Expert Views: How should the aid world do big disasters better?

An earthquake-affected area in downtown Port-au-Prince is seen in this combination photo. Eight months after the quake shattered large parts of the city, more than 1 million people left homeless by one of the world's worst disasters are still living in camps and critics say reconstruction efforts have barely got under way. Pictures taken Mar. 16, 2010 (top) and Sept. 28, 2010. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

An earthquake-affected area in downtown Port-au-Prince is seen in this combination photo. Eight months after the quake shattered large parts of the city, more than 1 million people left homeless by one of the world's worst disasters are still living in camps and critics say reconstruction efforts have barely got under way. Pictures taken Mar. 16, 2010 (top) and Sept. 28, 2010. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

LONDON (AlertNet) - Critics say the humanitarian response to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January was slow, inefficient and poorly coordinated.

At an event this week to review lessons learned from the disaster, experts discussed the problems the international aid community faced, from leadership issues to corruption and relief workers' lack of experience in dealing with urban crises.

The speakers were John Holmes, director of the Ditchley Foundation and former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator; Ross Mountain, director of a humanitarian emergency response review for Britain's Department for International Development; and Linda Poteat, director of disaster response for the U.S.-based NGO coalition InterAction.

Here is a selection of their comments:

# on the failure of U.N. and international aid agencies to involve local people

John Holmes: Why do we never seem to learn the lesson ... about involving local communities more, involving local actors, being more sensitive to local concerns? I think partly because we have to recognise in the inevitable chaos and urgency of any major natural disaster like this, it's just much harder to do in practice.

There is something more fundamental here about how difficult that is, certainly in the first weeks of a response when you're simply focusing on getting stuff out of the door and stopping people from dying. It's sometimes difficult, no matter how much training you've had, to involve local civil society as much as you would like, and there's always the attitude that they are helpless victims and not actors themselves, which is something that must be overcome.

Linda Poteat: We tend to work with local actors as a box-ticking exercise for our donors in a lot of cases, and we don't really spend time with them, to actually help them build up because they are perhaps, in some cases, ultimately going to become our competition.

# on leadership woes

John Holmes: Did we get the leadership right? No, I don't think we did for a lot of very complicated reasons although I don't think we got it as wrong as some people suggested either. Certainly, I never believed the U.S. view that somehow there could be some big person come in from the outside, solve all the problems and cut through all the bureaucracy.

On the humanitarian coordination side ... there was a constant battle (as to) whether there should have been a separate resident coordinator doing the development side and a separate humanitarian coordinator ... whether we should split (the roles) because clearly the challenges were too much for any one person, or keep them together because that was the best way to keep synergy between humanitarian response and recovery. That was a discussion that was resolved in the end in favour of one person, but a lot of effort was wasted in the process of arguing about it.

Ross Mountain: The leadership of (aid sector) clusters is an issue. Some people still think the cluster is an exercise of getting together and sharing information. That is a recipe for failure ... The objective of any coordination is to be more effective for the beneficiaries. That has to be the leitmotif, not making sure that everyone of the 400 health NGOs can actually get into a room and have their five minutes in the sun. It's about results and impact, surely.

# on the risk of corruption

John Holmes: Everyone is very conscious of the corruption problem and the transparency issues that are there. Various mechanisms have been put in place to make sure the money is being tracked and therefore it's gone to where it's supposed to go to. There's a committee of Haitian civil society which is supervising this, and of course the international community is worried about this too. The only thing I would say is, if you obsess about this point too much, you finish up where we started in Haiti, which is bypassing the government, disempowering them, condemning Haiti to being dysfunctional for good. So you probably have to take some risks that some money will go missing, but you have to go through the government and not try and leave them out.

# on working with the military

John Holmes: There's a more general point about the military actors particularly in natural disaster situations ... there's no point having our heads in the sand about this. They are there, they will be there for most natural disasters. They will be very important actors, so we need to get on with them. We need to have the civil-military coordination structure set up ... in advance and not try to improvise on the ground because it gets too difficult.

# on flaws in assessing survivors' needs

Ross Mountain: The needs assessment (is) extremely artisanal at the present time ... there's got to be a better way of getting a clearer take on this. If military people can read the licence plate on your car, how is it we can't know rather better what the extent of damage is without saying 'what do you think?'. This is a major weakness in our system.

Linda Poteat: The needs assessment issue is a big one. This is something where we have to discipline ourselves because when you have all the sectoral folks wanting to do one assessment together, everyone has 10 questions they want to ask. So you end up having 80 to 100 questions, which is almost impossible for the statisticians to compress.

# on the likelihood of more 'mega-disasters'

Ross Mountain: We're likely in the natural disaster area to confront more and more of these kinds of disasters ... Indisputably, it has been - be it Haiti, be it Pakistan now - beyond the effective equipment of the international community to deal with. We have not got the tools, the horses, the approaches to do it. We really need to, if we're looking ahead to the future, see how we can deal with this. Are we ever going to be able to manage this?

# on the challenge of working in urban areas

Linda Poteat: We do not know how to do urban disasters. All of us were trained in rural response. We have particular challenges in an urban situation with water and sanitation - you just can't dig up a latrine in the middle of the city. We're used to camps that are delimited, where you set up your own security. In a city you can't really do that. People were settling in open spaces. A lot of the NGOs were really nervous about taking on the camp management responsibility because they couldn't secure those spaces.