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The World’s Katy Clark reports on how all the aid being sent to Haiti affects the flow of aid to other places in need.
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MARCO WERMAN: There’s no question the need in Haiti remains enormous. The international community has contributed more than $500,000,000.00 so far. No one knows how much will be enough. But the crisis in Haiti raises a question, in these tough economic times, is there enough money out there to do the job without short-changing other places in need? The World’s Katie Clark takes a look.
KATIE CLARK: The United States is at the top in terms of dollars contributed to Haiti so far. Though when it comes to foreign disaster assistance the pie can only be sliced so many ways. And with Haiti now the priority, some other programs benefiting from U.S. assistance are feeling the pinch. Take a recent email sent to U.S. Agency for International Development staff working in Somalia. The email said that because of Haiti planned programming in all regions is being reduced, at least temporarily, by 40%. Carol Lancaster is a former Deputy Administrator of USAID. She’s now Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.
CAROL LANCASTER: The needs of Haiti are exceptionally large, so I’m not at all surprised that resources for other parts of the world would be shifted to Haiti.
CLARK: Lancaster says given the challenges of delivering aid to Somalia, which has a barely functioning government; the decision to shift funds from there to Haiti might not have been too difficult.
LANCASTER: I’m guessing that people are sitting around thinking, where can these resources come from and where can they be used most effectively? I suspect glances have turned to Somalia because of the challenges of doing business there. I actually know individuals who have been working on delivering aid to Somalia refugees, having been transferred to Haiti.
CLARK: But Somalia is just one place that benefits from American aid. Pakistan is another. Today the United Nations launched an appeal for more than $500,000,000.00 over the next six months. It’s to help hundred of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by Army clashes with the Taliban. Humanitarian groups launched a similar appeal last year. They fell nearly $200,000,000.00 short of their goal and that was before Haiti captured the world’s attention. Robert Smith is with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. He says they’re well aware that there’s a limited pot of money to draw from.
ROBERT SMITH: We’ve been in touch with donors about maintaining necessary funding levels for the other major crises around the world and I think we all share an understanding that we have to keep our eyes on several situations at once.
CLARK: Smith says he hasn’t seen too many instances where funds are being diverted to Haiti. But Haiti is likely to consume the attention of aid groups for years to come.
SMITH: You have to look at the Haitian crisis as an evolving situation.
CLARK: Peter Bell worked in Haiti for many years during his tenure with CARE USA. He’s now with the Hauser Center for non-profit organizations at Harvard. Bell is cautiously optimistic that Haitians will use this as an opportunity to rebuild their country for the better.
PETER BELL: And at the same time, there is this problem of what development professionals would call limited absorptive capacity. It will take a good deal of steadfast purposefulness and patience and a realization that everything isn’t going to go smoothly.
CLARK: And there’s no guarantee that another crisis won’t come along before the job in Haiti is completed, diverting international attention elsewhere, yet again. For The World, this is Katie Clark.
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