Six Lessons for Disaster Relief in Haiti

January 26, 2010

I’m joined this week by John Simon, a visiting fellow here at the Center for Global Development. Before coming to the Center, John served in a range of influential positions, from U.S. Ambassador to the African Union to Executive Vice President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. During the George W. Bush administration, he was a member of the National Security Council, serving as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Relief, Stabilization, and Development.

That last role placed him at the center of the American response to natural disasters including the 2005 South Asia earthquake and Hurricane Stan. On the Wonkcast, he shares some of the lessons he learned through those experiences, expanding on a blog post he wrote last week (a post I highly recommend reading!).

John’s six lessons cover the full range from the need for good logistical management of relief efforts to the need to start thinking about long-term reconstruction and private investment potential. I ask him to judge the relief efforts so far on each of the six criteria he laid out in his post. Some of the Haiti coverage takes on a new light when seen through the lens of John’s experience. He gives a quick history of how the relationship between civilian aid agencies and the military evolved through the course of the Asian tsunami and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and explores how the current response handles that relationship.

On the need to prioritize critical supplies, John notes media reports of some relief shipments being turned away from the airport in Port-au-Prince. He tells me, “When I hear those things I’m thinking, ‘Someone’s doing their job. Someone’s making sure that it’s not first come first served.”

Listen to the Wonkcast to hear the interview. Have something to add to the discussion? Ideas for future interviews? Post a comment below. If you use iTunes, you can subscribe to get new episodes delivered straight to your computer every week.

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1. Bahar Salimova Says:
   January 27th, 2010 at 11:38 am

   Dear Lawrence,

   Thank you for an interesting piece on lessons for disaster relief in Haiti. Haiti’s recovery process is not going to be easy to tackle and will require a lot of effort both from the international community and from local people. It is important not to forget lessons learned from the previous disaster responses and to integrate them into work in Haiti early on. The Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) has prepared an interesting note on the World Bank Group Response to the Haiti Earthquake: Evaluative Lessons. The note points out that the situation in Haiti is especially overwhelming because of the breakdown of social order and a fragile security situation, the near-complete loss of governance structures, and the failure to impose even minimum quality standards on the construction industry. Some of the main lessons highlighted in IEG’s note are the following:

   • Temporary shelters need to preserve existing social relationships. For instance, the layout of temporary shelter structures can reduce crime and violence against women if care is taken during the relocation process to ensure that as many doors as possible face a common and well-lit area.

   • Providing survivors with employment and cash transfers early on has had good results. For instance, taking the time to ensure that all usable building materials are recovered and recycled is a way to ensure that the poor will be able to afford to rebuild. The general population can be helped to recover emotionally through this process with paid work.

   • Donor coordination has always proved to be vital. Ways must be found for involved donors to work together or in parallel – in the short term – on a clearly defined set of activities with the same eligibility requirements and benefits.

   • Design of disaster projects should be simple, based on local participation and taking into account local capacity.

   • Streamlined decision-making and procedures for contracting civil works will help avoid delays. For instance, either a high-powered unit developed for the purpose or existing institutions can provide continuity in planning, coordination, and monitoring.

   • Damage assessments need to be simple and tailored to local construction types, with damage awards closely tied to actual costs.

   • Post-disaster operations need to include measures to reduce long term vulnerability and deal with land ownership issues. Reaching agreement on mitigation measures with the government within the first three months is important, because it becomes harder to get politicians to focus on disaster once the memory of the emergency recedes.

   • Owner-driven housing construction can be more effective than the use of contractors.

   • Leveraging existing private sector capacity is critical for effective emergency response. The private sector can play a key role in infrastructure and logistics, local banking, and provision of physical capacity.

   To read the full version of the note, please click on the following link: http://www.worldbank.org/ieg/haiti.html.

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