The utter failure of the Red Cross and other aid orgs in Haiti

Vice and ProPublica did some recent investigations of US aid to Haiti after the quake, and unfortunately you can probably guess what they found. It was literally like the Iraq War in terms of incompetence, mismanagement, hubris, CYA, and outright lies. I am done with the US Red Cross.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNM4kEUEcp8

Generous Americans gave the US Red Cross $500MM for Haiti relief. They outraised all other charities, probably due to marketing and brand. They promised that they would build thousands of permanent homes (with water and sanitation) for Haitians, and even "new communities". So far, they have built SIX (yes 1-2-3-4-5-6) new homes, and are getting ready to pull out. At least Bush eventually got Saddam.

The problem is that the RC is good at distributing temporary disaster aid (like post-Katrina water and tents), but knows nothing about reconstruction. Yet they gladly took our money and promised that they would get it done. Well, land rights and building logistics in Haiti is a Third World disaster as you can imagine, so the RC contracted with third parties. Except doing that requires higher mgmt fees on donations up to 33%. For scale, good charities have mgmt margins of like 5%. So millions of dollars went poof, and those orgs paid bureaucrats to try to get houses built, but never broke ground. For the few shovel-ready projects, they were delayed by red tape from HQ, and many people resigned out of frustration.

All the while, RC PR maintains that they did an awesome job and saved Haiti. They said they gave 4.5MM Haitians shelter, which is pretty impossible considering that is the entire urban pop. of Haiti (and only Port-au-Prince was affected). I have no idea how they got their #s. We know that there are inept, unmotivated people at every workplace. And unfortunately charity orgs are no different, despite their inspirational missions. RC leaders in DC treated Haiti like a 9-5 job, and it wasn't their ass if they didn't deliver. What about hiring local Haitian experts to manage the projects instead? It's their country and they had more innate motivation. Unfortunately there were HR delays and even overt prejudice against Haitian applications and hires. Mr. Big Boss Know-It-All American had to call the shots. I really hope Nepal doesn't turn out like this.

There are opportunists and carpetbaggers after every disaster/war, but I naively didn't expect them to have a red cross on their arms. But the truth is that they are no better than an occupying army, or USAID, or Halliburton.

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Like, who can you trust? Charity Navigator supposedly rates nonprofits. They rate the ARC as 3 out of 4 stars, with a 10% overhead ratio (90% of donations go to "programs"). That is pretty good, if we can trust their accounting.

But unfortunately, people have been trying to exploit others' generosity/sympathy since the advent of money. What level of hell is reserved for those scum? I can almost tolerate the Nigerian oil scammers and Wolf of Wall Street types, as they are preying on people's greed. But how can you lie to profit from goodwill?

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1903#.VXBesecmz9k

Also, F John Paulson for donating $400MM to Harvard Engineering. That's like doing volunteer work for the House of Saud. Literally he could have done much more good if he just gave the money away on a street corner in Boston. But that really wasn't a donation, it was more like a purchase of legacy and boasting to his peers.

http://www.republishan.com/e/7151433366795166/For-the-love-of-God-rich-people-stop-giving-Harvard-money

Haiti after the quake: the wrong way for the world to help

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20949624

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Americas (their $13B GDP is the same as 1/9 of IBM) and their quake 2 years ago set them back even further. 200K died out of a nation of 10M, many were seriously injured, and 20% of Haitians were internally displaced. Tough for any nation to recover from, even a rich one.

The global community showed a great outpouring of compassion and charity, giving in total $9B of aid (cash, goods, services). But those resources were mostly a boon to foreign NGOs, not Haitians directly. It's like they got a juicy gov't contract all of a sudden. I took some classes this spring about nonprofit finance and unfortunately they are not much more noble than for-profit entities. Their #1 goal is the mission of course, but goal 1.5 is related but somewhat more selfish: justify their existence, comfortably fund their operations, and grow in revenue/prestige if possible. And of course 501(c)(3) non-profits are fully entitled to earn a tax-exempt profit (see Kaiser Permanente) - they just can't legally pass it on to employees and (nonexistent) shareholders. Like many international development projects, these well-meaning folks from the G20 arrive with their Range Rovers and lofty plans. They think they know best and they tell the locals what to do and what to ask for. Then they give themselves a pat on the back, pack up, and go home to tell great stories of their philanthropy - even if the task is not done and the sustainable impact is minor. And of course there was the scandal about Christian groups trying to smuggle out (a.k.a. rescue) "orphans" and other children back to the US.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247788/Haiti-earthquake-One-Haiti-orphans-kidnapped-American-church-group-parents.html

Yes that is an overly cynical assessment. If zero aid dollars went to Haiti, clearly they'd be in far worse shape today. Volunteers and paid workers labored tirelessly to clear debris, attend to the injured, distribute supplies, feed people, and give useful advice. Lives were touched and saved. But $9B during a global recession is a lot of green, and it could have been utilized more effectively. Some economists even suggested that it would have been better to give ~$3,000 (about 2.5 years of avg. income) to each affected Haitian and let them decide how best to use it to improve their lives. Because the way it went down, about 90% of the money didn't "stay" in Haiti and was paid out to foreign orgs. Their labor and supplies stayed in Haiti, but we know that help is temporary (and Western labor is pricey) and supplies are consumed and wear out fast. People are still in tents in refugee camps 3 years later.

So instead of this expensive "reactive medicine" to hurriedly bind the wound, collect your fee, and clear out, there was no lasting, sustainable development effort. Surely it's the Haitians' fault too with their dysfunctional government and low levels of skills/education/employment. But if they could care for themselves, they wouldn't need foreign help. We can't blame the victim. And the fact that so much $ went to foreigners suggests that the funds were not efficiently allocated. Like with Iraq and countless other examples, foreigners tend to be driven by other incentives (not necessarily helping Hatians optimally), be ignorant about conditions on the ground, and the locals know better about the people's urgent needs. Haitian leaders needed more say. But we can understand that charities, like any other orgs, want to control their money (and some may feel that it is their budgetary duty to oversee expenditures). In fact, some Haiti relief funds were legally mandated to be spent on certain projects over others, even if they were ignoring more important ones. That is the "central planning" and cobweb of nonprofit finance that makes corporate taxation look trivial. 

Maybe the lesson learned from all of it is: if you want to deliver the most impact for your charity, invest in vetted local orgs who will be there for the long haul. They don't have short term objectives and short term thinking, so they will better allocate resources and deliver impact. I guess there is a chance that the money will be squandered by corrupt local thieves, but your buck could go a lot further too.

Less robust donor response to the Pakistan flood disaster

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38687569/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129293203

Some news sources were observing that the global response to the Pakistan flood is weaker than with the Haiti quake or Indian Ocean tsunami of recent past, even though the current Pakistan disaster is larger and affecting more people in a more strategically important nation. Over 10M have become displaced, and thousands have died (1,500 documented deaths, but the actual number is probably over 10X higher). Within 2 weeks, international donors pledged over $1B for tiny Haiti, but so far Pakistan has only received a $460M pledge from the UN (that hasn't amassed the funds yet), with $50-150M or so coming from the US. Of course the US gives a lot of aid to Pakistan in many forms, and the Obama/Bush admins have tried to boost social and humanitarian aid in order to improve relations and combat extremism (currently to the tune of $7.5B over 5 years). Maybe Washington sees this "opportunity" as a way to score goodwill points with Pakistanis and Muslims after years of bad relations (as was the case with tsunami relief). Plus the more gratitude ordinary Pakistanis have for the US, and the more our aid helps boost their quality of life, the more stable Pakistan and Afghanistan will be, and the safer we will be from Islamic terrorism and loose nukes. So really it's a win-win for all nations, but if the perception among Pakistanis is that the West doesn't care, or is withholding aid as "punishment" for their lack of cooperation in the war on terror (even though Pakistan has suffered greatly from our war), they may come to support us even less.

Some possible explanations for the less robust response to the tragedy:

1) Donor fatigue: more miserable dark-skinned people needing Western assistance is always a bummer.
2) Timing: Haiti and the tsunami both occurred during winter holidays, so maybe there was more good will in our hearts? Pakistan is in August, when Westerners are on holiday, not paying attention to hard news, or getting ready for back-to-school.
3) Location: apparently the flooding (the size of Lebanon) was so bad that it wiped out access to the worst-hit areas, and more may be coming. Only helicopters can get in, which makes it hard for government officials and journalists to document the tragedy and broadcast powerful images to our screens.
4) Politics: Pakistan is associated with terrorism and corruption, especially after the Wikileaks documents release. Maybe this causes us to feel less compassion, even though the victims of the flooding have never harmed and do not want to harm America and our efforts in Afghanistan. They may not love us, but they are not all Taliban sympathizers. However, if the international community and Pakistani government fail to provide even minimal aid to the desperate victims, Islamic groups will step in and fill the void (whether out of charity or for political gains), like in Palestine. Or maybe foreign donors feel like their aid would be wasted on graft or seized by militants, as was the case in Somalia.
5) Global warming denial: like Katrina, African droughts, and Southwest wildfires in the last decade, the Pakistan flood's unprecedented size may lead one to implicate climate change in the disaster. If so, it's damning for Westerners, because the least polluting poor people in equatorial nations tend to suffer the most from global warming, while the human component is mostly due to G20 economies and lifestyles. So the least responsible suffer most. If we don't give generously, to address a problem that may be of our creation, then that is pretty heartless. So maybe it's better to ignore it and be in denial than accept the guilt.
5) Islamophobia: no media sources are willing to acknowledge it, and it's somewhat related to point 4. But look at the Ground Zero mosque debate. Many European nations and the US have a negative impression of Pakistani Muslims, especially after the recent Times Square terror attempt. Yes it's true that we helped Muslim Indonesia a lot after the tsunami, but US-Muslim relations may have been a little warmer then, and Indonesians are the "good Muslims" in our book. Maybe we blame our struggles in Afghanistan on Pakistan (deserved or not), so we feel less about their current plight. This is ridiculous of course, because as I've said Pakistan has sacrificed and suffered for the war on terror much more than most Americans. It's not the people's fault that the ISI is working with the Afghan Taliban.

An explanation for the Haiti quake

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/Robertson_Haiti_cursed_since_Satanic_pact.html

So according to Pat Robertson, Haitian rebels made a deal with the devil (yes, Satan) to free them from French rule, but as a consequence god has punished Haiti ever since (poverty, hurricanes, civil war), with this month's earthquake being the most recent manifestation of his wrath. And then Robertson said that he hopes this tragedy will help Haitians turn to god. Hello, Pat? Haiti is a predominantly Christian country (80% Catholic, 16% Protestant). Yes there's some black magic voodoo here and there, but I guess he wants them to all become evangelicals?

Granted that Pat is probably senile (he claimed to bench 300 lbs. or something, right?), his take on history can only be described as "whack". Haitan rebelled from France under Napoleon I, not III. Not sure if the devil had a hand in it, but Napoleon was less interested in France's colonies in the New World, and needed every able soldier for his invasion of Eastern Europe. That's also why he sold us Louisiana on the cheap, because he was desperate for war funds. Pat also said that the Dominican Republic is prosperous with resorts and such, compared to neighboring Haiti. Obviously he has never been there. They are clearly better off than Haiti (not hard to do since Haiti is the poorest nation in the Americas and ranked #157 by IMF's per capita GDP estimate of $1,300), but the DR is ranked #84 with a pcGDP of a mere $8,600. That is good for Central American standards, but they are still pre-industrial. Ask David Ortiz or Vlad Guerrero how wealthy they were growing up.

Part of Haiti's troubles is due to geography and bad luck, but their man-made "curses" are deforestation (logging has destroyed 98% of original forests, ruining farmland and accelerating erosion, which led to famine), colonialism (diseases killed practically all of the native Haitians so the current population are blacks, the US actually occupied Haiti for 20 years, and the dictator Trujillo we installed in the DR massacred thousands of Haitians too), and civil war (Haiti has had 32 coups, and the US took turns supporting and then kidnapping President Aristide, and since we left the nation deteriorated into failed state status).

BTW, Pat didn't seem to care but Int'l Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontiers, and UNICEF (among many others) are all having special collections for Haiti relief.