. Zakāt (charity giving intended for the poor and often collected by local mosques) is one of the five pillars of Islam, and the practice of zakāt gives mosques the capacity and expertise to manage aid funding. Though the administrative capacity to manage humanitarian funding might not apply to every faith tradition (which can be developed through cooperation with international organizations), the communal nature of religious institutions is shared across most religions in the world.

The strategic cooperation with local faith actors in the delivery of humanitarian aid is not a new idea. In September 2023, for example, USAID published a policy paper on strategic religious engagement in humanitarian assistance and development, which built on a 2004 USAID Rule for Participation by Religious Organizations in receiving USAID funding. in 2017, Oxfam also published a research paper identifying the need to engage with local faith actors in providing humanitarian aid. Among the many advantages of such engagement, working with local religious bodies has the potential to address the lack of accountability that breeds corruption in aid delivery. This is not to say that religious institutions are immune to corruption, or that this approach could work everywhere. But in countries like Yemen, where religion plays such a significant part in the local community’s social life, and where there are reasons to distrust many of the secular NGOs that purport to assist with aid delivery, a focus on partnerships with faith groups may be a promising way to ameliorate the corruption crisis in humanitarian aid.