There are official (UN+govs) red zones, where the military and police prevent aid from reaching the people in those zones, and take violent action against anyone they catch in the act of trying to do so. I have never seen an explanation for this which makes any kind of sense to me. These zones are not on any map or public signage, but officials working in the areas are told about them, through the UN NGO clusters, and by other means.
There are the civil society (land owner manager) red zones, where any aid supplied to quake survivors is regularly destroyed or sabotaged by local authorities or property managers, and/or the land owners demand to be paid $$$ in return for letting the relief workers in to help the victims.
There are the NGO red zones, where the security situation (criminals and other reasons) is so bad, no volunteers will consent to going in there.
There are color coded maps showing severity of various risks such as quakes, wind, inches of rain, etc. where red generally denotes the worst or most intensive risks.
Summary of Key Issues/Priorities/Advocacy Messages in the MARCH 29 Sitrep
1. New site allocated by Government in north Croix de Bouquet
2. Seven high risk sites in need of immediate remedial works to reduce
3. Municipal Coordination – decentralization of coordination and gap filling to municipality level taking off and yielding results
4. WASH Cluster/DINEPA facilitates work to map all new sites - working together with CCCM, Shelter and OCHA – many more sites expected to be mapped; results expected end of week and will lead to a new round of gap analysis and strategy for response
5. Is assistance in camps creating more and larger camps?
Al Macintyre Theories previously shared ...
(a) TOTAL FAILURE of competent assistance OUTSIDE of the camps means starving and suffering people are going to the camps where the best assistance is currently located.
(b) As the infrastructure repairs advance, UN NGO personnel are waking up to notice clusters of people in trouble, who they would have noticed earlier had it not been for the nature of the disaster, and the nature of the relief effort structure, a mismatch in some ways to the actual needs of the region.
6. Plan put in place for desludging of latrines and pooling of desludging truck capacity to meet needs
Summary of Key Issues/Priorities/Advocacy Messages in the APRIL 13 Sitrep
1. Initial figures suggest a doubling in the number of camps and an increase in the number of displaced – to be verified. Question as to why additional displacement is taking place and what motivates people who were previously outside of a camp to move in
AL Macintyre Theories to explain what may not be obvious to other folks.
There are the crooked gangs, alleged corruption, there are the mass evictions, and lack of visibility what is now a red zone, or why. For many Haitian, they may not be able to tell much difference between these actors, in causing them to escape to some other apparent safety.
Also there is a huge lag in data from people on the ground reporting their info to the central collections. As infrastructure repairs advance, that time lag will shrink, having a spike in the data collection, to fix some of what had been broken all along.
2. Need for a strategy for the way forward for the next year to know how best to invest resources and efforts
3. Under reporting of agencies continues to be a significant challenge in getting a clear picture of actual and planned efforts
In Al opinion this is a no-win situation so long as the leading groups have an arrogance of exclusion for new volunteer groups and interests, data reporting sharing methods are time consuming, and the legal structure prevents profit and non-profit organizations from significant cooperating.
Needs moving forwards for WASH Cluster moving forwards, as of the April 13 Sitrep
1. WASH cluster planning figure is for approximately 1,100, 000 people for the immediate/emergency WASH needs. New but unverified figures may put this much higher towards 2.1m
2. The WASH Cluster has a list of 750 locations in its database although only 473 with GPS points that we can plot on the map covering Port au Prince, Jacmel, Gressier, Leogane, Grand Goave and Petit Goave. It is believed that some of these are either duplicates or are registered with a WASH agency name, but who reported the camp, although they may not be working there. With the need to carry out new surveys highlighted by WASH work, new surveys were carried by CCCM with WASH to ensure only one data set. It is estimated that the actual figure is more than 900 sites in Port-au-Prince with over 1300 sites for all affected areas, but again these need to be verified which is being carried out by CCCM
There are also cross-cluster needs. The differences between different cluster data sets will be much easier to manage when there is more consistency in identifying camps:
SSID, Lat+Long, GPS, street address, etc. The last figure I saw was 3.6 million people in some kind of need.
You would think that with the UN being in the international humanitarian relief business now for 60 some years, that this kind of data management would be more advanced, but I suspect there's an inertia in how things are done, without the pressures to improve like in business where companies in competition with each other are driven to become more productive. There is similar competition within NGOs, but it is to be more clever with PR. Plus this data management issue is within the UN structure they are all in. The UN has no competitors. This is like how government infrastructure influences how capitalism can function within their world. Pressures to improve it are overwhelmed by inertia and budget constraints.
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