There are a number of accusations about the Red Cross' lack of transparency when it comes to the relief effort in Haiti.
I think the Haitian people have spoken clearly through the PDNA process, which included town meetings all over Haiti.
They want THEIR government to be consulted in the spending of money on their nation, and they want their government to be accountable to the voter people of Haiti.
However, this process needs to continue. The actual #s of Haitians, who got to participate in the meetings, were a microscopic fraction of the whole.
I believe the Red Cross, and many other NGOs, are between a rock and a hard place here.
While an astronomical amount of money was pledged, donated, and actually delivered, it is not enough money to
buy the land, that is safe from flooding etc. to relocate the people to;
build there enough for all victims that is safe from hurricanes and quakes;
provide them with basics for survival ... water food medical sanitation etc.
fix up their environment, so they no longer at such risk of landslides, and their farming become productive
rebuild their economy so that the massive unemployment (90%?) can be turned around, and the nation begin to stand on its own feet and participate in the community of nations
Donor Nations, via the UN, pledged in excess of $ 11 billion to rebuild Haiti, but not one penny of that has been delivered yet, and none of it is for protecting the people of Haiti from the next Hurricane Season, or more immediate needs.
I believe what is needed includes:
Vastly superior communication with the people of Haiti, because the current misinformation and lack of information is breeding ground for civil unrest;
Vastly superior communication of funding needs, with flexibility so that for example, if funding is needed to pay Haitians to clear drainage canals, or to renew a contract for trucks to deliver water, we don't have to wait 3 months to see it materialize because the money is available, but has been budgeted for something less urgent.
Gov of Haiti enact some rulings about human rights for the displaced, and an appeal process for people who are asked to pay what they think are bribes to be able to bring in humanitarian aid.
http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/international/Haiti/HaitiEarthquake_ThreeMonthReport.pdf
BIM_LOD_Owner_Relationships_Tiny.ppt
INTOSI_Audit_Workplan_1946211.pdf
Haiti is on a collision course with additional crises. There are many challenges with lots of talk but little or no action yet, reported by the mainstream media. I think the info in the UN NGO clusters is a great window into what's happening on the ground in Haiti, that is failing to be communicated to the people of Haiti, and thus providing fuel for Civil Unrest.
Hurricane Shelters in time for Hurricane Season
Numerous relief operations halting because funds ran out
Transition from Aid Dependency to Productive Economy where GoH is calling for the people to get there via Cold Turkey (stop distribution of basic necessities to homeless jobless individuals)
Mass Vaccinations are under way, concurrent with a steady rise in various diseases associated with sanitation not yet fully repaired, combined with rainy season flooding camps etc.
As we have seen in news stories I posted to HEDR-CA (and they fall off into LI "archives"), corruption is not exclusively the province of the GoH, or other nations where there is humanitarian effort. It is found across the spectrum, also including UN military, UN personnel, NGO personnel, Church groups, land owners, private corporations, foreign government actors, the very structure of how the aid is delivered. Solutions are at risk of perpetuating corruption, if they are designed by people who think all the corruption is in leaders of a government, or employees of a government, in denial that it is a weakness of human character which can occur anywhere.
In the current structure, NGO's can only deliver aid some place with the permission of:
GoH border personnel (can demand bribes before cargo enter nation)
GoH national government (weak, just tell them what you plan)
GoH local government (can prohibit certain types of aid to certain types of people)
UN military which has declared some zones "red" (don't help anyone there)
Gangs in opposition to GoH & the UN forces (relief workers get security escort)
Private owners of the land on which the victims are to be served (may need bribes before relief is delivered)
Here is map, from Red Cross report on WHERE in Haiti the money was spent, as of reports to date.
http://www.redcross.org/haiti
Symbols on the map show the type of aid given where.
The UN has been pushing identification of camps with a system of SSID (Camp id assigned by UN) P-code (like a zip code in Haiti), but this is a recent change. Previously different efforts promoted GPS coordinates and Longitude Latitude (occasionally included Elevation), so because of transition in what the UN calls for, and quality of communicating the latest requirements, different map systems have inconsistent ways to correlate the data.
Your grievance is shared by many people, but the information is out there. I suspect part of the problem is news media stories that fail to give good links to information provided by the Red Cross, failure of the Red Cross to have good links on their own pages to information people are looking for, and the explosion of different kinds of software needed to access all the relevant data.
The people of Haiti need to have decent news media that can reach them where 1st world infrastructure like cell phones and Internet wi fi has not yet been brought up. The Red Cross is the largest of 10,000 NGOs serving Haiti, where over 90% of them choose not to share good info on what they are doing, with UN, Haiti, or the world in general. The Red Cross is in fact sharing info in periodic reports available from their web sites, and also posted to Relief Web
http://reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc106?OpenForm&view=rwlusppublished&po=72&rc=2&offset=0&hits=50&sortby=rwpubdate&sortdirection=descending
to share with the entire humanitarian community.
The UN NGO relief effort is organized into industry clusters.
http://oneresponse.info/Disasters/Haiti/Pages/Clusters.aspx
People who drill down into them can find what NGOs are reporting their activity where in Haiti, such as the Red Cross. They are all over the place.
Friday, April 30, 2010
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Al, your description of the International Red Cross being between a Rock and a Hard Place is close....but not a full picture. As I read the GoH Action Plan and my notes from the March 31st Donor's Conference, the Clinton (in his UN Special Envoy Role) is trying to rebuild a trustable and non-corruptable Govt of Haiti with the institutional skills to take back key service delivery and design roles from NGO actors. The reason that NGO's got into the gov't business of providing water, sanitation, health care, educational and other key community services was to assure donor funds actually got applied to helping the average citizens rather than just making corrupt officials richer.
ReplyDeleteIF this is an accurate picture of the HIRC strategy, the GoH Action Plan funding of ministry payrolls and rebuilding middle management skills - the timing and building of intermediate solutions rapidly needs to be confronted.
What Peter has defined and what you are suggesting can well be the spark that ignites these needed discussions between Bill Clinton and the World Bank. The Red Cross funds are leverageable if you make the right connections, it seems.
At the same time, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) is working at a plan, and many of the same parties are involved with the BIMStorm Plan Haiti Project. These need the right audience as a client. The general amounts expected for the next 18 months, 10 years, and 20 years need to be made more tangible and visible. That is a primary benefit of 3D community modeling and BIM.
I have attached Kimon Onuma - (the genius behind BIMStorm) documentation that illustrates how to get great conversations going between the key stakeholders - and provide residents a voice into their community design.
An architectural class starts working on a Plan Haiti exercise today...
Hope this raises a few additional questions about who needs what information and how all of us involved with building a better Haiti can achieve valid and sustainable results.
No question that corruption occurs in many organizations, and that Peter's approach to applying assessments of both funds flowing into an organization AND the results accomplished (in time to be used) need to be tracked and reported. Transparency is a nice term, but accounting and accountancy is important. The World Bank likely has the necessary accounting tools and methods and semantic frameworks to deal with Peter's concerns. The US GAO and international disaster accounting groups (INTOSI - notes attached) begins to rely upon GIS (Google Earth...) as a way to track toilets and other obvious facilities that were "promised" to be on site.
ReplyDeleteThe last few pages in the above show a "Mind Map" for creative thinking about the design. Could be managed with simple Activity Based Control (ABC) and simple Project Timelines. How much skill is required and available is always the problem.
Ideas??
Many of my Facebook contacts have expressed outrage at:
ReplyDeleteHuge sums of money reported by the news media in donations to various NGOs etc.
Many quake victims either not served or poorly served by the humanitarian effort so far.
No evidence of recovery progress towards hurricane shelters and other serious needs.
The conclusion drawn from news media reports was that the donated money was not being spent wisely, not being spent period.
I tried to address this topic with my "Haiti Answers" series in my Facebook Notes.
I will be attempting to answer these questions in a series of Notes, on behalf of the NGOs who have been too busy to reply to what may seem to them to be conspiracy theorists. My answers are speculations, based on my research, may have misconceptions in some areas.
I have since seen statements by representatives of NGOs regarding the complaints, which to my mind are such obvious PR spin, by persons disconnected from reality on the ground, that they will further outrage the general public, and further undermine future donations.
One of my answer threads was on the topic of who has STANDING to get answers or complain about any of this, to anyone with the authority to fix it, and hope to get resolution in time to do the victims any good. The situation is not hopeful for serious repair. I suggested efforts to make this an issue in future elections in Donor Nations, showing by example, how US Politicians who need votes from the Cuban Diaspora have been persuaded to make significant policy decisions so as to cater to that interest group. In USA, the Haiti Diaspora is smaller than the Cuban Diaspora, but the potential is there, since vast numbers of people, who are not in the Haitian Diaspora, share their desires. The time to strike is before the news media forgets about Haiti.
In my experience, enterprises only bring in auditors when:
They are required by law to do so, which is not the case with disaster relief. I believe this should be changed, that there should be an Inspector General who reports back to the UN, nation being saved, and the Donor nations.
New owner management comes on board (Haiti Transition group that Bill Clinton will co-chair) and if that new leadership is wise in the ways of the world, and more interested in results than diplomacy, there will be an audit of where we are today in the operation being taken over, with suggestions for improvement, whose quality depends on whatever organization is called in to do the audit.
They recognize that they are in over their heads with some project and someone calls for outside help (such as during a conversion project 20 years ago when I told my boss that I felt it was about time to request a review by outside experts since our current effort was rapidly dying through lost consensus of the players where we supposed to be going) but it has to be seen as a disaster by a majority of the hierarchy before this happens ... in our case, a few hundred thousand Haitians will die before auditors are brought in
People who have invested astronomical sums of money into some project, are not seeing satisfactory results, send in auditors, only if they have contractual authority to do so, such as a Bank of Government that has loaned a lot of money to some company operating on credit, and now in a financial hole. In a reality of inadequate accounting, the people who get blamed are the rank & file workers who were following verbal orders of higher ups who now have a hole in their memories, which we see all the time with computer security breaches, financial scandals, POW scandals.
Stakeholders are unsatisfied with what's going on, and they call on some outside organization to conduct an audit on their behalf. For example, there are Author associations that conduct audits of Publishers, where there is suspicion of hanky panky in the reporting of how many of what got sold, which is the basis of payments to the IP creators.
I work for the American Red Cross in DC. We always welcome this type of dialogue and I hope I can answer some of your questions.
ReplyDeleteThe American Red Cross response in Haiti is different than what many people are accustomed to seeing here in the United States, where we often sends hundreds of volunteers to help. While we could have sent large numbers of American Red Cross volunteers to Haiti, most would not have been able to speak the language or known the country. It also would have been expensive to transport so many people to Haiti, and those volunteers would have used tents, food and water that could otherwise have gone to earthquake survivors.
Instead, the American Red Cross has deployed highly trained disaster specialists who work with the Haitian Red Cross to deliver relief supplies through its expansive Haitian volunteer network, with some 10,000 volunteers nationwide. This way, we can empower the Haitian Red Cross to continue the work after other aid organizations have left and help the Haitian people become more self sufficient. This model has worked well over decades of international disaster responses because local Red Cross societies know the people, language and geography and have established relationships with other organizations and the government.
The American Red Cross expects to spend a total of approximately $200 million for emergency relief, such as the continued provision of emergency food, tarps, tents, relief supplies and financial assistance programs as well as construction of transitional shelters — mostly in the first 12 months following the earthquake. The remainder of the funds raised will be allocated for long-term recovery.
During this multi-year period, the American Red Cross expects to allocate:
• 39 percent of the total funds raised for shelter;
• 18 percent for emergency relief;
• 17 percent for water and sanitation projects;
• 16 percent for helping families rebuild their lives through grants, loans and other financial assistance;
• 5 percent for helping communities prepare for future disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes; and
• 5 percent for strengthening health programs.
In areas where the American Red Cross does not have extensive expertise, we will work through partnerships with other organizations to ensure the survivors’ needs are met. For example, we already have partnered with Habitat for Humanity, United Nations World Food Programme and Fonkoze, relying on their experience in shelter construction, food distribution and livelihood development. In coming months, we plan to work with other groups, including the survivors themselves, to help Haiti increase its resiliency to future disasters and rebuild people’s lives.
Below are a few resources to learn more about the American Red Cross response in Haiti:
1. Three month report: http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/international/Haiti/HaitUpdate3MoShort.pdf
[Creole edition: http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/international/Haiti/HaitiEarthquake_ThreeMonthReport_CR.pdf]
2. A video made by an independent documentary company: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross#p/u/17/dFQann1h-oc
3. Interviews with Gail McGovern, CEO & President of the American Red Cross on the American Red Cross response to Haiti:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross#p/u/6/20goET0_WQA
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross#p/u/4/1khUCf3YWO0
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross#p/u/3/tPBGBz5o1_Y
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross#p/u/2/LUYsKDzfjz4
4. More information on the American Red Cross response: www.redcross.org/haiti
Please feel free to get in touch with me directly if you have additional questions. Also let me know if you are holding meetings or would like to speak to a representative of the American Red Cross.
Best,