The Top 100 NGOs 2013. - Akshaya Patra

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The gloBal Journal + January & FeBruary 2013
ThegloBalJournal.neT
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coverage gaps were filled. His attempts
ended in exasperation.
When the earthquake struck, longtime
Haiti hands and clear-eyed aid leaders
thus faced a paradox. They knew that
outmoded, uncoordinated assistance
had not only failed to help in the past,
but also helped create the fragility
exposed by the disaster. On the other
hand, there was now an unspeakably
dire emergency, to be followed by
long-term, resource-exhausting
reconstruction. To add final fuel to the
fire, even more NGOs – many with no
experience in Haiti whatsoever – were
rushing into the disaster zone, lured
both by a genuine desire to help and a
bonanza of donations pouring in from
shocked observers around the world. In
the US alone, private donations reached
$1.4 billion by year’s end – equating to
approximately $6 per American adult.
Ultimately, more than $3 billion would
be donated to international NGOs
after the quake, part of a gargantuan
pledged total of $16.3 billion in all.
Coordination would be more crucial,
yet harder to achieve, than ever.
The approach chosen after the
catastrophe was to coordinate aid actors
through a system of humanitarian
‘clusters’, in which efforts would be
organized by subject area, such as
housing or sanitation. Representatives
from aid groups of all sizes and
provenances – from Médecins Sans
Frontières to the newest aid-group
leader of all, the movie star Sean Penn
– gathered for regular meetings to share
data, discuss results, and agree on
new strategies. The system’s top-level
coordinators were in turn to liaise with
deployed military and other government
agencies in hopes of achieving a
consistent response. Variations on this
basic strategy had been employed after
the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and
elsewhere, including at a smaller scale
in Haiti after a series of deadly tropical
storms in 2008.
As I trace in my new book, The Big
Truck That Went By: How the World
Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a
Disaster, the system failed. A critical
moment came at the beginning of
February 2010, toward the end of the
first month after the quake. At that
point, most people in the quake zone
had moved out of the acute crisis stage.