Why Aid is Slow Getting into Haiti- Re-posted

The above-mentioned piece has now been re-posted following publication as an editorial in Australia’s The Age newspaper. Fun times.

Article now posted under the “Articles on Aid Work” section of this site- click here to read more.

Why Aid is Slow Getting into Haiti- Where Did You Go?

Hi folks,

The article I posted on Friday about the constraints faced by the international community on getting aid into Haiti has had to be pulled from my site for a little while. The piece is being picked up by The Age newspaper (one of the larger national papers in Australia) to be run as an editorial tomorrow and they have requested I suspend the post until after the paper is published tomorrow. I’ll have the post back up by 9am Melbourne time Tuesday. Sorry about that. Thanks for all of you who have dropped by to read, leave comments, retweet, etc. etc.- I’ve really appreciated the interest and coverage.

Tris

Why Aid is Slow Getting in to Haiti

It’s been two and a half days since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, leveling the city and killing what the Red Cross is estimating up to 50,000 people. Hundreds of thousands more are injured or homeless.

Already- and who can blame them?- people are complaining at the slow pace of aid delivery. At the time of writing (Friday night in Australia) there had been reports of angry residents blocking roads with the bodies of earthquake victims in macabre protest (I’m not sure how this is supposed to improve aid delivery).

It isn’t uncommon, in the wake of a disaster, for aid to take a while to reach those who need it. There is always footage of some angry resident complaining that promised aid has not arrived. However in the prevailing culture of Port-au-Prince, dissatisfaction of this kind swiftly leads to violence. This is a problem that needs fixing fast, or there will be a lot of very cross Haitians, who have over the years repeatedly demonstrated a penchant for angry mobs and violent protest.

In addition, slow aid delivery gives the international community in general a bad name. The UN and NGOs get flak in the media. Our donors get suspicious and edgy. We get given less money. (I hear the eyeballs of the cynics out there rolling, but in reality this does mean, for better or for worse, less material assistance reaching people directly impacted by the disaster, which is ultimately what we’re about).

In the case of Haiti, there’s every reason to think that aid delivery is going to be slow, and far slower than appears acceptable in the face of a disaster of this magnitude. It will be easy to point the finger at governments, charities and the UN for not overcoming obstacles in their way and doing what they’re supposed to do best. However, let’s take a moment and look at why aid has been- and will continue to be- slow reaching Haiti’s victims.

Airports– Port-au-Prince has one. It’s small for an international airport. I’ve flown into it, and there’s not much there. I understand it actually has capacity for nine or ten planes at a time. Planes take time to land, to offload, and to take off again. There’s things like refueling, paperwork and clearances to consider. Different types of planes require different types of equipment to offload them, and different amounts of time.

The airport was damaged in the earthquake and is not yet back up to full capacity. Planes need fuel, but there’s very little available in Port-au-Prince, and it’s heavy and expensive to fly in.  Airport staff are among the victims, and many will be digging their families out of rubble. The US army is reputed to be stepping in to manage the airport. A strict system to allow planes in and out of the airport will be established, placing an absolute ceiling on the physical volume of aid that can come in. In other words, it doesn’t matter how organized, prepared or resourced you are: there’s only one airport, and it can only process so much cargo a day.

Seaports- The main seaport in Port-au-Prince was damaged in the quake. The access road from the port to the city is ostensibly buckled five feet into the air. Aid ships have already been turned away from the dock. Offloading cargo ships at a modern dock isn’t a matter of pitching sacks over the side- there are 20- and 40-foot steel containers to contend with which must be craned or trucked off decks. If the heavy lifting gear is damaged, you can have all the aid supplies in the world- you can’t offload it. Until the port is functioning again, there will be serious restrictions on how aid can get through.

Roads– As of today the roads into Port-au-Prince from neighbouring provinces were largely accessible. However roads inside Port-au-Prince remained blocked by debris and by people too scared or unable to return home. Some roads are accessible by four-wheel drive. Heavy trucks- those not damaged in the quake- will struggle to get through the debris. There will be a limited number of transport vehicles (and drivers to run them) available, and a limited number of access roads to drive on until they are cleared. So even if supplies make it to key points of entry, distributing them within the city will be a slow process, again limited by available logistical resources.

Neighbours– The Dominican Republic borders Haiti, was unaffected by the earthquake, and has seaports and an international airport. It is already established as an alternative logistics hub for the relief effort. Roads between the two countries aren’t great and there are reputed to be some safety issues in driving them. Again the limitations on (and inflated cost of) transportation vehicles- trucks and helicopters- from the DR to Haiti will be the main limiting factor.

Communications– Landline, cell-phone and internet communications (not to mention power) are all down at the moment in Port-au-Prince, so communicating with different parts of the city to identify access routes, populations, resources and alternative solutions is difficult. Communicating needs to the outside world is also difficult. Problem-solving, especially where multiple stakeholders are involved, such as trucking companies, government bodies or partner NGOs, is complex and frustrating when telecommunications are not functioning.

Staff– Many if not most of the UN and international agency staff- national and expatriate- in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake have been affected. Some have been killed. Many have lost homes, or loved ones, or both. Many will be unable to assist in relief operations. Key roles lie unfilled. The same is true of transportation companies, service providers, and government departments overseeing infrastructure and logistics. New staff are flying in to fill some of these gaps, but they are less familiar with the Haitian context and will not make decisions as smoothly or as quickly as their local counterparts may have.

Solutions– All of this not to say that the operation is hopeless, or nothing can be done. The response community as a whole and as individuals are aware of these challenges, and are tackling them in a myriad of different ways, so that hopefully, over the coming days, solutions will be found. Access roads can be cleared, staff brought up to speed, communication systems replaced and streamlined systems put in place. However the reality is, this will still take time.

During this time, an equal reality is that people will die. Men, women and children injured in the earthquake will not get the treatment they need. Infants forced to drink unclean water because the pipe network has broken will die from dehydration brought about through diarrhoeal disease. Frail or chronically ill people left shocked and exposed without shelter may pass away.

We acknowledge this will happen. But the constraints listed above will not simply go away because we don’t like them. We will address them as quickly and efficiently as possible, and we hope that in doing so, the number of people who die needlessly will be minimalized. We hope that in doing so, we will not make unecessary mistakes that cost the lives of innocents.

Many of these challenges remain outside our direct control, lying either with physical constraints that are effectively absolute, or with levels of state authority we cannot easily manipulate.

Of course it is not acceptable to sit back, throw up our hands, and say, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do to solve this problem. Woe is me!” We must- and are- throwing all our efforts at these problems to solve them.

But in keeping the above in mind, we should be careful not to slam the international community unfairly for the slow delivery of assistance into a highly complex and challenge-wrought environment.

The optimum solution is to have the necessary systems and resources in place before an event like this occurs. Alternative logistics plans, sufficient hardware, expanded port and airport facilities, redundant systems of governance should an event paralyze the existing structure.

As you can see when you write it out, not very realistic.

What is important to bear in mind is that the most valuable resources are the ones already on the ground. Our organization, for example, already had stockpiles of emergency supplies based in different warehouses around the country that could be immediately mobilized, irregardless of airport snaffus. Likewise, over 350 in-country staff to call on to assist without needing to fly them in, many of them already trained and experienced in disaster response. Many other agencies are in a similar position.

Community members are always the first responders and the people who, far outstripping the efforts of the UN and NGOs, save the most lives. They pull loved ones and neighbours from the wreckage, share the limited resources they themselves have with their communities, and are both the first and most effective responders.

By providing the local people themselves with basic first-aid, rescue and survival skills- not to mention encouraging people to have an emergency stockpile- food, candles, bottled water- the effectiveness of this first response can be greatly enhanced. This is undoubtedly the most effective and impactful way forward, and is the way many NGOs, my own included, continue to approach disaster relief in concert with more traditional response mechanisms.

Today all we can really do is hope that the authorities able to make decisions make them wisely, and that those attempting to overcome obstacles find creative insight. And we can pray that the community members themselves who have survived the earthquake and are now supporting others will continue to have the strength and capacity to keep their brothers and sisters in good health and spirits.

Putting the Complex Back into ‘Complex Humanitarian Emergency’

In the aid worker’s lexicon of Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) we call them CHEs- Complex Humanitarian Emergencies.  They’re what we get when we layer a natural or human-made disaster over a situation that was already pretty messed up to begin with (see, for example, Darfur, or the war in Eastern DRC, or northern Pakistan).

CHEs are typified by large-scale emergency events (usually covering a significant portion of one country, or several countries), generally involve some level of acute emergency layered over a chronically unsuccessful context (a cyclone, or food shortages, or a mass displacement of people in a war zone or an unstable region), and usually take place in a situation where the national or regional government is either unwilling or unable to solve the problem, and is therefore characterised by failure of state or governance systems.  They also usually take years, and sometimes decades, to resolve.

Basically, they’re screwed.

Interestingly, CHEs don’t necessarily make a big splash in the media.  Eastern DRC is the case-in-point of this sort of situation, but others include the Central African Republic, eastern Chad and northern Uganda, all of which spend very little time grabbing headlines but are archetypal ‘forgotten’ complex emergencies.

This week, we have a grand example of an emergency that is anything but forgotten, but certainly highly complex.  The earthquake which struck Haiti less than 72 hours ago has effectively flattened the capital, Port-au-Prince, and current estimates from the Red Cross suggest that 45-50,000 people have been killed, with tens of thousands more injured and hundreds of thousands homeless.  As much as a third of the tiny island nation’s population has been directly impacted by the disaster.

But Haiti too bears all the hallmarks of a CHE in the making.  Although on the surface it appears to be a natural disaster, like the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, or the Padang earthquake in Indonesia earlier this year- both of which were relatively ‘simple’ emergencies, with functioning (if overwhelmed) state structures and relative stability- the hallmarks of Haiti’s instability are already bubbling to the surface.

What is it that makes the Haiti context so complex?

Geography– Port-au-Prince sits snug against a harbour, ringed by extremely steep hillsides.  The hillsides themselves are crammed with shanties.  When the shaking started, these shanties crumbled into the valleys, taking access roads with them.  The congestion of blocked roads and the relatively small amounts of flat land in Port-au-Prince make it difficult to move about amidst the destruction.

Poverty– Haiti was a poor country to begin with- currently ranked 149^th out of 182 countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Indicator.  30% of the country had access to clean drinking water.  The country struggles to maintain enough food for the population at attainable prices.  Infrastructure is underdeveloped, trade (and therefore transportation) links are limited, building codes are often ignored and disaster preparedness measures not implemented.  With a baseline like this, there is very little resilience, or bounce, in the national coping mechanisms to manage a disaster of this magnitude.

Governance/Administration– Haiti’s government is fragile at best, suffering repeated coups and attempted coups, and currently largely propped up by the international community (backed by US political and military intervention, and 9,000 UN-mandated Brazilian peacekeepers).  Services, such as health-care, policing and emergency response were already weak.  With the earthquake, these services and structures have largely collapsed.  The government is effectively not functioning.  The scale of the devastation far outstrips the capacity of existing emergency services to respond, but even if it didn’t, because the disaster has focused on the seat of power, those very people who should be running those response services- paramedics and policemen- are themselves victims- dead, wounded, or freeing loved ones from rubble.

The UN and NGOs– While the chronic insecurity in Haiti over the years has bred a stable population of international and national aid workers, this populace was themselves not spared.  The UN has lost over 150 staff and peacekeepers, with their headquarters flattened.  As the driving force supporting government and national security services, their effective removal from the picture now leaves a huge vacuum.  NGOs themselves have also been hit, with most charities losing staff members and building facilities, hardware, and connectivity.  Staff themselves are victims, many of them still trying to locate loved ones among the rubble.  Many will not be in a position to return to their posts for some time.

Cyclone Season– From April onwards- three short months away- tropical storms and cyclones will start spawning in the Atlantic Ocean and sweeping over Hispaniola.  Every year Haiti takes at least one direct hit, and usually several, from these violent storms.  90 days (3 months) is a standard block of time during which to run the emergency phase of an operation, but it will take years (at least) to rebuild Port-au-Prince, replace basic services, repair damaged infrastructure and maintain the wellbeing of the population during this process.  Haiti’s populace are vulnerable to storms at the best of times, living as they do in ravines and on steep-sided mountains.  Without the protection of concrete buildings, the hundreds of thousands of people likely to still be in temporary accomodation such as tents or makeshift shanties will be at great risk when the next storm-season comes aroun.

Logistics– Port-au-Prince has an international airport of a moderate size- it can take commercial jets but does not have a large capacity, creating a log-jam in aircraft handling.  The road from the airport is damaged.  The seaport is also damaged and ships cannot dock.  Roads internal to Port-au-Prince are clogged with debris and temporary settlements- people refusing to return to their damaged homes (if they are still standing) for fear of aftershocks.  The international airport in Santo Domingo, in neighbouring Dominican Republic, is the alternative airport of choice, but is also strained to capacity, while roads between the two nations are not in great condition and somewhat insecure.

Security– Port-au-Prince is one of the world’s more colourful cities- by which I don’t just mean the paint on the walls, but the level of danger.  A kidnap capital, foreigners tend to remain behind barbed wires, are leery of spending much time walking around on the street, and avoid public transportation.  Criminal gangs run large portions of the slums, while drug cartels exploit the country’s fragile security services to make Haiti a base for drug-running operations.  Fragile and unpopular governance has provided Haiti with multiple and often bloody coups, rebellions and put-downs, and the capital and other urban areas are home to regular riots and violent protests.

Outmigration– With the capital city in ruins, people are streaming out into the countryside as road networks open up.  Many of them are injured or have lost everything.  While identifying and supporting hundreds of thousands of earthquake-affected citizens within the compact confines of Port-au-Prince was already a daunting prospect, trying to locate, register and assist a population that is rapidly spreading across the countryside is a staggering logistical challenge.

Over the next weeks, dozens of aid agencies, foreign governments, military forces and UN agencies will coverge on Port-au-Prince, attempt to identify the people most at need of assistance, and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of supplies, materials, food and medication.  This will be accompanied by thousands of foreign nationals.  Working with national counterparts, these various organizations will attempt to distribute assistance as evenly as possible to the highest standards possible.  In order to acheive this aim, they will have to contend with the above complexities.

And that’s just for starters.

Aid is a complex business.  Aid agencies of every colour get lots wrong, good intentions or no.  There’s plenty of criticism out there about the way these agencies do business, and a lot of it is merited.  By the same token, lives will be saved and vastly improved in many cases.  Where aid doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to, it’s worth bearing in mind a few of the complications that can make doing this job a mind-knottingly challenging prospect.

How would you resolve the Haiti earthquake dilemma…?