admin@crew2crew
15/12/2009 14:34:56
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Crowding in to help Haiti with emergency aid. The earthquake in Haiti sparked one of the biggest international aid efforts the world has seen, but the sheer number of charities involved caused problems with communication and coordination. Emily Ford reports. When the impoverished Caribbean country of Haiti was struck on 12 January by the worst earthquake in the Caribbean in 200 years, a devastating set of factors came together to create one of the greatest natural disasters ever recorded.
About 230,000 people lost their lives. That's roughly the same number as were killed by the 2004 Asian tsunami, but in a single country - the poorest in the western hemisphere. The earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, a capital city with huge numbers of inhabitants packed into flimsy houses and shanty towns. Though relatively well equipped to deal with hurricanes, Haiti was totally unprepared for an earthquake.
Most charities seem to agree that the biggest challenge of any disaster is coordination with other charities, governments and local people. The UN usually plays a central role, but with 101 of its staff killed in the earthquake and its headquarters destroyed, it was not in a position to coordinate effectively. Haiti's government, weak at best, was left in a similar state. The country's roads, ports and airport were all but unusable.
Two Oxfam employees were killed when an office collapsed. The charity's warehouse holding emergency supplies was destroyed. "It made the first few hours very difficult," says Ian Bray, disasters spokesman for Oxfam. "As soon as any disaster happens, we start coordinating with our counterparts in other agencies and the UN."
But in the first few hours the situation was difficult to gauge. "The agencies have to commit to sharing information - we concentrated mainly on water, sanitation and hygiene," says Bray. "It was not easy. Communications went down, getting around Port-au-Prince was difficult and there were security issues," says Bray. Small agencies were vital for local knowledge. Oxfam funded some and worked with them to deliver to hard-to-reach areas.
The engine of the relief effort in the UK was a joint appeal, coordinated by the Disasters Emergency Committee. Launched the day after the disaster, it raised £100m from the UK, the second highest amount in its history. For the DEC, which has only nine members of staff, the immediate challenge was scaling up. It brought in media professionals from 12 organisations to run a makeshift press office to cope with the calls.
The major NGOs are used to working together to coordinate fundraising and aid, but the DEC has struggled in the past with well-meaning individuals and groups attempting to join the process in an ad hoc way. "The best way to help people in a disaster is to give money," says Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the DEC. "Sending goods like food or clothes from the UK is usually slow, expensive and unlikely to meet the needs of survivors."
'Bad aid can be worse than no aid'
That lesson was learned most starkly in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, when people sent inappropriate goods such as high-heeled shoes and soiled underwear. "We've become increasingly outspoken about this because good intentions are not enough and bad aid can actually be worse than no aid," Gormley says. "Being able to connect to people directly and early through social media networks like Facebook and Twitter has helped us redirect some people's energy before it's too late."
The DEC also learned how to use these networks more effectively in fundraising. "Social media can help raise significant amounts if you work with the grain of how these communities want to fundraise," says Gormley. "We tried to promote online giving on Twitter and it didn't really take off. When we promoted giving by text message, people liked it so much we hardly had to promote it."
Back in Haiti, Port-au-Prince posed great practical challenges, says Mike Goodhand, head of disasters at the British Red Cross. Most earthquakes occur in rural areas. "We have never experienced a disaster of such magnitude in a capital city," he says. More than 900 temporary camps sprang up in car parks, football fields, even in the central reservation of a motorway. The Red Cross's usual latrine would not work; diggable ground was so watery that the latrine was unusable within hours. The charity developed a new, raised design that it will use again.
Haiti was also a stark reminder of the importance of developing resilience locally - the Red Cross was one of several sister societies in the country. "Members of staff are our most valuable assets - volunteers with community knowledge who understand the language," Goodhand says.
With dozens of charities operating all over Haiti, there was a risk of their work overlapping. The UN operated a cluster system based around areas of need - for example, water or shelter - so that charities could share information, collaborate and set common standards on, say, the cost of materials. But the clusters have brought their own problems.
Madara Hettiarachchi is a senior programme officer for World Vision, which worked mainly on water, sanitation and shelter with the Haitian ministry of health and the Canadian and Australian governments. "It was a challenge to ensure everyone was on the same page and to provide up-to-date information for partners, peer agencies and stakeholders," she says.
Impossible to coordinate
Most smaller NGOs did not attend the clusters, using their limited manpower to identify camps and begin distributing aid. This caused some confusion.
Michelle Brown, emergency team leader at Save the Children, which led the UN cluster on education, says some clusters were so oversubscribed that it was impossible to coordinate them - more than 1,000 agencies attended the health cluster.
"We ended up bypassing the clusters and setting up separate meetings with key actors just to get things done," she says. The overwhelming number of, for example, medical charities, also had the effect of overriding the work of local doctors and preventing the country from helping itself. Deciding whether to limit the registration of agencies allowed to work in the country might help, Brown says - but this would really be a decision for the Haitian government to make. She believes the charities were too absorbed in the devastation in the capital: "We should have separated Port-au-Prince from the broader strategic challenges in the rest of Haiti."
The relief effort is far from over. The quake left 1.3 million people homeless and hundreds of thousands of people remain so. Bijay Kumar, who led the relief effort at ActionAid, says the local community has not been adequately consulted, particularly on the distribution of $5.3bn for 2010/11 from the US. "We are trying to see how we can engage in monitoring the accountability of where the money goes," says Kumar. "It is critical that the community of Haiti sees how the money is used and are engaged in those decisions."
Rebuilding is also hindered by land rights problems. Most Haitians did not own their own houses, but government land records were destroyed in the quake. NGOs negotiate with a landowner, only for two others to turn up claiming ownership. There is also a paralysing fear of the elements. April and May heralded the rainy season. This month the hurricane season starts.
Who's working where?
This map shows where non-governmental organisations with UK arms were known to be operating in Haiti on 6 February 2010. In total, 984 organisations were thought to be taking part in the relief effort on that date, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affair
more here
edited by admin@crew2crew on 01/06/2010
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