Aid Agencies Must be Accountable and Transparent
When you give your money to an aid agency, don’t you want to know how it is being spent? My latest audioblog asks when are aid agencies going to start being more upfront about their work. Transcript below.
There is no question in my mind what the most affecting story of the past week was. It was Sean Penn’s erudite, thoughtful, really powerful interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Sean has become the manager of an intentional refugee camp in Haiti that currently houses 55,000 people, and he is bringing his not inconsiderable intelligence, strength of will, his enviable network of contacts, and the organisational skills honed by years of working in the unpredictable world of making movies to bear to provide security and access to healthcare and other services. It’s absolutely worth taking an hour out, perhaps over your lunch break, to listen to what he has to say.
The report was made all the more poignant because it has been six months since the earthquake devastated one of the poorest countries in the world. With the hurricane season bearing down on the displaced Haitians, you’d expect to see some progress in helping them to rebuild their lives, maybe some permanent structures to help them weather the coming storm. But that just hasn’t happened.
Let’s put aside for the moment the $5.3 billion in relief aid pledged by world governments. Less than 2 per cent of this, by the way, has actually been paid and most rich nations continue to drag their heels on the issue of when they are actually going to pay up. I think most of us have become cynical enough not to expect governments to deliver on the promises they make to those most in need. But aid agencies – that is a whole different kettle of fish.
The world’s aid agencies are our interface with this crisis and indeed with crises anywhere else in the world. They are the networks through which we as citizens of one country show that we care about what is happening in another country. They are our way of reaching out to strangers.
So it’s a reasonable question to ask: just how well are these agencies representing our human compassion and concern to these beleaguered, bedraggled fellow citizens.
And the answer is we really don’t know. And worse than that, the big aid agencies like Red Cross, Save the Children and World Vision really don’t like us asking.
Last week a report from the Disaster Accountability Project turned up some disturbing facts about the Haitian relief effort. For instance of the 197 organizations identified as soliciting money for their activities in Haiti following the earthquake:
● Only 6 had publicly available, regularly updated, factual situation reports detailing their activities in that country.
● The vast majority, 128, did not have such reports available on their websites.
● Only around ten percent, 21, were responsive to the Project’s request for more information, and of those that did respond, many provided only incomplete information which made judging their progress almost impossible
In the wake of the disaster hundreds, if not thousands, of relief organisations sprung up asking for money and the public has given generously. As of this month some $1.3 billion has been donated by private citizens. And mostly we never asked the big questions or demanded the facts about how many people were being served by this money, or where and how was it being spent. The relief agencies, it appears, didn’t ask themselves that either and this, as Sean Penn notes in his interview, has really hindered basic coordination of efforts in Haiti.
This raises a lot of questions for me. For a very long time, certainly for my lifetime, we have been conditioned to believe that our aid agencies are forces for good. It is taboo to question this assumption. I can still hear the very vocal affront of Bob Geldof when, 25 years on, he is still being questioned about Live Aid and where the money actually went. Admittedly he can be a pretty easy target.
The fact is that our larger, more long established aid agencies are not just kindly do-gooders. They are major corporations with premises, and financial investments, and staff, and overheads and all the same frustrating hierarchies that you find in any large organisation. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
Our global aid agencies are also brands and each of them works hard to reinforce, to really sell, their image in the public mind. Again this was something that the Disaster Accountability Project found. When it asked for facts, what it got was links to facebook pages and blogs full of purely anecdotal accounts, heart wrenching pictures of children and other emotional appeals to tug at our heart strings and our wallets and make us feel that the agency was this force for good. Some even claimed that if you wanted to know what they were doing, you should log onto their Twitter pages. I mean, seriously, how much factual information can you give in 140 characters?
This is absolutely unacceptable, and really it’s a disgrace. And while there is no doubt that the job in Haiti is difficult and chaotic, and there is also no doubt that while independent groups like Sean Penn’s are leaner, more fluid and more able, sometimes through sheer force of will, to cut across the wasteful bureaucracies that have become such a part of the aid agency functioning, there is a dark side to the international aid business which may be contributing to the lack of focused response. In part it is schadenfreude, the often unexamined but exquisite pleasure in the misfortune of others, but it’s also the continual back biting and dick measuring and competition to be the hero of the piece, that needs to be dragged out into the light of day. Environmentalists take note – since we can sometimes suffer from the same lack of awareness of our motives.
Six months on the reality is that only 28,000 of the 1.5 million refugees have been rehoused. Spontaneous camps have become lawless, frightening places where. Looting and rape are daily occurrences and disease is rife. Whatever the difficulties, it is absolutely not good enough.
And you have to ask yourself, is this what you intended when you donated your money to help?
My own evolving view is that aid agencies must be subject to the same accountability as any other corporations and we as a concerned and compassionate public should be much more demanding of these groups that rely on our donations to keep them going.
Perhaps it really is time to come up with an accountability checklist that all aid agencies must adhere to and to have an overall international authority that demands accountability of our aid agencies so those of us who want to help but who cannot abandon our day jobs or families to do so, can be assured that when we offer what we can in the form of a donation the people most in need will benefit immediately and fully from that gift.
© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without the author’s permission.
