Letter to the Editor
by Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Dalia Al Kadi, Marcos Ferreiro on March 10, 2010 in Letter to the Editor, Opinion
Dear Editors of the Harvard Kennedy Citizen,
The earthquake in Haiti has shocked and saddened us all. We have been inspired, though, by the outpouring of support from the Harvard Community. At the same time, relief and reconstruction are currently entering a critical stage: while concerned actors must continue to mobilize support, the challenge becomes to utilize donations and efforts in the most efficacious ways. The task is not as easy as simply giving money: experiences during natural disasters have taught harsh lessons – namely that financial donations that are forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of a disaster often pour in and overwhelm local systems, yet, after the initial deluge, monies are not sustained long enough to address longer-term challenges. Facilitating disaster-stricken countries’ abilities to address such challenges, including the rebuilding of critical infrastructure and security systems, social service investments, and institutional capacity building, is an essential component of humanitarian relief strategies and greatly impacts the degree to which disaster-stricken countries are able to rebuild themselves. The 2004 Tsunami is an iconic example of the ill-effects of uneven funding flows that are solicited and allocated without in-depth – or any – capacity and needs assessments; it is essential that we not reproduce these same mistakes.
With this in mind, we raise the following issues based on our respective experiences assisting in crises in Somalia, Burma, Lebanon, many places affected by the Tsunami, etc – arguing that citizen donors are ultimately responsible for maximizing the impact of their donations:
1. Money is often not the limiting factor: Coordination (interagency and with governments), logistics, human resources/capacity, and security are often larger constraints; excessive funds often exacerbate these problems;
2. High-Impact Short-term Funds: Given these constraints, funds designated for immediate use should be allocated strategically, contributed to NGOs based on each organization’s absorption capacity. Even organizations with great capacity and may face legal restrictions that limit the amount of funding they can carry over from one fiscal year to another. For this reason, many organizations opt to disburse funding hastily on endeavors of limited impact. The donor community should emphasize transparency in aid monies received, so that funds can be allocated in the most effective ways (see below).
3. Sustained Long-term Funding for long-term Institutional Capacity Building: Funding that exceeds current absorptive capacity can be better utilized by:
a. Disbursing funds to organizations that have the legal and administrative capabilities to manage and spend the funds over a longer time period, as well as the competency and experience to engage in post-natural disaster redevelopment work;
b. Placing funds with organizations that will have the long-term scope, organizational reach, and capacity to disburse funds to viable but capacity-constrained NGO’s on the ground;
c. Build on previous models (in Pakistan, for instance ) that encourage donors to make long-term incremental pledges rather than one-off donations.
Funding distributed this way is more likely to contribute to the development of civil society institutions (educational, associational, market-based/cooperative, and political) that can continue to utilize and amplify the impact of contributions for years to come. This may allow Haiti to emerge from this tragedy with greater capacity to improve the long-term social welfare of its citizens.
Finally, we would also encourage all members of the Harvard Community to go beyond disaster relief support to consider the deep and enduring problem of Haiti’s underdevelopment. Poverty exacerbated the effects of the earthquake, something made clear in Chile just last week: a quake some one hundred times more powerful there killed only hundreds, rather than hundreds of thousands who have perished in Haiti. And yet some who focus on Haiti’s underlying poverty, such as columnist David Brooks of the New York Times (“The Underlying Tragedy” Jan 14, 2010), have distorted the issue by advancing an argument that it is Haiti’s ‘culture’ that has determined its poverty. Harvard Professor Paul Farmer, who as a physician anthropologist has navigated Haiti’s cultural nuances for 20 years, reminds us that “systemic studies of extreme suffering suggest that the concept of culture should enjoy only an exceedingly limited role in explaining the distribution of misery…’Culture’ does not explain suffering; it may at worst furnish an alibi” (Pathologies of Power (2003), pp 48-49). Here that alibi – Brooks’ idea that one should blame voodoo for Haiti’s underdevelopment (also demeaning a value system, while apotheosizing Judeo-Christian ethics as the standard bearer) – encourages an elision of the far more relevant political and economic variables that helped contribute to Haiti’s underdevelopment. To wit, Haiti’s 20th century has been characterized by direct and indirect U.S. military occupation and domination. In the 1910s, the US invaded and occupied Haiti directly for twenty years, at which point it literally rewrote the country’s Constitution, allowing ownership and exploitation of Haitian resources by foreign capital, and in which document it refashioned the police in order to put down peasant resistance to these policies, killing thousands in the process. Throughout the rest of the century, the US supported Haitian military coups and presided over unsustainable extraction of natural resources by transnational corporations. These realities contributed to and compounded Haiti’s economic and political decline, leading to a collapse of the country’s agriculture sector, the onset of massive emigration, political coups, and the rampant spread of diseases such as AIDS (see Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, 1992: pp 178-190). These historical events also explain, in ways that no myopic or culture-based analysis can, why it is that Haiti’s latest – and perhaps greatest – challenge yet, the 2010 earthquake, has exacted the toll it has. The “underlying tragedy” of the challenges that Haiti has and will face is neither an accident of history, nor the result of unique cultural traits; it is the result of geopolitical and global economic machinations that we have the capacity and obligation to change if we want to support Haitians in their quest to fashion a brighter future.
Therefore, fighting reactionary and opportunistic discourses such as Brooks’, both in our Harvard Community and beyond, is the responsibility of those committed to justice. Indeed, speaking back is a critical aspect of ‘what we can do to help’ – provided that it duly leads to a deeper interrogation into the ways in which we are complicit in the political-economic foundations that exacerbate disasters like these, and to the extent that such an interrogation spurs a commitment to work to alter systems and structures that allow such exploitation to endure (from unequal trade laws, to militarized ‘development’ schemes, and beyond). To truly assist Haitians in their long path to recovery, and the millions of people elsewhere who experience similar states of vulnerability, we must not only commit our money – we must also commit our voices to demand fundamental changes.
Sincerely,
Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Dalia Al Kadi, Marcos Ferreiro
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