Interview - Mathew Cherian, Alex Irwan and Andrew Harding

Money raised for tsunami victims should be going to indigenous charities rather than international agencies with costly overheads, argued freelance journalist Nick Cater in the Guardian newspaper on 11 January. Robin Le Mare of ActionAid disagreed (Guardian, 18 January). If individuals had donated direct to indigenous NGOs, he said, the tsunami relief operation would have been wasteful, uncoordinated and disastrously underfunded. Is this true?

The response to the tsunami from around the world has been prodigious, with international aid agencies rushing to offer assistance. But how effective has this relief been, and how well coordinated? And what role should international NGOs be playing? Alliance talked to two NGO activists, Mathew Cherian in India and Alex Irwan in Indonesia, and to the BBC’s Asia correspondent Andrew Harding, to get their views.

A lack of coordination

According to a recent survey conducted by a group of public and private agencies working in Aceh and led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the relief effort ‘continues to be hampered by insufficient coordination’. In an interview with the Washington Post, Rob Holden of WHO said aid workers ‘do what they think is best, and sometimes a particular country or a particular agency may well send materials or equipment that may not be what is required at that stage’.

Alex Irwan of the Indonesian Tifa Foundation confirms this lack of overall direction. ‘The international NGOs are all over Aceh,’ he says. ‘Everybody’s doing their own thing, running their own relief services. There has been some effort by the Indonesian government to make the international NGOs report to it, but they aren’t complying with that.’ According to Indonesian officials, more than 50 international organizations and over 8,000 volunteers are engaged in the relief effort there, along with 8,000 US military personnel.

Andrew Harding, who arrived in Aceh three days after the tsunami, confirms that initially things were ‘pretty chaotic’. ‘In the first few weeks I saw aid agencies just throwing stuff in and taking pot luck, seeing whether they could charter a helicopter for a few hours, land somewhere, and more often than not someone had arrived just before and dumped a whole lot of aid, so actually it was a wasted trip.’ But he sees this as unsurprising: ‘To be honest, that didn’t strike me as surprising given the complete collapse of infrastructure and the size of the coastline and the scale of the destruction. It was teething problems.’

Issues of coordination apart, the actual presence of international NGOs is not always appropriate. ‘At the moment,’ says Mathew Cherian of Helpage India, ‘there’s a large international presence in a country like India where there are a lot of technically qualified and very capable people working for NGOs. This is something aid agencies need to look at. There are hordes of expatriates – from Save the Children, Oxfam and so on. This may be appropriate for say Indonesia but not for a country like India. In India the NGO sector is well developed. In Tamil Nadu, in particular, there are very capable and strong NGOs that have been around for the last 40 years.’

‘Too much money too soon’

Curiously, Cherian thinks that part of the problem is that too much money has been made available. It has tempted agencies to set up their own offices rather than working through existing local groups. ‘British charities and American charities basically have a lot of money, so all of them started doing things on their own rather than going through partners. Someone sets up a relief camp and puts World Vision there, someone sets up a relief camp and puts an Oxfam banner there. They’re – how shall I put it? – grabbing territory, like a Wild West cattle baron occupying frontier land.’ This is not to say, he stresses, that there will be too much money overall for the long-term reconstruction effort, just that the initial amount has been overwhelming.

In fact, Cherian feels coordination between NGOs has actually been weaker than it was after the Gujarat earthquake. ‘Fundamentally, I think it’s a problem of too much money. People have commitments of too much aid and everyone wants to set an example. If there was less money, they would have coordinated much better and not duplicated. People would have said, OK, I’ll do the boats and you can do the nets.’

Having said that, he feels that ‘most of the relief work has been quite good on the ground’. In contrast to the situation in Aceh (see below), the government soon began coordinating the relief work. ‘The government authorities and the District Collector – the head of the district – starting coordinating. They called the NGOs together and said, now, you’re working in this area and you’re working in this other area. Otherwise they were falling over each other.’ The NGOs, he feels, ‘should have done this on their own sooner’.

The experience of Aceh

In Aceh, as we have seen, Alex Irwan and Andrew Harding both report a similar lack of coordination. But Irwan feels that the main culprit is the government. ‘The Indonesian government has itself failed to provide strong coordination and a lead for all the other institutions to follow.’ The difficult political situation of Aceh, which is currently still under Civilian Emergency Law, is partly to blame for this: ‘The government and the army control different coordinating positions, and they’re not coordinating well. So goods are piling up at the airport.’

Harding cites other factors too: the size and scale of the coastline and of the destruction; ‘the complete collapse of infrastructure’, due partly to the tsunami and partly to decades of conflict; the fact that the military had previously thrown out all the international organizations, so when they did come in they really were starting from scratch.

Ironically, shortly before the disaster, work had just begun on the Aceh Social Reconstruction Agenda (ASRA), a cross-sector initiative following decades of conflict. ASRA’s goals were to reconstruct the social and cultural system, reorient the economic system and the management of natural resources, and restructure the political system within the context of Aceh as a Special Autonomy Region. ASRA will now have to take second place to a more urgent reconstruction, as Irwan explains: ‘We will stick to the Aceh Social Reconstruction Agenda but now we need to focus on the revitalization of NGOs and indigenous social institutions to promote a community-based reconstruction of Aceh, and develop a system for monitoring the reconstruction of Aceh, including the collection and distribution of aid.’ This is the Tifa Foundation’s priority for the next year.

The missing local NGOs

The tsunami washed away not only the lives and homes of hundreds of thousands of people, but also a large proportion of the local NGO presence. ‘We have identified that there are about 42 NGO activists missing, presumed dead,’ says Irwan, ‘and 25 NGO offices that are badly damaged or completely destroyed.’ This is out of what he estimates to be a total of between 60 and 70 NGOs in Aceh. Moreover, as he says, ‘the ones destroyed are the ones in the affected areas, mostly in Banda Aceh.’

Now that ‘the emergency era is almost over’, the need, says Irwan, is to rebuild the local infrastructure and residential areas. While infrastructure – bridges, roads and so on – can be left to government, local NGOs and communities will be critical in the residential areas.

‘Rebuilding of the residential areas, the neighbourhoods, needs to be done by the community,’ says Irwan. ‘Now everything’s destroyed and it’s very difficult for people to determine who owns the land, for example, and it needs to be sorted out at the community level. Social institutions like the community mosques will also need to be rebuilt because the social life of the Acehnese actually takes place around the community mosque. They are important both for trauma-healing and for preventing conflicts in the future. In addition, if the government rebuilds houses and apartment buildings, then it’s not going to help revive the local economy.’

Harding’s observations confirm the key role of community mosques in Aceh’s society. ‘One of the things that struck me,’ he says, ‘it is a very conservative and united society, and the village chiefs and mosques and so on had a big role to play in the aftermath in terms of bringing aid, especially in those first crucial days when people had literally nothing.’

Developing a common platform

Unfortunately, largely because of the damage to the local NGO sector, the Acehnese people ‘have not been able to develop a common platform regarding what the reconstruction of Aceh should be’. To remedy the situation, Tifa Foundation has called a meeting of civil society organizations on 11-12 February so the CSOs can start to develop a platform. A week later there will be a community leaders’ meeting. ‘If we have the voice of the CSOs and of the community leaders,’ says Irwan, ‘we hope we will start being able to pressure the government and the international organizations and the private sector to follow what the Acehnese people want.’

What role for international NGOs?

So what role should international NGOs play in the aftermath of disasters? At a recent conference in Ethiopia organized by the leading agency Africa Humanitarian Action and representing hundreds of African NGOs, the demand was simple: put much more money into indigenous agencies so they can create a sustainable infrastructure for relief, rehabilitation and development that is on the spot.

Mathew Cherian agrees that this would be a better role for international agencies, but, with a few exceptions, he sees little sign of it happening. ‘Helpage India has established partners in the affected areas and they’re going through them. International agencies should start working in partnership with local agencies rather than opening their own offices and flying in huge numbers of expatriate staff who have no understanding of the local terrain.’

Clearly, this is a point to be noted for the future: ‘We are talking about areas which, if they’re not tsunami prone, they’re cyclone prone … so they should be thinking about the long-term capability of local partners. International agency visits should be for the purpose of establishing these relationships where they don’t already have them so that when there is a crisis partnerships are in place.’

Where local partners are well established, international agencies might better serve the relief effort by channelling resources to local groups to carry out direct provision, rather than getting involved in such provision themselves.

In Indonesia, too, Alex Irwan is clear that reconstruction must be based on local consensus. He feels that international NGOs have a role to play in endorsing and supporting community-based plans for rebuilding. ‘Once the NGOs and community leaders have developed a vision of what the Acehnese people want, I think the international NGOs should follow them … If the international NGOs follow their platform, it will help us to pressure and convince the Indonesian government.’

But it is also clear that after the tsunami outside organizations were needed in Aceh. Although aid from other parts of Indonesia and other parts of Aceh was the first to arrive, this was closely followed by ‘aid coming in from neighbouring countries like Singapore’, reports Andrew Harding. ‘This was incredibly quick off the mark and very effective.’ ‘When I first arrived, there were no doctors in the hospitals, but by the next day there was a team of Singaporean doctors.’

In Harding’s view, Nick Cater’s comments in the Guardian that aid should have gone to indigenous NGOs rather than to ‘international agencies with costly overheads’ ‘didn’t apply in Aceh because of the scale of the destruction and because there weren’t the indigenous NGOs or civil society networks to even remotely cope’.

The message that seems to emerge very strongly is that the right role for international NGOs will always be very context specific. In Aceh, for example, the fact that local NGO capacity was so devastated by the tsunami left more of a role open for international organizations than there might otherwise have been. In India, the right role in Tamil Nadu might be different from the right role in Gujarat or Andhra Pradesh, where the local NGO sector is less developed. This in turn suggests a need for international NGOs to be constantly reassessing their role – in each country and each new situation.

Mathew Cherian is Chief Executive of Helpage India. He can be contacted at Mathew.Cherian@helpageindia.org
See www.helpageindia.org

Alexander Irwan is Executive Director of the Tifa Foundation. He can be contacted at alex@tifafoundation.org
See www.tifafoundation.org

Andrew Harding is Asia correspondent for the BBC. He can be contacted at andrew.harding@bbc.co.uk