Managing Chaos: The Disaster After the Disaster

The non-governmental sector has grown massively over the past 25 years. In the United States there are over 600,000 non-profit corporations, of which perhaps 3,000 are exclusively international in focus. Only a few hundred of these comfortably fit into the category of “international relief and development NGO”.

The “dirty little secret” of foreign aid is that governments do not employ relief workers and rarely deliver aid directly; nor, for the most part, do United Nations agencies. Increasingly, foreign aid provided by governments is contracted out to non-profit NGOs and for-profit corporations. UN agencies are increasingly using NGOs rather than member state organizations -- which used to have first claim to UN funds.

As a result, the NGO sector is “morphing” into something resembling (in the US, at least) the defense industry. Organizations founded as eleemosynary or charitable institutions, whose mission statements and corporate by-laws outlined their philanthropic purpose, are opening offices in Washington, New York, Brussels and Tokyo. Their task is to glean new and/or unallocated funds for their parent NGOs. This intensifies competition among NGOs without increasing the quality of their assistance.

The recent pan-Asian tsunami produced a governmental and private sector response of unprecedented size. Fifty-two NGO members of InterAction, a US umbrella organization of 160 relief agencies, collected HK$4 billion for the tsunami while the US Government has pledged an additional HK$7 billion, most of which will be in the form of either government contracts with the NGOs and UN agencies or in reimbursement to the US Department of Defense for ships and helicopters.

There is also a problem with newly emerging centers of aid conflicting with each other. The world now counts as major aid providers the US, the UN, the European Union/European Commission, Japan, Canada, the UK, the Scandinavian countries and now, with the tsunami, India and China. This is in addition to private benefactors of NGOs and Red Cross agencies. All have distinct policies and varying priorities.

While this may ultimately benefit victims of the recent tsunami and other major disasters, the growth has not been in per capita receipt of aid by the victims, but in which NGOs and Red Cross agencies receive the most money for their own purposes. The American Red Cross reports over HK$2.5 billion already in hand for the tsunami; but its annual budget for 2003/2004 included fund raising expenses of HK$1 billion and administrative costs of HK$1.4 billion, so it is not clear how much of these new funds will actually benefit victims.

Another aspect of the coordination problem has been the failure of already enfeebled governments of countries affected by a disaster to be prescriptive in outlining what is and what is not acceptable aid. Governments too often fail to publicly state what their policies will be vis-à-vis international aid efforts mobilized to help their citizens. In Sri Lanka, for example, the government has complained loudly about Christian missionaries and Scientologists evangelizing among Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim disaster victims; but it has yet to eject any of these groups from the country. Sri Lanka was also late in outlining what is and is not acceptable material aid and, as a result, received such items as winter clothing, outdated pharmaceuticals and even Viagra.

There needs to be vastly improved coordination after a disaster on many fronts. A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) would include the following:

• Governments should hold off accepting any and all aid deliveries to affected areas which are not related to the immediate rescue of persons in distress until they and/or an international assessment mission has been completed (this can be done within 72 hours). The results of the initial assessment should inform what will and will not be acceptable aid and this should be disseminated worldwide.

• Bi-lateral and multi-lateral governmental donors should speak to each other first before making their own arrangements with affected-area governments to avoid duplication of effort and being manipulated by desperate governments. The competition for tsunami aid-giving by various governments was unseemly. Most of the pledges are unlikely ever to be fulfilled.

• NGOs and other non-state actors should renew efforts to cooperate before sending material aid and personnel to an affected area. Once there, local NGOs should be acknowledged as the main actors and be given the majority of the resources raised so aggressively by the foreign NGOs descending upon them.
   

Asia’s growing philanthropic profile can benefit from not repeating the mistakes of the rest of the world.

The substance of this article formed the basis of a presentation at the recently held “International Conference on Issues Relating to Disaster Management: Challenges for Governance Reform in Asia" organized by the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong.       Mr Richard M. Walden, is Executive President & CEO, Operation USA, an international relief and development agency operating for 25 years. He can be contacted at rwalden@opusa.org