The media and political response to Haiti’s disaster was as predictable as the effect of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Port-au-Prince. The pictures and emotions are still running high, and people are giving generously to more than 10,000 charitable agencies. The scale of that is bewildering; the opportunities for corruption are proportionally large.
A natural disaster is the prime fundraising opportunity for any NGO, and the posters go up on their websites right away. Yet very few will have means of immediate delivery to the stricken location. It does not follow that they will immediately forward all receipts to agencies that do have feet on the ground.
Haiti is an especially difficult case, because its government and infrastructure were entirely dysfunctional even before the earthquake, and its social conditions such that military force is necessary to distribute goods.
The country has no match in the Western Hemisphere: it is more comparable to the 20 or more failed states in Africa, which endure natural disasters with much less international attention because they are not tourist destinations.
That the various aid agencies on the ground in Haiti are doing their best under the circumstances, to sort out who is delivering what to where and how, goes almost without saying. Proximity to real human suffering can bring out the best in people, even lifelong bureaucrats. This is not the issue in Haiti, or anywhere else that immediate disaster relief is being delivered. Nor need we worry, at first, about waste, when the priority is to save lives.
Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works.
A number of reviews were conducted of aid after the Asian tsunami, five years ago. I was struck by one that Laura Freschi cited on the Forbes magazine website. It answered the question, “How can you go wrong by sending drugs?”
This study showed that most of the drugs donated to Aceh province in Indonesia—the region which sustained most damage—were of kinds not needed by the survivors. Compounding this, more than two-thirds were labelled in languages which local aid workers could not read. “These drugs wasted health workers’ time, took up limited storage space in hospitals, and cost millions of dollars to destroy safely.”
My impression has long been that donations in kind are almost always counter-productive, and donations in money can be useful only if people with direct knowledge of needs at the location are dictating the urgent spending decisions. The rest of the effort is getting in the way.
This problem is exacerbated by our “culture of narcissism,” which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to “do something now.”
The impulse to “write a cheque” to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies.
Love is not a declaration, but instead an action, and those who are troubled by the hideous conditions in which so many on our planet live and die had better devote more time than is required by PayPal.
A hard and unwelcome truth (to those who want the charitable equivalent of instant gratification) is the limit on the amount of money that can be usefully spent on a disaster, before counter-productive efforts begin to dominate all spending. By counter-productive I mean, especially, in a case like Haiti, restoring the circumstances that keep its people in desperation, including the power of a kleptocracy to create political obstacles to any direct human enterprise—whether profitable or charitable.
The first part of disaster relief is uncontroversial: food, water, medicine, shelter. Surprisingly, that doesn’t cost a whole lot, nor take very long. It’s the “peace and development” programs that follow which absorb the big money—the growing of permanent new branches of bureaucracy to mind the population thus saved.
Haiti is not a basket case from the absence of foreign aid. Quite the contrary.
I lived many years in Asia, and much of my journalistic work was focused on “development issues.” I’ve seen the consequences of aid dependency with my own eyes. It is the same story everywhere, where people are desperately poor: they have no freedom, they are landless, everything belongs to an exploiting class. And that exploiting class is, almost invariably, “leftist,” and the nearly-exclusive beneficiary of foreign aid.
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