After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, an economist at the Centre for Global Development in Washington, DC, Vijaya Ramachandran, attempted to track $6bn (€5bn) in taxpayer donations to the crisis, and concluded it could not be done. "A question worth asking is why we rely on this model of going through expensive NGOs rather than relying on domestic systems," Ramachandran says. "Corruption is often used as an excuse to not build up the local system."