The help provided to tsunami victims by hundreds of private relief groups -- their coffers swelled by record donations from the American public -- could have been better coordinated, according to nonprofit leaders.
Rivalry among nonprofits and the sheer number of groups crowding into the relief effort have sometimes led to tensions among organizations and duplication of services, they said yesterday.
"There is no reason for 50 [aid groups] in a country if 10 or 15 are already there," Stephen Commins, senior human development specialist at the World Bank, said yesterday at a roundtable discussion of the tsunami relief effort at the Aspen Institute. For many nonprofits, Commins said, the reason is "fundraising, fundraising, fundraising."
Nevertheless, participants in the discussion agreed, coordination among relief groups has been much better than in previous international disasters that attracted large numbers of private aid organizations, such as the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and the Ethiopia famine in 1984.
Yesterday's discussion was part of an examination of what U.N. humanitarian relief official Jan Egeland called "the most remarkable relief effort in modern times," fueled by record contributions from governments and their citizens around the globe.
But all that money is a mixed blessing, some at the discussion warned. It has brought international aid groups unprecedented scrutiny from millions of Americans who contributed.
Donors will want to see results for their money, said Kathryn Bushkin, executive vice president of the United Nations Foundation, a private organization based in Washington.
"They're going to want to see that it's not just a drop in the bucket," Bushkin said.
To reduce duplication of services -- such as when several aid groups provide medical care to one refugee camp but none furnish food -- some participants in the discussion called for stricter controls on aid groups.
Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, suggested a credential system that would authorize aid groups to perform certain functions in a disaster.
But Egeland said that, in the last five years, the United Nations had begun to play a bigger role in coordinating relief among nonprofit groups in a disaster area -- directing the groups to sites where relief is needed, for example, and providing them with information on what is needed.
"It's not perfect, but it's the best system we've had -- ever," Egeland said.
