11/29/10 USA Today: Much of aid for Haiti is still unspent

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

Christian charity World Vision has spent half of the $192 million it raised after the Haitian earthquake in January, most of it on tents, tarps, food and drinking water.

Partners in Health, which provides health care in developing nations, has spent a third of the $86 million it raised after the disaster, much of it on emergency care in 15 facilities in central Haiti.

The American Red Cross has spent 39% of the $476 million it raised, most of it on emergency aid such as tents, tarps, food and hygiene kits.

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Catholic Relief Services spent 32% of the $196 million it received for Haiti. Most of it went to food and shelter.

Ten months after the magnitude-7 earthquake that killed 230,000 people and destroyed at least 60% of Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince, some relief agencies have not spent the bulk of the donations they raised after the disaster. They say they want to use the rest for the country’s long-term recovery, but they can’t get rolling because roads are torn up, government agencies aren’t functioning, and the economy is at a standstill. Agencies are also working to contain a rapid-spreading cholera outbreak.

“The pace of recovery is slow,” says Randy Strash, World Vision’s strategy director for emergency response. Agencies that want to build shelters for the 1.5 million people left homeless after the quake, he says, struggle with lost records of land ownership and insufficient available land.

World Vision has built 393 of the 3,520 shelters it planned.

Overall, the United Nations says, relief agencies have built 19,000 shelters that can house about 94,000 people, about 6% of the homeless.

The Haiti earthquake was followed by $1.4 billion in donations to 96 organizations, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. The center has not tracked how much of that has been spent.

The center has been tracing donations to disaster relief since 9/11. It found that although needs are different after each disaster, the pattern of giving is similar, research director Una Osili says. She says there is a steep rise in donations in the first six weeks to two months after a disaster, then the pace drops off.

Making a donation is an immediate emotional response to a disaster based on what people see on the news or stories they read, she says, but longer term, it is harder to raise money for rebuilding.

As a result, relief groups will “go for what they can” right away, says Saundra Schimmelpfennig, a consultant who created The Charity Rater, an online resource for people considering donations.

Osili says aid groups need to do a better job of assessing how effective their spending is.

“In Haiti, it’s too early to tell,” she says. “You are not even at the one-year mark.”

Michael Wiest, executive vice president for charitable giving at Catholic Relief Services, says part of the challenge in Haiti is a desire to let Haitians carry out their own recovery. However, the government, churches and other groups were so weakened by the earthquake that they are slow in taking action.

“There’s a dynamic tension between empowering Haitians vs. providing immediate assistance as quickly as possible carried out by American and European agencies,” he says.

At the American Red Cross, spokeswoman Julie Sell says in an e-mail, “Each individual project is subject to regular monitoring and sets individual targets. Progress reports are submitted monthly, quarterly and annually and HQ and field staff coordinate regularly to monitor and ensure that each project is on track to meet its targets.”

She says that of the $184 million the group has spent, 38% was spent on temporary shelter, such as tarps and tents; 35% on emergency relief, such as food; 12% on cash grants for families and entrepreneurs rebuilding businesses; and the rest on water and sanitation, health and disaster preparedness.

The Red Cross has made a commitment to Haiti to spend $43 million to build transitional shelters.

About 1,460 shelters, each housing an average of five people, have been built, Sell says.

The watchdog group Disaster Accountability Project, which surveyed 197 aid groups in Haiti in July, says only six groups provided regularly updated, public and detailed reports on their work.

“The result, then, is that people base their donations on emotion and not the facts on the ground,” says Ben Smilowitz, the project’s founder.

He says that can mean donating to groups that lack the local experience or capacity to do the job they promise.

He says the latest emergency in Haiti, a cholera outbreak that has hospitalized 33,485 people and killed 1,721 makes him wonder whether aid groups are spending enough money on sanitation and supplying clean water.

“When something like cholera happens, you can’t help but wonder why more is not being spent,” he says.

Susan Sayers, interim development director for Partners in Health, says the outbreak was the health crisis many feared after the earthquake. She says it occurred in rural areas, which haven’t received the money and attention Port-au-Prince did, even though those communities are crowded with people who fled the capital.

“There’s an impression that a lot of money was flown into Haiti but that there is not much to show for it,” Sayers says. “As long as the shelter situation remains as precarious as it is, it’s a hard impression to combat.”