admin February 19th, 2010
Just one week after an ALNAP report overwhelmingly cited ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’ as the key problem facing humanitarian relief efforts, Sir John Holmes, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has attacked the Haiti relief effort for a failure of coordination.
In an internal email acquired by US title Foreign Policy Sir John especially picks out the cluster systems for criticism. Foreign Policy carries the email in full together with its own commentary.
Sir John starts by praising what has been achieved, but he quickly gets to the nub of his argument, “However, it is also clear that there remain major unmet humanitarian needs, particularly in critical areas such as shelter, other NFIs, and sanitation.” The upcoming rainy season, together with the threat of civil unrest if needs are not met, gives everything a particular urgency.
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Tags: Haiti, natural disasters, OCHA, UNICEF
admin February 15th, 2010
Everyone involved in humanitarian or development work has a pretty good idea of why disasters in general and earthquakes in particular wreak more damage in some countries than in others. Disasters hit poor countries harder because of the usual development litany: poverty; shanty towns thrown up on marginal land with little or no foundations; poor or non-existent building codes; corruption allowing developers to get round such regulations as do exist; limited state services to respond after the event.
But we are indebted to BBC News which yesterday published a fairly detailed comparison of the China (May 2008), Italy (April 2009) and Haiti (Jan 2010) quakes.
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Tags: China, earthquake, Haiti, Italy, natural disasters
admin February 12th, 2010
Natural disasters fade oh-so-quickly from the public consciousness as they slip down the news agenda. Already Haiti no longer leads the news as fresher scandals, disasters and stories come to replace it.
But a new study – the third in a series – on the effects of Cyclone Nargis shows how long it takes for already underdeveloped areas to recover from a natural disaster. And the sad message is that it is going to be years before Haiti gets back to where it was on 11th January 2010, let alone makes forward progress.
Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008. An estimated 140,000 people were killed, 2.4 million were seriously affected by the cyclone and the economic losses were estimated at $4bn. The relief effort was the focus of world attention for at least as long as these things grab the news agenda. And then we moved on.
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Tags: ASEAN, CARE, Haiti, Myanmar, natural disasters
admin February 11th, 2010
Yesterday’s blog post looked at the size of the humanitarian sector as seen through the prism of a new report from ALNAP – ‘The State of the Humanitarian System’. This is a pilot study (details here) for what is hoped will be a regular assessment of how the sector is performing.
Aside from the interesting data on its size, it is also illuminating to see what the key problems are from the perspective of the people who work in humanitarian operations. Number one amongst their concerns, by a long way, was ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’. This was cited by 150 respondents.
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Tags: ALNAP, Haiti
admin February 10th, 2010
‘How big is the humanitarian sector?’ is a question that is probably of most interest to those who work in it. But it has been a question to which it has been very hard to get a definitive answer. And if you are involved in the disaster business at all – as a worker, a donor or even as a beneficiary – it’s something that would be at least ‘nice to know’.
Now a pilot study from ALNAP has gone some way to answering this question. On one point there is a clear answer – the sector employs 210,800 people worldwide and has grown at a rate of 6% a year for the past ten years. On another it is not so clear – resources spent on humanitarian initiatives were somewhere between $6bn and $18bn in 2008. The report can be downloaded here.
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Tags: ALNAP, Cadbury, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, DRC, Haiti, International Organisation for Migration, Oxfam, Red Cross, Save the Children, Sudan, UN, Unilever, World Vision
admin February 5th, 2010
Where there are vulnerable people, masses of money (and goods like food aid) with little accountability and people in positions of power over the people and the assets, corruption is always liable to raise its ugly head.
Transparency International (TI) has been in the forefront of the battle against corruption worldwide for 17 years and it has now followed up its 2006 report on Mapping the Risks of Corruption in Humanitarian Action, with publication of a handbook on Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Operations. It can be downloaded here.
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Tags: Corruption, Haiti, Transparency International, WFP
admin January 20th, 2010
The eyes of the world are, quite rightly, fixed on Haiti at the moment. But emergencies carry on happening elsewhere and it has to be a worry that donors and aid agencies are (or will be) so stretched by what is going on in the Caribbean that they will be unable to respond in other parts of the world.
That is especially worrying for Africa, many of whose ongoing wars and displacements of people are already under-reported and over-looked.
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Tags: Central African Republic, Congo Republic, DRC, Haiti, Refugees, UNHCR
admin January 19th, 2010
Advance Aid is indebted to work that MapAction has done for it in the course of last year. And so it is a pleasure to be able to report that MapAction has sprung into action (if you’ll forgive the pun) in Haiti.
Having accurate and up-to-date maps of disaster-hit areas is crucially important for humanitarian response teams and MapAction – itself an NGO staffed largely by volunteers – had ten deployments in 2009.
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Tags: earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, MapAction, natural disasters, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
admin January 15th, 2010
The Harvard Business Review is not normally the place one would expect to find words both of wisdom and relevance on emergency relief, but writing on the HBR’s blog, Timothy Ogden, president of Sona Partners and the editor-in-chief of Philanthropy Action, a journal for high-net-worth donors, gives good advice to corporates about how they can really help both the people of Haiti and those in the aid agencies who are working there.
His main message is to stop and think and not make a knee-jerk response. He points out that there is a discernable pattern in emergencies and that it is not a good one:
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Tags: corporate giving, earthquake, Haiti, Harvard Business Review
admin January 15th, 2010
As the news this morning reports rising anger in Haiti at the ongoing failure of aid and relief supplies to arrive on the island, one thing is clear – the world was not ready.
That is not to say that we should all have foreseen a ‘once-in-200-years’ event. Or that we should have known that it was going to happen this week on Haiti. And it is not to underplay the devastation to an already weak infrastructure that has been caused by the earthquake. The level of devastation is such that it clearly makes it even harder to get such goods as are available onto the island.
But it is still true to say that we were not ready. There were not sufficient stockpiles of basic goods and medical supplies nearby, or even in the same hemisphere. None of this is the fault of the aid agencies who are, as always, achieving miracles with the resources that they have available. But the way that the emergency relief system operates works against them.
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Tags: cyclone, earthquake, Haiti, Human Development Index, Myanmar, natural disasters