Thoughts, One Year after the Tsunami
It was impossible to avoid the tsunami last week, even if one wanted to. I spent a while thinking about what I wanted to post, since my original intention for this blog was to focus on information management in humanitarian operations, not to speak more generally about the humanitarian sector. But there’s a lack of other bloggers discussing humanitarian issues, so I guess this will have to do. (Incidentally, if anybody knows any humanitarian bloggers, please send me links!)
While remembering the dead is important, our own thoughts should be with those who survived. As usual, media focus on the tsunami one year on was fairly weak, and has now almost completely disappeared. (Interestingly, coverage of the Pakistan earthquake has also been quite poor, despite the fact that we’re now in the middle of the winter that almost everybody agrees we have failed to address in time.)
The tsunami coverage that there has been in the UK has generally been quite good, but split into two stock articles. One type covers the plucky (white) survivors, especially if they’ve returned to Thailand or Sri Lanka. If I read another article about how a bunch of holidaymakers helped to rebuild a Thai village near their resort, I may become enraged.
The other type - normally a feature article - covers the plucky (non-white) survivors, most of whom are still waiting for somebody to come and rebuild their village, which happens not to have been located close to a resort - bad luck! The general tone of these articles is that there a lot of people waiting around for their houses to be rebuilt, which is pretty accurate.
In December, the Fritz Institute has released its survey of Recipient Perceptions of Aid Effectiveness [PDF file], a multi-country focus group study conducted 9 months after the tsunami. There are no revelations in the study, but it is a useful contribution to the debate that the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition provides the framework for.
The headline findings can be summarised as follows:
- The initial response (i.e. the first 48 hours) was overwhelmingly local - but there are still problems with international organisations not listening to local voices.
- Satisfaction with services provided varied widely from location to location - but interestingly tended to even out after 60 days, irrelevant of location.
- Livelihoods are still not back to normal, and permanent shelter continues to be the main problem.
The first point confirms what a lot of other studies have shown; the second point is far more interesting, as it’s the first time I’ve seen a large-scale survey like this based on “customer satisfaction” with services. Normally we evaluate against our internal (weak) project indicators, and I’d like to see more evaluations based on recipient satisfaction. However neither of these points have an impact on the current situation, and there’s not much we can do about them in the context of the tsunami.
The third point does require action. Neither of them has seen the amount of progress that they need to fully recover from the tsunami, let alone pursue the spurious ‘recovery plus’ policy that was aired in the middle of 2005. (It’s so spurious, I’m not even going to provide any links to explain what it means.)
There are clear practical constraints, not least of which is the fact that it’s damnably difficult to build that many houses (over 200,000 across the region, mainly in Aceh and Sri Lanka); in the UK, the government is on the rack over the construction of just 29,000 new homes. The international community can justifiably claim that various political obstructions have prevented more progress, although these complaints become weaker over time; if there are obstructions, we need to find better ways to work with or around them.
Things look more positive in Aceh, with the recent peace deal bearing dividends, while Sri Lanka appears to be sliding back towards war. Here, the international community needs to make more effort, since the war in Sri Lanka has been a curse to everybody in the country, holding back economic development even before the tsunami.
But if we reach the two-year anniversary without fixing the problems that the Fritz Institute study identifies… well, it will be as embarrassing as the recent anniversary of the Lessons from the Rwanda experience, when we all sat down and realised that, in 10 years, we really hadn’t made much progress in fixing all the things we knew were wrong with the system.
p.s. Happy New Year!