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| Best Practices: Philanthropy |
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Marilen Cawad
07/01/2005
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Overlarge Largesse
Nonprofits usually compete for funding, conducting
intense marketing campaigns to portray themselves as the first option for donors
who want to make an immediate contribution during a disaster. Many of these
groups, however, found themselves poorly equipped to respond to the outpouring
of support for the Asian tsunami.
The day after the disaster struck, CARE
launched an online campaign entitled “Asia Quake Disaster.” The website featured
updated news, photos and streaming videos of tsunami victims and relief and
recovery operations. It also had a link to a page where donors could pledge
funds with a credit card. CARE capped online donations at $10,000 per
transaction, and asked that larger amounts be transmitted by mail or phone. In
the United States, CARE alone raised $43.3 million. (The group says
approximately 8 percent of that figure will be used to cover administrative
costs.) The organization admits to being challenged by the deluge of donations.
“How soon can we open 60,000 pieces of mail?” CARE development director Beth
Gluck asks. “What do we do with all the checks? How soon can we respond back to
the donors?”
International aid organizations have also learned not to provide
a surfeit of cash to the affected area too quickly. “We don’t want to
overtax a fragile system of domestic NGOs [nongovernment organizations] that
lack the capacity to absorb large grants,” says Raymond Offenheiser, president
of Oxfam America, an international development and relief agency headquartered
in Washington, D.C. Over the long term, a deluge of U.S. dollars into developing
economies can also cause local currencies to steeply appreciate, which can lead
to rapid inflation.
Large aid groups working in the same devastated areas can
also cause confusion and duplicate efforts. Several humanitarian groups may
provide medical care to the same refugee camp, while none offers food or
clothing. To avoid these missteps in the future, Offenheiser suggests that
national governments, with support from the United Nations, implement a formal
system to accredit international humanitarian organizations to ensure their
qualifications for the scope and duration of the work they propose to do in a
disaster area. “Not every group that shows up at a disaster scene is qualified
to help out, and their well-meaning efforts can end up hampering relief
efforts,” says Offenheiser, who in February sent written testimony to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on the lessons Oxfam learned from the tsunami
response.
Many entrepreneurs and corporations that specialize in
infrastructure also offered their technical skills, but most of them lacked
international expertise, and few had prior experience in disaster conditions. In
the aftermath of the tsunami, international aid groups realized that the speed,
quality and effectiveness of emergency response in these highly skilled areas
require vast improvements.
To address this problem, CARE, Oxfam GB, Catholic
Relief Services, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Save the Children
Federation and World Vision International have collaborated to expand the pool
of qualified aid workers to address shortages in skills. The Emergency
Capacity-Building Initiative, funded with a grant of $5.18 million over two
years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to combine the
agencies’ collective knowledge and experience to hire and train personnel who
can lead rebuilding efforts in tsunami-damaged areas of India, Indonesia, Sri
Lanka and Thailand, replacing emergency workers who will return to their usual
duties in other countries. Most new staff will be citizens of the countries in
which they work.
“Each successive major disaster offers the humanitarian aid
community lessons in how we can improve our work,” Offenheiser says. “But unless
those lessons are implemented by the scores of aid groups flocking to southern
Asia, our collective best practices will be submerged in an anarchy of
altruism.”
Marilen Cawad, an intern at Worth, is studying journalism and international
affairs at Columbia University. marilenc@worth.com
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