7/12/10 NY Times: Report Faults Haiti Aid Groups on Openness

July 12, 2010, 3:16 pm

Report Faults Haiti Aid Groups on Openness

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

New York Times

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/report-faults-haiti-aid-groups-on-openness/

Over the weekend, while attending a meeting of hundreds of specialists involved in softening the blows from natural hazards, I met Ben Smilowitz, the executive director of Disaster Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization trying to track the performance of aid agencies and organizations.

This appears to be a tough task given the findings of the groupís new report on the lack of transparency by aid organizations that rushed to raise money to help Haitians after the devastating earthquake six months ago, but haven’t always been in a rush to say how the money has been spent.

Clearly the epic scale of the task in Haiti, with only 28,000 of 1.5 million refugees housed so far in anything other than tents, could easily be used to justify a lack of focus on describing projects to the public.

But some of the findings in the report are disturbing, particularly given how aggressively many aid groups promoted their work using the wrenching imagery from the shattered neighborhoods around Port-au-Prince.

Of 197 organizations that the group found had solicited money for activities in Haiti, it found (among other things):

– Only 6 had publicly available, regularly updated, factual situation reports detailing their activities.

– The vast majority – 128 – did not have factual situation reports available on their websites, relying instead upon anecdotal descriptions of activities or emotional appeals.

– Many groups claim to provide details of their activities on their blogs. However, many organizations’ blogs are full of appeals to emotion, pictures of children, and purely anecdotal accounts about touching moments during a particular delivery of relief.

Here’s how Smilowitz summarized the situation in a statement Monday:

After the quake, the public was eager to donate, but it had to know which groups already had the greatest capacity to deliver, which groups were already in Haiti, and which were planning trips for six months later. Looking back over the last six months, the lack of transparency by relief groups has caused much of the coordination problems that continue to plague the response.

The group maintains a toll-free line (866-9-TIP-DAP) as a means for disaster survivors, workers or volunteers to report gaps in disaster prevention, response, relief and recovery services, along with instances in which money may have been been misspent.