Africa: Rethinking Humanitarianism – Will Aid-for-Hire Become the New Normal?

“It’s so critical that we scrutinise these actors adequately right now, before they are legitimised.”

In the previous collaborative episode between Rethinking Humanitarianism and Start Network, Fogbow CEO Brook Jerue questioned why the aid sector was so “infatuated” and critical of his company – a small private American firm delivering aid in high-conflict contexts like South Sudan and Gaza.

In this follow-up episode, host Tammam Aloudat speaks with Beatrice Lindstrom – co-author of a recent policy brief on the rise of privatised, militarised, and politicised aid actors – to situate Fogbow within the larger context of these emerging operators, and to examine why their growing “subsumption” of professional humanitarian roles deserves closer scrutiny.

Lindstrom, who is also a human rights lawyer and a senior clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s International Human Rights Clinic, warns that we may be sliding towards a future where “aid-for-profit” becomes normalised at the risk of harming affected communities.

She draws distinctions between firms like Fogbow and entities such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose US-Israeli-backed activities were linked to Israel’s killing of thousands of aid seekers. Yet, she argues, they share structural features that matter: corporate structures and incentives, close relationships with states that are parties to conflict, and approaches that risk turning aid into an instrument of military and political strategy.

A central concern for Lindstrom is the ambiguous nature of these companies, which “seem to be asking to be held to corporate transparency standards rather than humanitarian ones”. That mix, she says, creates “a grey zone of accountability” in which people in crisis – and the public funding much of the response – lack clear information on who is calling the shots, whose interests are being served, and what safeguards exist when those interests clash.

Lindstrom links this shift to “massive defunding” of professional aid organisations and a deliberate policy turn by major donors like the United States. This is embracing “a philosophy around aid that is entirely instrumentalised to serve American interests, and where private actors are named as core actors to carry out that plan”.

While private actors have long been in the humanitarian space, Lindstrom says the sector is “on the cusp of a broader trend” where aid-for-profit models risk becoming increasingly accepted and entrenched, “and I think that that’s exactly why it’s so critical that we scrutinise these actors adequately right now, before they are legitimised”.

Lindstrom says traditional NGOs also fall short, especially on accountability to affected people, but insists that this cannot be a reason to abandon core principles.

“I don’t think we’re disproportionately focused on for-profit companies here, but rather that this conversation now needs to be applied to these new actors in the same way that it’s been applied to nonprofit organisations,” she says. “We all share a responsibility to fight for a model of aid grounded in needs and rights, and kept at arm’s length from politics.”

Guests

Beatrice Lindstrom, senior clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic; co-author of “The New Humanitarian Actors: Politicization, Corporatization, and Militarization in the Aid Sector”

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Transcript | Will aid-for-hire become the new normal? Brook Jerue

“I think you keep on trying to say that we are just running our own thing, running around wild, and it’s just not true. We just abiding by the same principles that everybody else is abiding by. […] There’s a reason why we’ve been able to do what we do, and is I think it’s more because we’re an outsider coming in. And honestly, we get a lot of flack because we’re an outsider coming in. […] I don’t understand why we get this blowback for helping people, you know, that are on the cusp of starving to death.”

Tammam Aloudat

Welcome to this special edition of the Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast, in collaboration with Start Network. In this series, we explore what really drives change in the humanitarian system

Christina Bennett

And what it tells us about the future, and what it tells us about future efforts to transform it for the better. In this episode, we’ll look at a future scenario where aid becomes increasingly politicised, privatised, and militarised.

Tammam Aloudat

From The New Humanitarian, I’m Tammam Aloudat.

Christina Bennett

And from Start Network, I’m Christina Bennett.

Tammam Aloudat

So, Christina, this was an interesting and quite long conversation.

Christina Bennett

I was really, really sorry I couldn’t co-moderate this one with you, in part because I did moderate the other episode we did on sort of the changing face of aid, and that was much more about how we were looking at aid from the ground up. How grassroots aid is transforming the way aid is delivered in so many ways, and you know, that was an example of how volunteer organisations, grassroots organisations, organisations from within communities, are adapting to the new sort of political and financial realities of what aid is. And what we heard in that episode was a lot of underlying themes around aid based on solidarity with people suffering, and even things like joy being an important byproduct of aid, alongside life-saving assistance, alongside survival, alongside addressing needs.

Tammam Aloudat

This was entirely different. This is a very outsider view to aid, and it is by a corporation. So, I spoke to Brook Jerue from Fogbow. It is a private American company that is quite new to the humanitarian space. They have mostly dropped aid in conflict zones and Fogbow has stirred up controversy because of some of those projects, specifically in Gaza and South Sudan. And to our listeners, I’d strongly encourage them to read the New Humanitarian’s reporting on Fogbow. In it, they will read that critics have alleged that Fogbow doesn’t adhere to humanitarian principles and has used aid to serve the political and military interests of governments and political actors in these contexts. As we will hear in this interview, Fogbow strongly disputes that. Listeners will see it is a long episode, but I think it’s worth listening to the whole thing because it goes into ups and downs. There are so many questions. When you have a corporate entity providing aid, the questions become about what is the motivation, what are the resources, what is it about transparency and availability and choices that are made? What politics affect it? It was a fascinating discussion.

Christina Bennett

And there’s no doubt that you know there is something about aid efficiency that’s important, and you know, getting the logistics of aid right. Getting aid into a place that’s hard to reach has always been a challenge for aid organisations. Aid driven by efficiency, cost, speed of delivery, is going to be really different from aid shaped by what communities want and need.

Tammam Aloudat

And what accountability might actually happen to those communities, because Iyou’ll see in the episode, there’s a difficulty in establishing the efficiency because there is a different way a corporation accounts for its money and efforts, and like the KPIs, the expected results are different, and they are not easy to make, like, a one-to-one comparison with international organisations, but there is a difference in intention. And yes, you could argue that there is a sort of solidarity that is for making people do a corporation, and Brook argued, that to aid others. But it is a different world, and I have to say, after so many years in this line of work, it still got me surprised on the argument.

Christina Bennett

So, I can’t wait to hear this. Shall we have a listen?

Tammam Aloudat

Our guest this episode is Brook Jerue, who is a former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who co-founded Fogbow and also serves as its CEO. Fogbow is a logistics company that builds itself as the next generation of aid, to date, the U.S. company has coordinated aid delivery in high-conflict zones like Gaza and South Sudan. Brook joined us from Massachusetts. Take a listen.

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Tammam Aloudat

Brook, thank you very much for joining us today. In this series, we’re talking about change that is happening to the humanitarian system, and what you do is part of that change. But before we jump into that, tell us about yourself, Brook. Who are you, where do you come from, and how do you end up where you are?

Brook Jerue

Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m an American. I grew up in New England. I went to college at a historically black school, Bethune Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida. I graduated there and joined the Marine Corps. My father was a Marine. Both my grandfathers were Marines, so I come from a military lineage. I became an F-18 pilot. I served in the Marine Corps for 15 years. Then when I left, I went to graduate school at Columbia, got a degree in East Asian policy, and then from there joined a consulting firm. Worked there for a while, then got picked up at the venture capital firm, and from there we started Fogbow.

Tammam Aloudat

Starting a humanitarian agency from a venture capital firm is hardly the regular way. Fogbow is one of a handful of companies that often come into discussion about emergence of privatised, militarised, and politicised actors in humanitarian space. Do you see it as a part of a bigger shift? Is it exceptional? Is it different? Where do you see yourself as the CEO of this company, and what is it? Define it for us.

Brook Jerue

Yeah. So first, I would say that Fogbow is not necessarily a humanitarian firm or entity. I would say that we operate in the intersection of maybe humanitarian stabilisation, development, but more importantly, I think what we do is enable access, access to people that have been cut off, or areas that have been neglected, or have lost connectivity to. In this case, in the instance that we’re talking about, I guess, is aid. You know we are currently looking at multiple projects all over the place that are not just aid type projects; that are access problems for stabilisation or development as well.

Tammam Aloudat

Access to what?

Brook Jerue

For the humanitarian sense of it, it’s getting aid to the people, right? I mean, look, I don’t think that people are starving because there’s a lack of food in the world. I think there’s a lack of getting food to the people, and you know, Fogbow has concentrated on enabling access or opening corridors where international NGOs or the UN has decided not to go due to bureaucracy, geopolitical concerns, or security.

Tammam Aloudat

You say “decided not to go.”Can you give me an example of that?

Brook Jerue

Well, I’ll give you a great example. [It] is when we did the work in South Kordofan. The UN had an aviation incident. I don’t recall if it was an aircraft shot down or a helicopter shot down, but they stopped flying into the region, into the South Kordofan region, and they started only flying and dropping- they were basically dropping goods in the South Sudan/Sudan border, and then trucking them north because they refused to fly north, or they couldn’t fly north due to bureaucratic, you know, legal procedures or aircraft probably couldn’t get insurance, which we ran into as well. So there was populations that were completely cut off by aid. So we developed, through just kind of meticulous planning, our own air aviation corridor to go provide these people, you know, food assistance.

Tammam Aloudat

Why could you do what they couldn’t?

Brook Jerue

I think part of that is probably because we’re a private company, right, and we’re very small, agile. We can kind of do what we want as long as we can negotiate access with the host country in the airspace. We don’t have the same kind of thresholds for risk as a lot of these large entities do. Obviously, geopolitical concerns are much different for a very small organisation, and bureaucracy speaks for itself.

Tammam Aloudat

Let me go to South Kordofan. It is a one of the big crises, and you’re saying that you could do what they couldn’t do because of those elements of flexibility of being a private entity, and so on-

Brook Jerue

Sorry, at that given time, they were not executing due to risk, and we were able to do it because we were able to navigate that risk in a way that we felt comfortable with.

Tammam Aloudat

Can you do the same scale though?

Brook Jerue

No, and we’re not trying to replicate scale. We’re just trying to show that it’s possible and open up a corridor, and then hand it off to somebody like the UN or WFP.

Tammam Aloudat

But also, arguably, the scale matters in terms of replicating the risk, doesn’t it?

Brook Jerue

Like yeah, but I don’t think you can rely on a company like Fogbow to scale to the level of WFP or the UN. I mean, look, we’re just trying to enable access and show that it’s possible, and then open up the corridor so that other people can use it.

Tammam Aloudat

You’ve delivered, if I’m not wrong, something within the vicinity of about 600 tonnes of aid to Upper Nile. Would proving that the corridor is openable change the attitude of a big organisation like WFP?

Brook Jerue

WFP ended up flying, I think, within a week or two, the same exact missions that we were flying.

Tammam Aloudat

What changed with them? Like, how did their risk calculus change?

Brook Jerue

I am not sure because, I mean, we coordinated with WFP very closely while we were operating, but when we were done, obviously we didn’t continue to coordinate with them. They just decided to do it on their own. I mean, look, I think those people, you got to understand that the Upper Nile region, you had people approaching IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] level five, so it was a desperate situation.

Tammam Aloudat

Yeah, absolutely. You are one of the people who started Fogbow, you’re one of the founders. How did you think about it? How did it come to be?

Brook Jerue

Now it’s probably about four years ago. Me and my other business partners were, I think, reading an article on a tsunami that had hit the Philippines, and there was a gap between when the tsunami hit and when aid was able to get there, and we just started discussing how could we help in a situation like this. And each of us come from different backgrounds, either from finance background, diplomatic background, or myself from the military, and we thought we could each reach out to our network, grab a few people, put a working group together, and think about how we could potentially tackle this problem set. And from there we started having kind of biweekly discussions with a group of people, and then October 7th really catalysed the company and changed the company in that it gave us a very focused effort to work on, which gathered a lot of steam quickly, and we went from there.

Tammam Aloudat

What about October 7? When you say catalyse the company, what do you mean by that?

Brook Jerue

Well, I mean it was obviously a huge event, impactful in so many ways to so many different people, and it allowed us to focus on a very specific problem that was urgent for a lot of people, and that’s getting food to the people in Gaza.

Tammam Aloudat

Getting food to people in Gaza is definitely an important issue that you have put a lot of effort in tackling. Others have, including – and I know that you might not agree with the comparison – but the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has stated the same aim. Is there a structural fundamental difference between your model and other companies that get mentioned in the same breath?

Brook Jerue

Yeah, I would argue that we’re completely the opposite of somebody like GHF, and that, as I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, Fogbow was developed just to enable access. We’ve never handed a piece of food to anybody or a box of aid to anybody. We always use a local vetted NGO that we conduct due diligence on. We use very high standard. For example, most of the local NGOs, if not all of them, have been used by the UN, WFP, other international NGOs.

Tammam Aloudat

Help me understand. You do airdrops, right?

Brook Jerue

We do, yes, correct. We do airdrops, but we don’t solely do airdrops. I mean, we brought, I brought food into Gaza through trucks, and we help put food across the maritime corridor.

Tammam Aloudat

So we were going to talk about two differences. One is with the general humanitarian sector. So when you bring food with trucks and so on, how is it different from what WFP or you know MSF, Doctors Without Borders, or others…

Brook Jerue

Yeah, it’s just using a different group of people. For Gaza we were using a very localised kind of soup kitchen setup. But if you want me to go back to the differences between GHF, the original question, I’m happy to answer that.

Tammam Aloudat

Yes

Brook Jerue

Which is, nobody on my team has ever carried a weapon. We’ve never handed a box of food or aid to anybody. We’ve never even hired security for what we do. So I think the only reason why people compare us to somebody like GHF is because I have a few guys on my team that were in the military, and GHF was almost all military. And I have a few guys on my team that served in an intelligence agency, but other than that, there’s no comparison to what we do.

Tammam Aloudat

I don’t necessarily buy into it because there are plenty of people with military background in many NGOs. That’s hardly the point. But to talk about comparison, have you not acted in coordination and under protection of the IDF in Gaza?

Brook Jerue

Never.

Tammam Aloudat

You don’t need to carry guns yourselves if there are other guns.

Brook Jerue

I’ve never acted in coordination or under the security of the IDF.

Tammam Aloudat

So you don’t coordinate with the IDF?

Brook Jerue

I mean, we coordinate with COGAT [Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories] just like everybody else does to move stuff in and out of of Gaza. There’s a difference between the project in Gaza, which we did, which was the maritime corridor. So that was a certain corridor that we had set up in order to move aid at scale into Gaza. Okay? Nobody else- and the traditional humanitarian actors were sticking to land corridors because they thought that the maritime corridor detracted from their efforts to open up some of the crossings.

Tammam Aloudat

Just for our listeners, the maritime corridor is the pier that was created in Gaza, right?

Brook Jerue

The maritime corridor is not just the pier. The pier is what got approved. Our, Fogbow’s initiative was different from the pier. The way this whole thing came about, and we’ve told this before, is we proposed a dredging operation on the beach that would bring barges right onto the beach, roll on, roll off, massive amount of food into a, into an area that would then distribute aid through an NGO, local NGO, which we had coordinated with the Palestinians. I’ve been to the West Bank, I don’t know, probably 10,15 times. Then, President Biden called the CENTCOM commander a few hours before the State of the Union, and said, “Look, I’m going to go with the military option,” which was the JLOTS [Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore] Pier system. Look, it’s an antiquated system that was not built for what they used it for on the shores of Gaza. Meaning, it was limited by sea state to a very low sea state. It was made for very calm waters. They decided to go with it anyways, I think for political reasons, in order to show that the U.S. government wasn’t standing by idly. We were poised in Cyprus ready to execute our plan. The U.S. government decided to run with the JLOTS system, and we got behind it and decided to support it with our assets and the food that we had sitting in Cyprus, because the alternative was to what? Not send the food over? If we have the opportunity to send the food over, I think it was a pragmatic thing to do.

Tammam Aloudat

I mean, there are two points whether it is the barges going to Gaza or the JLOTS pier, which, to be fair, a lot of people knew wouldn’t necessarily work, and this is arguably why they didn’t stand behind it. But in both cases, why do something this complicated when you could deliver aid with trucks if the Israelis open the border?

Brook Jerue

I think because this, you get the, the Israelis are out of the equation at this point.

Tammam Aloudat

Were they? Couldn’t they bomb the barges or stop them?

Brook Jerue

Yeah, but they’re not going to bomb an American-backed group moving food into Gaza. The U.S. government. The U.S. government was behind this.

Tammam Aloudat

Behind you?

Brook Jerue

No, the U.S., but the– look, we were using, we were looking for the U.S. government support. We would have tacit support by the U.S. government in order to operate there. We’re not just going in on our own. We’re an American company.

Tammam Aloudat

Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you would have the American government support, nor that you should seek it, does it?

Brook Jerue

Why wouldn’t I seek my home country’s support in providing food to people?

Tammam Aloudat

Because it conditions your aid on whoever is supported by the government, and the government is a political entity and might not support good causes.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, look, you could say the same thing about WFP, the UN. The largest contributor to WFP is the United States.

Tammam Aloudat

Used to be…

Brook Jerue

The head WFP is always always an American, so…

Tammam Aloudat

Which is, which is a very unfortunate thing.

Brook Jerue

Maybe from your perspective. Maybe from your perspective.

Tammam Aloudat

How is it from your perspective?

Brook Jerue

What? I see no problem with the largest donor to WFP being able to put somebody in charge of it.

Tammam Aloudat

So it’s a matter of buying WFP with donations.

Brook Jerue

We’re getting into a completely different kind of conversation from where we started.

Tammam Aloudat

No, no, I’m trying to- because this is, this is at the core of the discussion. It is, are there principles that govern the delivery of aid that are beyond and outside politics, or does politics – whether political pressure or economic pressure – is might right? That’s what I’m asking. You’re saying there’s nothing wrong.

Brook Jerue

You cannot, I don’t think you can operate in a vacuum without political or economic pressure on any aid.

Tammam Aloudat

Would you agree then if that was the political and economic pressure exerted by people you don’t like? Would you still have it that easily accepted? Like if China put economic pressure.

Brook Jerue

They do this globally. I mean, this is geopolitics at play.

Tammam Aloudat

Are you fine with that?

Brook Jerue

I mean, this is how the world works.

Tammam Aloudat

Arguably, humanitarianism is part of confronting how the world unfairly works, isn’t it? Like delivering aid. You could argue that people who are hungry are hungry because this is how the world works.

Brook Jerue

No, I think that most of these people are hungry due to security or geopolitical play.

Tammam Aloudat

But isn’t that the exact same thing? Isn’t the domination of good or bad actors through political power a geopolitical thing? Isn’t the U.S. forcing its will on WFP or other actors a geopolitical-

Brook Jerue

I don’t think the U.S. is doing that. I mean, look, I think you’d have to talk to somebody in the U.S. government. I can’t make an assessment on that. I can only tell you how we operate.

[Music break]

Tammam Aloudat

How do you make choices about your operations? Like, how do you choose where to go and where not to go? Obviously, you’re not a huge actor compared to someone like WFP, for example. How do you make those choices?

Brook Jerue

We look for areas that people have been cut off from aid, or whether it be food or medicine, and then we look to see if we can tackle it. We have a pretty strong advisory board that is a sounding board and kind of looks through everything, hears everything, and then we make a conscious decision as a group whether or not to go forward with it.

Tammam Aloudat

How did you choose your advisory group?

Brook Jerue

I think we looked at people from across different sectors. So, obviously we have people like Governor David Beasley who ran WFP for a while. We have a few former military generals, we have some diplomats, we have some business people. So I think we cover a pretty wide spectrum of people. You know, I think that we’ve always looked for people who have, you know, breadth and depth and what’s going on globally

Tammam Aloudat

I’m looking at your website, and you have four people in it, and…

Brook Jerue

Yeah, the website isn’t everybody that we have. Some people have other obligations, and, you know, they’re limited.

Tammam Aloudat

The advisory group is not a governing board. They don’t make decisions over the executive. It’s still your decision , right?

Brook Jerue

But they do. I think we wouldn’t go forward on a project unless it was kind of everybody was on board. I mean, look, a lot of these people have a lot of experience, and you know they have a lot at stake reputationally. They’re not going to put themselves into a project that they think could come back on them.

Tammam Aloudat

That’s a pretty good point because, at least the ones that are on the website are putting their names. And you mentioned Governor David Beasley as one of the advisers. How’s your relationship with him? What’s his role in Fogbow?

Brook Jerue

He acts as kind of the executive leadership of the senior advisor board. Obviously, given his experience, we tap into him for his thoughts on multiple different things across a project. You know, so any given day it could be something different. Overall, you know, we look for his, whether or not he thinks it’s a viable project, and you know if we should continue a path forward to pursue it.

Tammam Aloudat

Let’s talk about experience, because obviously, Mr. Beasley has been the executive director of WFP for quite a few years, as you mentioned on your website. He didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize. WFP received it, but he was the one who on the stage that got it at the at the day. He was known as a quite voracious fundraiser for WFP at the time. On your website you mentioned raising over $55 billion. That was the whole budget of WFP during his tenure. It’s hardly his fundraising alone, but beside the point. David Beasley is the one who has a humanitarian experience. You mentioned that some of your staff come from a military or intelligence background, and I want to address something, and please take it as a curious question. What makes any of you guys fit for this particular? Like, it’s not only a logistical exercise of delivering a corridor at any cost. It is also a prioritisation, a politics and ethics and an experiential exercise of delivering aid under what you’ve called geopolitical pressures.

Brook Jerue

Anybody can be involved in a humanitarian effort. Just because certain people call themselves humanitarian doesn’t mean they have, like, a monopoly of like ‘I can only deliver aid. I’m the only person who can deliver aid because I have this.’ So I would also say that, and you know this, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of people in the UN or in WFP that have military experience. No more than mine. And I guarantee there’s people with intelligence agency experience in all these entities as well.

Tammam Aloudat

I’m sure there is.

Brook Jerue

The only thing that’s different is maybe because we’re smaller, it’s easier for people to go, ‘Oh look, that guy was in the military and he’s involved in the humanitarian project,’ but I don’t think there’s much difference than what we’re doing than anybody else.

Tammam Aloudat

Brook, I’m not arguing that military experience should exclude people from being humanitarians. On the contrary, and I mentioned that in the beginning. Let me put it differently. You’ve been in the Marines. I have worked as a humanitarian for a long time, I am a physician by training, and I watched every war movie there is. Do you think I should be deployed as a Marine? Give me a gun, give me a radio and a you know cover, and just…

Brook Jerue

You’re talking about two wildly different things. You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Tammam Aloudat

Why? You’re, you’re implying that humanitarianism doesn’t have a professional element to it, and is anyone’s business if they-

Brook Jerue

No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying anybody can pivot their career and, and help other people as well.

Tammam Aloudat

Why not the opposite way?

Brook Jerue

They can. I’m sure there’s people that worked at USAID that went on to be join the military,

Tammam Aloudat

But they needed training. They needed to rise through the ranks and follow-

Brook Jerue

If you’re working for a government organisation. I mean, we’re not a government organisation. We’re a private entity. I think you’re trying to frame Fogbow into something that it’s not.

Tammam Aloudat

No, no, I’m not. I’m genuinely not.

Brook Jerue

We don’t, when we go like, for– I’ll give you an example. Like maybe this will clarify. Let’s talk about the kind of the the full spectrum of what Fogbow does.

Tammam Aloudat

Yes.

Brook Jerue

We go and we look at a problem set of how, where people have been cut off. Maybe, I don’t know, because the UN, something happened, right, and the UN decided they’re not going to go there anymore due to a security incident or something. We’ll go. We’ll get the team together. We’ll look at the problem. And look, we look at the flash reports. We look at the need statements. We do all these things that you know others would do when they’re looking to bring aid or whatever it could be to people. Then we see if it’s possible, through our planning, or our ability to plan, or get something to these people through establishing some sort of corridor. Then we find a vetted local partner that could then collect the aid, distribute it in accordance with humanitarian norms. We’re not doing anything different than anybody else. They use the same reporting that they would report for the UN or WFP. They’re the same exact local NGOs that the UN or WFP uses. The only difference is we’re filling this middle mile corridor where the UN, or WFP, or somebody else decided it was too dangerous, too bureaucratic, or too the geopolitics of it came into play and they decided not to do it. That’s it. I think it’s pretty simple. I think you’re trying to overcomplicate where Fogbow is. I’m not the same as a UN person. I’m not the same as a WFP person. I’m not. I’m not picking beneficiaries. I don’t do that.

Tammam Aloudat

Aren’t you? I mean, by choosing which corridor-

Brook Jerue

Sorry, these are people that the UN has designated are reaching IPC level five or on the verge of they’re IPC level four or five. This is the targeted people that we’re looking at. They, I didn’t make that designation. The UN did, right? So then, and we look for vetted local partners that the UN historically uses, or WFP historically uses, or international NGOs historically use. Then we contact them.It’s much different than than what you’re trying to say, which is, I, like ‘The only way you can be a humanitarian is if you’ve been fully trained by the UN, USAID…

Tammam Aloudat

No, no, let me…

Brook Jerue

… or somebody else in order to be call yourself a humanitarian.’

Tammam Aloudat

No, no, let me-

Brook Jerue

Also, I would say that we’re not, Fogbow, I’m not trying to say I’m a humanitarian. Do we go conduct humanitarian projects or what people would consider humanitarian projects? Yes, we do. We open corridors for humanitarian access to people that have been cut off. We do that. But I do not, I do not pick the exact person who’s getting the aid. I, I work with a local NGO who’s historically done this for decades for international NGOs, and I trust that they’ve been – we vet them, we do our own due diligence – but I also trust their work experience for the last 20 years of working with major international NGOs that they’re doing the right thing, and then they provide the same reporting that they would to those entities, we receive that reporting, and move forward from there.

Tammam Aloudat

Let me try to break this down. First, I’m not trying to say anything. We’ve been preparing this with the views of a wide range of people, and I’m trying to bring that to you so you can actually say what you’re saying, and explain it to people. The first thing is, you’ve elaborated that this is a complex system

Brook Jerue

It’s a very complex, system. I mean these are very complex problem sets as well, and I mean look…

Tammam Aloudat

You probably are explaining it extremely well within the language that you come from, which is different from the humanitarian language, whether you call yourself humanitarian or not. You’re functioning within a humanitarian milieu that requires a certain way of understanding. That’s what we’re trying to do. So let me make a challenge first to one very specific thing. You said you do not choose, and I do not dispute. Yes, you are going to places where have been deemed to be in severe food crisis and people are suffering. You do not cover all of them; hence, you are doing a choice within them. That’s my question: How do you make that choice? Why why area A not B?

Brook Jerue

So, for the Sudan project, we worked with an international NGO that was very experienced, and they knew exactly where we should bring it. And so we just followed their guidance. For the South Sudan example, we worked very closely at the operational level with WFP, and we made sure we weren’t duplicating efforts, and we talked about exactly where we were bringing food.

Tammam Aloudat

The other part is on this issue of the what you call the middle mile. And you’ve come together and have created this company that covers that, and I appreciate – I’ve worked for NGOs for a lot of my life, but there are calculations of risk and risk tolerance. Why do you have more risk tolerance?

Brook Jerue

No, I don’t say I don’t have, I don’t have risk tolerance. I just think we probably have a different threshold for risk tolerance. And when you talk about people with military experience, I think that the threshold’s different. And look, there are humanitarians that are out there in in similar type situations, I do think that the military planning capability and what’s instilled in you, kind of growing up in that that environment, the detailed level of planning is unmatched. And so our ability to plan to the second to the exact location, I think is unmatched compared to others that are maybe looking at these same problems.

[Music]

Tammam Aloudat

One of the places where I worked personally was Darfur in Sudan. It’s one of the places where there were no humanitarian flights at all…

Brook Jerue

Yeah.

Tammam Aloudat

… because of the risk of anti-aircraft weapons used regularly.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, you’re talking about recently with the RSF?

Tammam Aloudat

About two and a half years ago.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, that makes sense.

Tammam Aloudat

One of the things is we needed to drive for about four days to reach the project. I would have loved to have flights there, and one of the issues was no one was willing to take the risk.

Brook Jerue

Yeah.

Tammam Aloudat

And I’m here. I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I’m pretty sure the military has a capability of logistical delivery that is, doesn’t exist in or or much harder to reach in civilian entities. But what happens when that- because part of how you said there was a security incident and they stopped wanting to fly. What would happen if you had a security incident? You might be planning much better, but that doesn’t make you immune from a security incident.

Brook Jerue

No, it doesn’t make us immune, but I think that, first of all, we won’t execute a plan unless we think there’s a very high likelihood of it being successful, right? And I think that there are ways to plan these missions or projects to be successful that, I would say some of the- because look, the UN doesn’t own these aeroplanes,they’re leasing them as well, they’re leasing the pilots. These guys, everybody has their own threshold and their own level of training. I would argue that guys on our team probably have a much higher level of training than most of these people that are executing missions on the behalf of any of these NGOs.

Tammam Aloudat

Let me then ask you: Where are your red lines? Whether this is logistical, security, or political, or in terms of collaborating. You mentioned that you work with governments and government entities.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, I mean, I think our our red lines are aligned with most humanitarian actors. Obviously, we won’t, we don’t do anything that is playing into you know political loyalties or military objectives. Obviously, no support to any combatants. You know, we don’t want to mislead anybody about where we’re at and what we’re doing. And then, if we see anything that’s outside of the norms, we would stop there, suspend the the project, you know. Every humanitarian system that’s sending something somewhere, there’s always some leakage, right, that ends up in the wrong hands, and that’s understood. I mean, look, Gaza is notorious for stuff ending up in the wrong hands, and everybody understands that that’s part of, kind of, moving stuff in and out of there. But you know, we’re the, we’re the same. I mean, I think we look at it from the same lens.

Tammam Aloudat

There is the logistical planning capacity that you talk of, and I don’t think this is what [is] getting people jumpy about the idea of private companies working in that intersection of aid. Do you have an explicit adherence, for example, to humanitarian principles. Did you sign the Charter of humanitarian principles or the minimum standards?

Brook Jerue

I mean, we have standards within our company that is aligned with humanitarian standards and principles.

Tammam Aloudat

Can you tell me about them?

Brook Jerue

Yeah, I mean, they’re the same: transparency, independence, all the same, you know, humanitarian principles that the humanitarian community abides by. I don’t think we’re any different than that. Impartiality…

Tammam Aloudat

Impartiality is an obvious one. I mean, we always prioritise people according to their need. But neutrality is a different story.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, and I would say that Fogbow does the same thing. You could argue that us picking a local NGO, therefore we’re not acting impartially, but we’re a very small entity, and conducting a very small mission set to open up a corridor. And I don’t know, look, I’d be happy to work with the UN. If the UN said, came to me or WFP came to me and said, “Look, we’d like you guys to help us plan a new corridor to enter this area that we’ve had trouble getting into,” and look, because we don’t, we’re not the UN, we could go do it a few times to prove that it operates, and like we’ve done previously.

Tammam Aloudat

I have no issue whatsoever with you working with a local NGO. That’s the dream. We’ve been talking about localisation for 20 years and failing to do it. My problem is you working with the U.S. government, to be perfectly honest with you.

Brook Jerue

I don’t work with the U.S. government.

Tammam Aloudat

There are a couple of overlaps…

Brook Jerue

Overlaps and.. look — nobody, no actor is able to operate in these places without political weight behind them. Name one.

Tammam Aloudat

Doctors Without Borders, which I worked for for 15 years.

Brook Jerue

Okay. Good example. But, you know, I think that for the cases that we’re talking about, first of all, everything we had we’ve done we haven’t done that much for the U.S. government or with the U.S. government involved. We’ve done a lot more stuff on our own than with the U.S. government. So I don’t think putting us as kind of a proxy for the U.S. government is fair at all.

Tammam Aloudat

I don’t think you are. To be fair.

Brook Jerue

I have two Europeans on my team.

Tammam Aloudat

If the U.S. government wanted a proxy, it would have more money and be bigger than you, to be honest.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, exactly.

Tammam Aloudat

So my question is, what happens when you want to intervene in a place where the U.S. government is not happy for you to intervene?

Brook Jerue

We’re not going to do stuff that’s political at all. We’re going to bring food to starving people. That’s what we’ve done in the humanitarian context of humanitarian projects, that’s all we do is bring food or medicine to people that are starving to death or need medicine. That’s it. I don’t think any government’s, I don’t think any governments against that. Are there?

Tammam Aloudat

Oh god! I’ll send you a study where the U.S. bilateral sanctions between ’71 and 2021 has caused half a million excess deaths a year. Some governments are against that. And this is again arguable. What happens when the hungry people are in Iran? What happens if it happens that the hungry people are in a place where the U.S. government doesn’t want you to intervene?

Brook Jerue

I’m happy to go help in Afghanistan. If, at the tail end of this war, if there’s a group of starving people in Iran, I’m happy to go help.

Tammam Aloudat

Why at the tail end? Why not now? In a similar way to Gaza.

Brook Jerue

Yeah, I’m happy to help. But look, on the other hand, like you can’t operate in these combat zones with impunity as well, right? I mean, I think that some humanitarian organisations have learned that the hard way with people getting killed. And I think that the coordination of this is very important. I think you’re targeting Fogbow because we’re an American company, and you try to wrap us into this American wrapper but, it’s just not true.

Tammam Aloudat

I’m not targeting Fogbow. I’m absolutely happy when people are delivered aid, and I’m as critical about the-

Brook Jerue

If you look at, if you look at what we’ve done, like from a very high level, we’ve brought food to people that were legitimately starving. We didn’t make the decision that they were starving. We followed guidance on what they were needed, why they were in that state. We’ve set up a corridor to bring them some aid, and look, I understand that we’ve done a very small amount compared to the UN, WFP, or even a lot of international NGOs. I mean, they do a tremendous amount of stuff that’s unbelievable. We’ve just looked at things a bit more asymmetrically in a different viewpoint, and I think that it’s touched a nerve on some people that we’ve gone in and been able to execute in these places that historically have been difficult.

Tammam Aloudat

Let’s talk about touching a nerve. I’ve looked at your website. Do you have a clear account of who gives you money and how is it spent?

Brook Jerue

We do. Internally we do.

Tammam Aloudat

Why internally? Why not public?

Brook Jerue

We’re a private company. We’re not an NGO.

Tammam Aloudat

So that touches a nerve, because we don’t know.

Brook Jerue

Okay. Well… If you want to sign a non-disclosure agreement, I can show it to you.

Tammam Aloudat

If you go to the website of the International Committee of Red Cross or MSF or so on.

Brook Jerue

Those are international NGOs. I mean, let’s just use Maersk as an example, the shipping company. So the UN, the UN has a whole maritime kind of aspect of it, right? And we were very close to them because we were working on this maritime corridor. The UN maritime kind of you know portion of it is really just contracting Maersk or other large shipping companies to do that work. What is the difference between Maersk and Fogbow? Tell me.

Tammam Aloudat

You are not a contractor. You are making choices.

Brook Jerue

We are a contractor! The UN’s getting money from sovereign governments.

Tammam Aloudat

Who can hold you accountable? That’s the question.

Brook Jerue

The, any donor can hold us accountable completely.

Tammam Aloudat

Do any donor have access to all your accounts or only their money?

Brook Jerue

No, every project that a donor is involved in, it’s completely transparent of what’s going on.

Tammam Aloudat

To them, their projects, but not your whole account. You see, you see the problem there?

Brook Jerue

Okay, but you’re trying to equate us to a non-governmental organisation, which we are not

Does Maersk open its books across its entire business line to the UN because the UN does work with them? What’s the difference? What’s the difference? They move goods. We move goods. They do middle mile. We do middle mile. What’s the difference?

Tammam Aloudat

Let me give you a couple of reasonable differences. One is contractors are required to sign a set of principles with any agency,

Brook Jerue

And most, the donors that donate money to us, it’s the same thing, and I bet it’s the same exact principles that you have.

Tammam Aloudat

And the second thing is, it becomes the accountability of the agency that is contracting. So it’s WFP, or the Red Cross, or whoever is contracting someone, and that someone messes up, it becomes accountability of WFP. My question is, who’s accountable is-

Brook Jerue

Our donors, they don’t want anything to happen as well, and they’ll be accountable.

Tammam Aloudat

I don’t think you do want anything bad to happen.

Brook Jerue

So you’re saying only the UN and only WFP and only large NGOs are allowed to operate in this space?

Tammam Aloudat

Not really at all. Not at all. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that what is the one of the principles that have governed humanitarian work? Whether it succeeded or not, in many cases it didn’t. But there’s an intention.

Brook Jerue

We abide by the same humanitarian principles.

Tammam Aloudat

Transparency and accountability?

Brook Jerue

Yes.

Tammam Aloudat

How do I know? We’re journalists. Just so it doesn’t look like I’m promoting a WFP model, because they have done extremely badly recently with the data breach that they messed up. In Gaza, they’ve had their data of 600,000 families leak, and they haven’t been answered. We can stand there and say: As an humanitarian actor, but also as someone who’s in charge of people’s vulnerable data, you should be held accountable. Hopefully, they will. My question is: How do we know, with you as a as an actor who is in that circle where your work determines-

Brook Jerue

Tammam, you keep on trying to put me into the circle of international NGOs, and the UN-

Tammam Aloudat

Well, you work in it, don’t you?

Brook Jerue

So does Maersk. So I think you keep on trying to paint Fogbow into this corner where you want us to be, and it’s just not-

Tammam Aloudat

No, no, no. I don’t want you to be anywhere. Let me give you an example. I’ve worked in surgery before. I don’t want you to be a surgeon, but I don’t want you to be in the operating theatre if you’re not sterilised. Do you see my point?

Brook Jerue

What’s the difference between us and any other company that’s servicing a contract with any NGO?

Tammam Aloudat

The NGO can terminate the contract if the company messes up. Who can terminate your contract?

Brook Jerue

The same people, the same people that sponsor an NGO can cancel our contract. We’re contracted to do this work from sovereign governments.

Tammam Aloudat

See, this is not on your website. This is my point. There’s a point that is about trans[parency]. Who contracts you? What are the conditions of your contracting, for example?

Brook Jerue

Same as everybody else. Same as everybody else. Same as everybody else. I think you keep on trying to say that we are just running our own thing, running around wild, and it’s just not true. We’re just, we are abiding by the same principles that everybody else is abiding by. Look, we’re navigating it in a way that maybe is not traditional to what you’re used to as being in the kind of space for decades. But we’re also, there’s a reason why we’ve been able to do what we do, and I think it’s more because we’re an outsider coming in. And honestly, we get a lot of flack because we’re an outsider coming in. I’m more happy to come work with everybody, and help, you know, to be able to go help these people. I don’t understand why we get this blowback for helping people, you know, that are on the cusp of starving to death.

Tammam Aloudat

No one is complaining about helping people on the cusp of starving to death? Obviously not.

Brook Jerue

Well, I mean, I don’t understand why you keep on trying to paint us in this box that we don’t conform with humanitarian principles, that we’re not the same as any other contractor- we’re the same as every other. Anybody we’ve received money from would not, would be ashamed if we did not do anything in accordance with international humanitarian norms. I guarantee that.

Tammam Aloudat

That might well be the case, but. Why don’t you publish your accounts?

Brook Jerue

We’re a private company, we don’t have to do it. Why? Why? I don’t know. Why doesn’t Maersk publish its accounts?

Tammam Aloudat

I don’t know about Maersk, I’m asking you. Why don’t you, if you’re doing the exact same thing as everybody else.

Brook Jerue

I’m not an NGO. I don’t need to do it.

Tammam Aloudat

You don’t need to if it helps your case that you’re saying you abide by the same principles

Brook Jerue

I think on the website we do say that we abide by all the principles, so I think they’re all on the website.

Tammam Aloudat

Yeah, but, you know, this is a case of trust me, without seeing my books.

Brook Jerue

Okay, well, If you want to sign, if you want to sign an NDA, I’ll send you all the background info on all the stuff we’ve done, and you can look at it.

[Music]

Tammam Aloudat

You said that you’re so small. Tell me in five or 10 years if you had actually succeeded beyond your dreams, how would it look like?

Brook Jerue

I think we would be looked at by large NGOs or the UN or WFP as the go-to people to open up access corridors to difficult locations. I don’t think the situations we’ve been in over the past decades are going to stop. I think that we’re going to continue, conflicts not going to end. People are going to continue to be cut off. People are going to continue to have to find new ways, innovative ways, different ways to reach people to give them aid.

Tammam Aloudat

When you talk about you being a private company, do you make profit?

Brook Jerue

No, we’re probably a break-even company.

Tammam Aloudat

Is that by choice, or is that how it happens to be?

Brook Jerue

No, any profit we get, you know, we actually put back into projects. So, give an example: on Gaza, we made a little money. We took that money and we actually ran proof of concept into Kordofan in Sudan, and we paid for that out of our own pocket to go execute that. I don’t know if any other entity does that.

Tammam Aloudat

Who’s your, who’s your shareholders?

Brook Jerue

Me and two other people. There’s three of us that own the company. We each own 33 and a third percent.

Tammam Aloudat

Why do you do this for break even?

Brook Jerue

You know, somebody asked me this recently. You know, because this is, I think it’s incredibly… First of all, I think everybody on our team appreciates the problem-solving aspect of it. The difficulty of the- I mean, like we talked about earlier, is incredibly complex problem sets. And I think everybody on our team has served in some capacity, right, either a government, an NGO, somebody. And I think service to people is important to everybody on our team. Some people on the team don’t get paid at all, they just want to be a part of it. You know, they’re volunteer and they just, they just show up for every call or show up to a project and go execute because they just want to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves, and I think that that’s no different from a lot of different people. I would argue that there’s some probably UN people that get paid much higher than people on my team. So [laughs]…

Tammam Aloudat

I mean, I know I know exactly how much UN people get paid.

Brook Jerue

We’re not doing this to make money. I’ll tell you that much. We’re doing to solve problems that I think the world needs solved, you know. And I think that, like, look, what’s the alternative? Like, let’s say the UN gets a plane shot down. I mean, you know, [the] perfect example is El Fasher. El-Fasher is such a shame because I think we could have executed it if we had the right amount of funding, but-

Tammam Aloudat

How would you do it?

Brook Jerue

I mean, I…

Tammam Aloudat

I worked a few kilometres south of El Fasher, when it was under siege. How would you have done it?

Brook Jerue

Well, I think that,how would I have done it? I would have done it at night, very low, and brought in a bunch of aircraft to deliver aid.

Tammam Aloudat

So you would have dropped it inside El Fasher?

Brook Jerue

On the airport. We put together a brief. We actually put together a brief. But I do think that that problem set was solvable. It was a funding thing. We couldn’t get enough money to go do it. We were even going to put up our own money to go execute that to show that we could do it. I’ll just give you one more example. I have eight cargo drones sitting in Amman, Jordan that I staged there, that can carry 500 kilos each, and I staged them there to go drop into El Fasher like an offset drop because of the surface air missile problem set. We never got to it because we just, it just never, we never got to the level of comfort that obviously I don’t want to send an aeroplane in and get a shot down. I mean, I felt really bad for the people of Fasher. You gotta, I mean, I’m sure you know exactly, I mean, this siege around El Fasher. We were, we had put together – and actually, I tried to donate the medicine to Gaza, but I think that honestly, I’d have to ask my team, but I think a lot of the stuff’s still in the conga line because it’s impossible to get approved by the Israelis – but we had purchased you know a few thousand metric tonnes of critical medicines to be delivered to El Fasher to people during the siege that were cut off, and we had everything all ready to go. We were just waiting on the we were waiting on like the intel picture to improve, and we never got nobody ever kind of gave us a real defined threat picture. We worked very closely with a lot of different NGOs that were on the ground to try to figure out where some of these surface-to-air missile systems were at, and we just never got to the level of comfort we could execute, but it’s sad.

Tammam Aloudat

Where do you get your intel from?

Brook Jerue

It’s either from open source like everybody else or like me talking to an NGO on the ground. I mean, in that case, I approached the Sudanese government, I approached the RSF and asked them to give us a window to allow us to operate to help these people. This is how Fogbow is looking at stuff. We look at stuff completely different. How can we tackle this problem set of these people in an extremist situation, how can we get to them? And we try to pull out every stop possible to try to get to them, and ultimately we failed on this project. We couldn’t do it, but if we had a much larger kind of funding source, I think we could have done it, to be honest with you. If we were able to pull this off, it could have changed the trajectory. And I don’t know if it could have changed it in a good way. But it was worth the shot.

Tammam Aloudat

The way you say change the trajectory to the better or the worse is a quite significant thing because you know you might do something good today and you know screw it up

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