More co-ordination needed for disaster relief: experts
Too many aid groups in Nepal can add to chaos after quake
Two years ago — knowing that the ancient city of Kathmandu sat on a fault line teetering on a catastrophic slip — Nepalese and international disaster officials gathered to plan how they would respond to a massive earthquake.
Among other provisions, they mapped out all the open spaces where shelters could be set up and how basic services, such as food and medical aid, would be provided.
But even with the best-laid plans, disaster management experts say crises like Saturday’s earthquake tend to be followed by organizational chaos, including a lack of co-ordination and even clashes between local authorities and international agencies, as well as the arrival of some NGOs that, while well intentioned, really have no business being there.
Take the example of Haiti, the Caribbean nation ravaged in 2010 by an earthquake that claimed more than 220,000 lives. A blistering report found that the international response “followed the same chaotic pattern as past disasters.”
“Information was scarce, decisions were not evidence-based and overall sectoral co-ordination presented serious shortcomings,” read the report from the Pan American Health Organization.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s quake in Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, whose death toll has now surpassed 4,000, Canada joined numerous countries in an- nouncing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
So far, Canada has committed some $5 million in aid to the South Asian nation and has promised to match — dollar-for-dollar — all contributions to the Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund between April 25 and May 25.
The government has also deployed more than 40 Canadian Armed Forces personnel, including 18 members of the Disaster Assistance Response Team, seven urban search-and-rescue team members and six medical personnel. They’re expected to arrive in Nepal by early Wednesday.
However, when rescuers and aid groups from different countries descend on a disaster zone, it is not uncommon for them to have to wait days before they’re deployed, said Ali Asgary, a disaster management expert at York University.
“Often when they arrive, there are complications. It may take some days to find their exact locations (where they’re needed),” he said. “They wait and wait.”
The agency playing a lead co-ordinating role in Nepal is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It has set up an on-site operations centre to dispatch search-andrescue teams to help local crews dig through the rubble.
The agency is also overseeing the deployment of teams to determine whether people have adequate access to water, food, sanitation and shelter.
Having a strong co-ordinator is critical because the last thing you want is five agencies deploying to the same district, asking community leaders the same questions about what their needs are, said Jessie Thomson, director of the humanitarian assistance and emergency team at CARE Canada, a member of the aid organization CARE International, which had 150 staff already in Nepal.
Often these initial planning meetings can be chaotic with 50 people crammed into a room, Thomson said.
“Can you imagine what chairing a meeting like that can be like?” she said. “It can go on for hours.”
Reviews of past disasters have shown that a recurring problem is that local government authorities sometimes are not party to — and are even excluded from — these planning sessions.
But as John Holmes, the UN’s former emergency relief co-ordinator, wrote in a recent blog post, sometimes involving local authorities isn’t always so easy, and “messy” politics can get in the way, as when the Haitian president insisted that food aid was not needed a few weeks after the 2010 quake.
“On occasion,” he wrote, “local views … may need to be overridden in the short term.”
Another problem, Thomson said, occurs when smaller aid groups show up in a disaster area but fail to co-ordinate with other groups — and essentially go off and do their own thing.
There were thousands of such groups in Haiti. The “proliferation of actors” included “a number wholly unprepared or even incompetent health actors who bypassed and overburdened co-ordination mechanisms,” according to the Pan American Health Organization assessment that came out a couple of years later.
Ali Asgary is hopeful things will be more co-ordinated in Nepal than they were in Haiti. Unlike Haiti, whose government infrastructure was in ruins, the Nepalese government is still functioning. And while Haiti’s disaster preparedness before the quake focused narrowly on seasonal climatic events, Nepal has spent the last few years working with the UN and NGOs on large-scale disaster mitigation and response strategies.
TV images have shown, for instance, that newer buildings in Nepal generally withstood the quake. Unfortunately, rehabilitating older buildings is something that takes many years, he said.
Experts agree that the best way international agencies and donors can help developing countries prevent loss of life from a natural disaster is to focus attention on helping those countries help themselves — by building up their capacity to respond to a catastrophe.
“The majority of search-andrescue operations are done by local people anyways. This is what we often tell agencies,” Asgary said. “We need to spend more time and resources to enable local people.”
Often when they arrive, there are complications. It may take some days to find their exact locations. They wait and wait.