By Megan Rowling | Thu., January 27, 6:48 PM | Comments ( 0 )
A woman stands inside the destroyed cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Jan. 12, 2011. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
There may be no such thing as a perfect humanitarian response, but most aid workers admit that getting it right after the two huge disasters that hit in 2010 - the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods - has been particularly tricky.
A year after the quake in Haiti killed as many as 300,000 people and six months after the monsoon rains in Pakistan affected some 20 million, the general feeling is that a lot of good work has been done to save lives and get communities back on their feet. But the aid system has been hugely over-stretched and, sadly, relief hasn't reached all those in need.
The media does have a tendency to dwell on the negative aspects of disaster response - it's not personal, we do the same with pretty much any news story. Yet spotting the problems that persist in Haiti and Pakistan doesn't take a great deal of effort.
Piles of uncleared rubble line the streets in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, while some 800,000 people still live in tent camps. In Pakistan's southern province of Sindh, thousands of families are surviving pretty much out in the open, in or near the remains of their wrecked homes and water-logged fields.
Kids aren't going to school. They are going hungry. And the world seems powerless to stop the suffering.
But is it really fair to expect governments and aid agencies to meet all these people's basic needs within a relatively short timeframe?
HALF-FULL, HALF-EMPTY
Often it's a case of glass half-full, half-empty. While trying to get an overview of progress six months after the onset of the Pakistan floods, I am quite shocked to learn that only around half the households that need emergency shelter this winter have received it.
But Brigadier Sajid Naeem, who heads up the emergency operations unit of the government's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), tells me "with confidence" that the overall situation has "fairly stabilised". In most of the affected districts - except in the south - the water has receded, and around 95 percent of the millions who had to leave their homes have gone back to their villages.
Several million people are getting food aid on a monthly basis, nearly 10 million people have been given medical attention, and 3.5 million access to safe water through rehabilitated systems. Seeds and fertilisers have been distributed to more than half a million farmers, and nearly 1.5 million have been registered for direct cash compensation from the government. These achievements are not to be sniffed at.
Yet, impressive as the numbers are, they also highlight the massive amount of work that remains to be done. For example, reconstruction of permanent houses, schools and other infrastructure has not even started.
The NDMA's Naeem can't say how long rebuilding is likely to take, adding "it all depends on what you have in your pocket". But with the government diverting money from its development budget to flood reconstruction, it's clear that Pakistan is running to stand still.
'THREE DISASTERS IN ONE'
Understandably, the government - and aid agencies working on this disaster - want their critics, as well as donors, to comprehend the geographical and human scale of what they are dealing with.
"When we evaluate the response, the magnitude of the floods must be kept in mind," says Naeem. "It was so huge that almost the entire rainfall predicted over the monsoon period came in four to five days."
In a briefing note for the media, the NDMA points out that the "unprecedented floods" stretched the entire length of Pakistan, and affected a geographical area and number of people more than twice those impacted by the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and the Haiti earthquake.
"It would be an enormous challenge even for the most advanced country of the world," the note says.
Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Pakistan, agrees that he and his aid agency colleagues have a very tough job on their hands, describing the response as "far from perfect".
"We have to look at how the humanitarian system responds to such a mega disaster," he tells me. "Looking at the regions affected, this one amounts to what would normally be three disasters in their own right. There is room to improve."
In a report released this week, the non-governmental aid group Oxfam criticises the U.N. apparatus in Pakistan for not having enough experienced staff to coordinate the relief work in the initial phase, and for failing to deploy into the field fast enough, which led to "gaps, duplication and delays".
It says coordination between the "clusters" - which bring together agencies working on different areas such as food, shelter, and water and sanitation to avoid fragmentation - is still weak. And cumbersome procedures for dishing out money to aid groups working on the ground have been slow und unsuited to the needs of a rapidly growing emergency, "hindering NGOs trying to scale up and deliver urgently needed aid", Oxfam says.
Bessler argues that coordination in this particular emergency has been a huge challenge, partly because there are many different elements of government to be consulted, both at the national and provincial level. And the north-to-south reach of the flooding means the United Nations has had to set up hubs in several different cities, all managed by coordinators with adequate capacity and knowledge.
The U.N. official says questions are now being asked about how to do things better, including whether clusters should be led by neutral individuals rather than designated agencies, to reduce the risk of bias and competition.
The navel-gazing is also happening at the top level. The U.N. emergency relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, said last September, shortly after taking up the post, that the world "can't just go back to business as usual in terms of how we tackle these large complex emergencies".
"Having seen the tsunami, having seen Haiti and seen what is going on in Pakistan I think we have to recognise that we face bigger and bigger crises and we are going to have to work in a completely different way if we are going to grasp these," Amos told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York, promising a review of how U.N. agencies and aid groups respond to major disasters.
BUILDING BACK BETTER?
As for the Pakistani government, it has also come under fire for failing to prevent so many people's lives from being shattered by the floods. The Oxfam report offers some praise for its deployment of over 20,000 troops in successful rescue operations and efforts by civil servants to coordinate and manage the provision of assistance.
"However, in a country prone to disasters, the state should have been better prepared to deliver an adequate and timely response," it says. "Its struggle to do so is largely - at various levels - because of weak state institutions, conflict, and lack of effective control over parts of its territory, and years of under-investment in its civilian disaster management capacity."
The aid group calls on the government to use the flood crisis as an opportunity to tackle underlying social inequities, which it says have increased people's vulnerability to disasters, together with the rising threat of climate change.
Certainly high levels of long-term poverty in both Pakistan and Haiti have exacerbated the impacts of last year's catastrophes, which have wiped out many of the fragile development gains made in recent years. But, if done right, reconstruction and rehabilitation can offer the chance to "build back better" - to borrow a rather over-used slogan - not just in terms of safer buildings but also more resilient livelihoods and communities.
Will that happen in Pakistan? A shortage of funds for relief and early recovery activities - let alone the reconstruction phase - makes one wonder. But NDMA official Naeem sees some cause for optimism.
The 2005 earthquake which hit the north of the country, killing nearly 75,000 people, brought about a sea change in Pakistan's previously reactive approach to disasters. In early 2007, the government set up the NDMA, as well as similar institutions at provincial and district levels, partly aimed at protecting people from potential crises.
Alongside a range of training, assessment and awareness-raising activities, Naeem says a checklist for disaster risk reduction (DRR) has been approved and adopted by the national planning commission, so that all new building projects will have to take the guidelines into account. A small victory, perhaps, given the daunting clear-up operation Pakistan now faces, but an important one nonetheless.
"People now take it seriously that reconstruction will not be fruitful without considering DRR," he says. "We have to veer more vigorously onto this track in the wake of the floods."
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