March 03, 2010
A thought-provoking piece from anthropologist and filmmaker Mark Schuller on Huffington Post today asks some hard questions of the international community:
As of a month after the earthquake the estimate of aid donated is $600 million for Haiti relief efforts (compare this to the $20 billion in Wall Street bonuses).
And yet, there are still an estimated 600,000 people today who are not covered when the rainy seasons come. According to aid agencies’ own estimates, only 35% of the needs for tents and tarps in Port-au-Prince are being met – and this up from 30% a week and a half ago. While the rains haven’t come yet, they surely will. I join many others in asking why this is, especially given this outpouring of generosity.
But there is hope for moving beyond some of the obstacles to aid delivery, Schuller writes:
One problem appears to be on its way to be resolved: the lack of coordination. The U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti has created a website that allows donors, NGOs, and grassroots organizations to coordinate their efforts. It does have a wiki function which means that the groups doing the work can post what they are doing, and smaller, grassroots efforts are invited to use this tool as well as the large NGOs. It behooves everyone who is offering aid to use this tool, a directory of Civil Society Organizations: http://csohaiti.org/
Schuller also examines the problems and challenges in communicating with the intended recipients of aid on the ground, the plan to relocate quake survivors from Champs-de-Mars and other settlements in Port-au-Prince, the need for accountability for NGO’s delivering aid, what he terms “disaster voyeurism,” the politics of USAID’s Haiti aid, how best to provide aid responsibly, and describes the tremendous capacity of Haiti’s quake survivors to self-organize and assist each other, and much more.
See the whole post here.
