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 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 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