Research for Haiti

Cash grants after a natural disaster and for development? Exciting evidence from Oxfam Great Britain projects in Zambia and Viet Nam

Duncan Green of Oxfam Great Britain has posted a blog summarizing and commenting on evidence from Zambia that cash grants can be very efficient and effective ways to provide assistance following a disaster. More details can be found in this report (PDF, 305kb; page three of that course lists the way to get an extended evaluation). The report and Duncan’s blog comment in particular on women’s experiences with the program and with a “complaint box” system that was used. Details on how the grants were spent are in the report, too. Overall, I think this is very exciting, especially as it reduces the need for expensive staff consultants (although oversight is, of course, needed).

On March 15th, the International Herald Tribune also had an opinion piece by Floyd Whaley on Oxfam Great Britain using cash grants in Viet Nam in 2006.  Of course, people are often highly critical of cash grants in welfare states. Responding to this Whaley adds:

“Welfare payments in the U.S. and Europe are long-term, small payments,” he [Steve Price-Thomas, the Vietnam country director of Oxfam Great Britain] said. “This was a large, one-off transfer, which households knew was coming for months in advance so they could plan for it and avoid the windfall effect.”

He also notes the Oxfam program is not meant to replace existing development initiatives. “In the particular case of this program, the lives of a significant number of households have changed for the better and that change is still apparent three years later,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we should stop worrying about education services and women’s political participation and the many other aspects of development assistance. This is a useful tool, but not the only one.”

It’s unlikely that the billions of dollars in development aid that is spent annually will ever be turned over to the poor without conditions, but the Oxfam program deserves a closer look by traditional development organizations.

Here's a guide from Oxfam on cash grants, the link takes you to a page where you can get the guide as a PDF or order it from the UK: Cash-Transfer Programming in Emergencies : A Practical Guide.

There are several organizations in Haiti that could facilitate such a program which could be targeted to families that are housing relatives from the earthquake-damaged areas and which could help ensure that Haiti’s harvest this year excels. It sounds as if the largest grants in the Vietnam case were for just under $400; so while small they were substantial grants to the families, many of the grants were relatively small interventions.

More once I get the full evaluation. Thoughts?

Standards in the INGO Industry: Guidelines and Annual Reviews for Haiti?

The international relief and advocacy group Tearfund, begun in the UK as a Christian disaster relief group, has a great set of links related to standards in international relief work. I do not know anything about Tearfund’s work, but the links provide some interesting language and ideas for early thoughts on how standards in the INGO industry should by applied in Haiti. Of course, essential to having standards is the establishment of external reviewers to ensure that the standards are given some meaning through planning and accountability.

An avenue for the government of Haiti regarding governance and the NGO and INGO sector that may be worth exploring is to establish a discussion with the sector and aim for a public declaration of guidelines and values for the industry (yes, the nonprofit sector is made up of industries) when working in Haiti. The standards should outline how the industry is accountable to their donors and to the Haitian people, as well as to professional standards. This could be followed up annually with a general review of the industry by an outside panel and with reviews of the largest groups.

Map: Where Shoddy Construction Could Mean Death

 

A map worth ten thousand words: Where Shoddy Construction Could Mean Death – Map (NYTimes.com).  Have we learned enough from disasters in Haiti, Turkey, Pakistan, and China to make better housing and more even development (geographically) a serious goal in development policy?

Sustainable Housing for Haiti: Don’t Forget Community

There’s been a lot of talk about the different kinds of tents, modular homes, and shelters that can be provided rapidly to Haiti that could also hold up to hurricanes and additional earthquakes. The Miami Herald rand this story about InnoVida:

Efficient, inexpensive and nearly indestructible, the little blue-and-aqua hut sitting in the parking lot of a North Miami-Dade factory represents cutting-edge building technology -- and many like it could soon could be headed to Haiti.

The company that made the prototype house and the space-age composite panels it is built from announced Wednesday that it will donate 1,000 of the cabins to people left homeless by the Haiti earthquake.

… InnoVida Holdings officials also said they have lined up $15 million in investment capital to build a factory in Haiti that could produce 10,000 houses a year.

… designed by renowned Miami architect and planner Andrés Duany as permanent housing. The company is in talks with the Haitian government and several interested volunteer organizations working on quake relief.

It is not clear what final design will be built, but it appears to be similar to those on this page.

A point I want to make that I have not seen addressed yet: Houses that are useful (stable, affordable, rapidly deployable, etc.) but that do not build community will be a problem. Famed urbanist and author Jane Jacobs often wrote about the need for designing streets and buildings to facilitate community. I hope these firms find or hire some sociologists, planners, or anthropologists (see this group of community planners called PPS to get the general idea of what I am talking about) that can work with Haitian community organizers (animator) and governments to help make sure these designs, and the patterns the are placed in, facilitate healthy communities.

Lessons on Relief Delivery: Using High Schools and their Students

The Haitian Project’s blog has a story on their web site what I think has several good lessons on how to provide relief in a dignified manner (emphasis mine; ellipses representing cut text):

I also want to point out that we—staff, students and volunteers—carried these bags [of relief supplies] to the houses in the neighborhood and handed them directly to families… There were no lines, shoving or question as to who received the food support. It was given to people with whom we live and work daily, in an orderly and dignified manner. I mention this because we had denounced a disorderly ad hoc distribution done on our street two days before. Those involved in the earlier distribution took notice of the order and dignity of ours. In fact, the leader of the other distribution came in person to state that he now understood our concern and criticism of what had transpired on Wednesday. Sometimes it is not just what you do, but how you do it.

It is important to note that this food is more economic assistance than simple hunger relief - as we have stated previously, there is no real food shortage. The supply is in place at all levels, from wholesale to local markets, for those who have the funds to purchase it. This is why THP/LCS continues to look for ways to employ members of the community in the relief effort. We will be reporting on our house-building project next week. This program produces not only housing, but also jobs, making a double impact. We appreciate the relief funds that have been donated for housing and look forward to reporting on that effort.

While providing relief is not the core mission of the organization, I think a lot of decentralized work like this could help Haiti if these groups received some training and management support to make sure they do the most good they can. There are some tent cities not far from the school campus of The Haitian Project; it would be interesting if, with—again—some training and support, they could use their connections in the neighborhood and some of their older (and very bright) students to make life significantly better there.

[I once worked for The Haitian Project at their schools site in Santos, an area outside of P-a-P.]

Agriculture: Food Rots in the Countryside while People go Hunger in the City

This disturbing observation from a report on food prices from the Haitian and US government (which otherwise reports that food prices in P-a-P are only ~10% higher overall than pre-quake):

Fresh vegetables and fruits are also rotting in the fields because of this loss of purchasing power in Port- au- Prince due to the losses of assets and employment opportunities in Port- au- Prince. The stability or decrease in staple food prices is not so much due to increased supplies (except for the imported rice given the current relief distributions), but to the reduced demand. 

Unfortunately this means that food prices may rise once demand does increase back to pre-quake levels. More disturbing for the moment, however, is that (a) a variety of foods are not coming to urban markets (i.e., not being purchased) which implies declines in the nutritional value of diets and (b) that rural areas are losing income, putting additional pressures on migration.

INGOs and donor nations should begin to put out the word that they will purchase food from farmers or at the markets and then use these at either feeding stations (e.g., schools including those outside of quake-affected areas) or pass them on to timachann (if even just a thousand such merchants in the cities are enrolled in such a program this could work) or…and this may sound bizarre…destroy any purchased foods that cannot be used or given away fast enough and that would not have gone to market due to decreased demand. This was a common event during the Great Depression in the U.S.: the government both giving out food and destroying it at the same time so that agricultural economies and rural communities would not sink. These programs can end or be phased out once “regular” demand increases.

While it would be hard to set up, another alternative would be to create a food stamp system: provide the public with vouchers not for bags of food but for food they buy on the street markets; registered merchants could then exchange them for cash. Again, this would require enrolling merchants in the program, but I actually do not think this should be too hard if there are some managers on the ball that are working in a couple dozen neighborhoods in P-a-P (and in other cities, of course). Work programs were established almost over night during the New Deal and with modern communication and printing technology it should be easy to do now (note how quickly Fonkoze got their banks running again). The hard part is developing food vouchers that merchants can easily identify as non-fraudulent.

Do any of these ideas make sense? Am I getting the economic or administrative issues wrong?

Relief: Utilizing Local Talent and Subsidizing Local Markets

Instead of throwing huge bags of rice at crowds, now might be the right time  for the government and donor nations to emphasize facilitating the rebirth of food markets in Haiti.

This can be done and prices kept low by building temporary market spaces and subsidizing the transport of a variety of food from the countryside, the Dominican Republic, and other nations to be sold at greatly reduced prices to timachann (literally, “little merchants”) who then sell them at the neighborhood markets. (See this wonderfully colorful and well written post by Bev Bell on successful community organizing with timachann in Carrefour-Feuilles, Haiti.)

At the same time, a campaign to provide farmers with seeds and tools, should be launched immediately as planting season is coming up so. Sadly, donors are far behind on raising funds for agriculture and food projects in Haiti. Hopefully, with all the money that has been raised by rescue and relief operations some of these millions can be re-granted to organizations on the ground and in the countryside that can help ensure Haiti has the best 2010 harvest possible.

Briefing Paper on Unsolicited Donations Haiti

While lots of people have discussed how donated goods can cause problems in a relief setting, the fact remains that many groups will continue to send goods and there are some groups that can make use of some goods. This briefing paper by the "logistics cluster" in Haiti gives advice on how to appropriately send goods, not just explain what problems are caused by poor planning: PDF version (100kb) and the original link with summary at Relief Web.

A brief quote:

In order for humanitarian aid to be of the most benefit to affected populations, donations should be well-planned with national authorities and the humanitarian community coordinating the relief effort and fully compliant with national requirements for the importation of goods. Cargo that lacks documentation and adequate planning for onward delivery may have an adverse effect on the relief effort by taking up scarce resources, such as aircraft landing slots or storage space, and can place an additional logistics burden on organisations working on the ground.

Aid for Haiti: What kind? Planned by whom? For Whom?

The editor of Wired shares on their popular new blog Haiti Rewired some honest reflections on how hard it is for people to assess what it is Haiti will need:

Perhaps naturally, as the editor of Wired.com, I've been consciously and unconsciously framing the reconstruction in terms of delivering telecom service over mesh networks, bootstrapping data mashups to bring a Web 3.0 layer to the relief, delivering green tech and so on. Sexy.

Here's what the Lambi Funds wants: Electric grain mills for grinding corn and millet, a portable irrigation pump, ox ploughs, a goat breeding program, a fishing boat and reforestation.

Bad aid starts with ignorance and condescension.

(As an aside: technophiles may wish to take a look at this list of cautionary tips by the people at Catapult Design.) In addition to the plan from Lambi Fund, one can look at this rough plan that a priest in the rural community Fondwa made. Fondwa's agriculture school (one of only a few in the countryside in Haiti) and other community buildings suffered damage from the earthquake. Note that these plans, general as they are, focus on very concrete and immediate needs rooted in the experience of projects under the control of local leaders.

On a completely different scale then the mistakes that some individual donors or observers may make, International Organizations (IOs) and International NGOs (INGOs) run the risk of selecting goals that favor their own organizational needs (the literature on this is mixed but the concern is certainly fair). As I have posted before, albeit regarding peacekeeping operations, large international programs can have economic impacts that are not easy to discern from the outset. Moreover, there are important questions about the transparency and accountability of the planning process for the expenditure of hundreds of millionsof dollars that have been raised by INGOs or committed by donor nations (pledges which often never materialize). Who will be selecting the values and outcomes the projects aim for? Who will evaluate them and manage them? Will they improve or reduce self-determination in Haiti? (see Paul Farmer's testimony to the US Senate on this last point.)

On a related note, I want to get off my chest a pet peeve: It has been popular in the press recently to complain about the billions in international aid funds that "Haiti wasted." But for decades aid to Haiti was controlled by donors not Haitians, or at least not many Haitians. (I swear some journalists make it sound like they think all of Haiti got together in a soccer stadium and voted to spend aid money on lottery tickets.) While it is true that the Haitian government (at all levels) has grave weaknesses, the opportunity in Haiti now,it seems to me, calls for strengthening and developing Haitian government, not acting like the Duvaliers are still hanging around. The fact is there is an associational life in Haiti that is very rich, indicating democratic skills rivaling those at which US citizens are famously believed to excel. (For examples: See this article by Media Global for also about Fondwa. And, to finish off your dose on the interesting work that has been going on in Fondwa see this documentary; the portion on development begins about half way through).

 

 

Evaluations and Impact Analyses: Economic Impact of Relief and UN Work

A host of documents for today on the economic (and social) impact of relief work, including UN peacekeeping work, in Haiti and other counties.

1. Peace Dividend Trust puts forth a call for relief projects in Haiti to adopt a "Haiti First" policy on purchases.
2. In a somewhat similar vein is this 2005 assessment at Prevention Web.Net of the benefits of Cash for Work (CFW) programs run by Mercy Corps during its efforts in Aceh after the tsunami. The report finds that cash for work programs could be implemented rapidly in emergency situations and had the benefited individuals as well as their communities socially as well as economically. The report only studied short-term CFW programs, however, while Haiti could likely benefit from sustained jobs programs, something President Clinton has suggested several times.
3. Regarding the impact of UN operations, the first report for today is a sobering look at the impactof UN peacekeeping operations (including the operation in Haiti) on prostitution and the trafficking of women. This report, from 2009, is from MICROCON at the University of Sussex.
4. The second report on the UN is a fairly exhaustive and thoughtful 2006 study of an extensive range of concerns about the social, bureaucratic, and economic impact of UN operations in nations. The goal of the study:  "Although the body of literature related to the economic dimensions of peacekeeping operations is wide-ranging and diverse, there has been very little analysis of the extent to which mission policies and choices can affect the longer-term development of the places where they deploy. This project set out to help fill this gap by gathering data that could permit more systematic projections of longer-term impact and by analyzing how such impact might be harnessed to support the fundamental international objective of locally sustainable peace and security."  Everything from the impact of local hiring and pay scales to use of air conditioners is reviewed. The report is by the Peace Dividend Trust and Stimson Center. Fascinating stuff even if you don't always agree with their analysis.