Patrick Meier: Disaster Response, Self-Organization and Resilience: Shocking Insights from the Haiti Humanitarian Assistance Evaluation

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Non-Governmental
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Patrick Meier

Disaster Response, Self-Organization and Resilience: Shocking Insights from the Haiti Humanitarian Assistance Evaluation

Tulane University and the State University of Haiti just released a rather damming evaluation of the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12th. The comprehensive assessment, which takes a participatory approach and applies a novel resilience framework, finds that despite several billion dollars in “aid”, humanitarian assistance did not make a detectable contribution to the resilience of the Haitian population and in some cases increased certain communities' vulnerability and even caused harm. Welcome to supply-side humanitarian assistance directed by external actors.

 

“All we need is information. Why can't we get information?”

A quote taken from one of many focus groups conducted by the evaluators. “There was little to no information exchange between the international community tasked with humanitarian response and the Haitian NGOs, civil society or affected persons / communities themselves.” Information is critical for effective humanitarian assistance, which should include two objectives: “preventing excess mortality and human suffering in the immediate, and in the longer term, improving the community’s ability to respond to potential future shocks.”

This longer term objective thus focuses on resilience, which the evaluation team defines as follows:

“Resilience is the capacity of the affected community to self-organize, learn from and vigorously recover from adverse situations stronger than it was before.”

This link between resilience and capacity for self-organization is truly profound and incredibly important. To be sure, the evaluation reveals that “the humani-tarian response frequently undermined the capacity of Haitian individuals and organizations.” This completely violates the Hippocratic Oath of Do No Harm. The evaluators thus “promote the attainment of self-sufficiency, rather than the ongoing dependency on standard humanitarian assistance.” Indeed, “focus groups indicated that solutions to help people help themselves were desired.”

I find it particularly telling that many aid organizations interviewed for this assessment were reluctant to assist the evaluators in fully capturing and analyzing resource flows, which are critical for impact evaluation. “The lack of transparency in program dispersal of resources was a major constraint in our research of effective program evaluation.” To this end, the evaluation team argue that “by strengthening Haitian institutions’ ability to monitor and evaluate, Haitians will more easily be able to track and monitor international efforts.”

I completely disagree with this remedy. The institutions are part of the problem, and besides, institution-building takes years if not decades. To assume there is even political will and the resources for such efforts is at best misguided. If resilience is about strengthening the capacity of affected communities to self-organize, then I would focus on just that, applying existing technologies and processes that both catalyze and facilitate demand-side, people-centered self-organization. My previous blog post on “Technology and Building Resilient Societies to Mitigate the Impact of Disasters” elaborates on this point.

In sum, “resilience is the critical link between disaster and development; monitoring it will ensure that relief efforts are supporting, and not eroding, household and community capabilities.” This explains why crowdsourcing and data mining efforts like those of Ushahidi, HealthMap and UN Global Pulse are important for disaster response, self-organization and resilience.

See Also:

Major Aid Organizations “Duped Donors” and “Failed Haiti” Group Charges

Haiti Rolling Update from 20100120…CLOSED

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