Guardian News and Media/Port-au-Prince
Despite collecting nearly half a billion dollars for Haiti earthquake relief, the American Red Cross has built only six permanent homes and seemingly squandered millions in the country, according to a new report.
A joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR uncovered rampant mismanagement, high overhead costs and deeply rooted acrimony from Haitians toward the aid organisation.
Among the investigation’s findings was that although the Red Cross apportioned about $170mn to the category of “shelter” relief, and although it at first planned to build some 700 houses, it only constructed six permanent homes.
The report charges the Red Cross with consistent misrepresentation of its projects, especially in housing. The authors cite promotional materials that say the Red Cross provided more than 130,000 people with homes, and then note that that total includes people in “transitional shelters”, recipients of short-term rent assistance, and people who had been “trained in proper construction techniques”.
The Red Cross disputes the report and asserts it has “helped build and operate eight hospitals and clinics” and “move more than 100,000 people out of make-shift tents into safe and improved housing”.
In a statement, the organisation said it is “disappointed” by the “lack of balance, context and accuracy” on the part of ProPublica and NPR.
A major problem for the organisation was leadership and staffing, according to the report. Integral positions, including experts for health and shelter, were left vacant for months and sometimes years. The positions that were staffed were predominantly held by expats or by people flown in from the US, many of whom could not speak French or Creole.
In one 2011 document, Red Cross official Judith St Ford notes that there are “serious programme delays caused by internal issues that go unaddressed”, including for cholera relief.
“There is a clear lack of foresight and planning,” she wrote, and “the lack of leadership ability has contributed to poor morale in the field.”
She also urged her superiors to hire more Haitians: “the implication that talented, smart, competent Haitians cannot be found in Haiti has to be dispelled.”
In its statement the Red Cross says 90% of its current staff are Haitians; the organisation did not break down the hierarchy or positions of its staff.
“If they were an organisation that had a real history in Haiti I think this would’ve gone a lot better,” said Justin Elliott, one of the journalists who co-wrote the report. “The entire Haiti reconstruction effort has been really problematic, but the outside groups that have done better have roots there, have Haitian people working at high levels, have people who speak the language.”
In one 2013 e-mail published by ProPublica, CEO Gail McGovern admitted a project had failed and that she did not know what to do with a $20mn remainder. “Now that the Northern project is going bust and we are still holding $20mn of contingency, any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?” she asked, before mentioning a mysterious “wonderful helicopter idea”.
Without Haitians in leadership positions, the Red Cross was particularly ill-prepared to deal with Haiti’s land tenure rules, a system so tangled and unforgiving that it has intimidated USAid and Vatican relief efforts .
“Land tenure is probably the biggest stumbling block,” said Jonathan M Katz, a freelance journalist and author of a book about the earthquake, The Big Truck That Went By. The system has stymied aid organisations for years, and Katz said that for years aid organisations have “thrown up their collective hands and said ‘we don’t really want to deal with this.’”
The Red Cross entangled itself in a web of other organisations, often paying them to do relief work, and themselves struggling in Haiti. This outsourcing is commonplace in the international aid industry, Katz said, and leads to inevitable but not necessarily unreasonable overhead costs. But eager to better solicit donations, organisations often try to downplay these costs.
