Tracking The Aid Money: Mission Impossible (Tiny Spark)

From podcast: 

The Center for Global Development’s Vijaya Ramachandran spent years trying to account for the aid money in Haiti. After the quake killed more than 200,000 people, U.S. and foreign governments committed $6 billion and private contributors pledged another $3 billion. Ramachandran explains that much of the U.S. money was disbursed to private contractors, NGOs and other U.S. government agencies like the military.

“But after that, we don’t know what happens,” she tells us. “So the U.S. government might be collecting these data, but they don’t make them public. So we don’t know who the NGOs or the private contractors have given the money to, what kinds of services they have delivered to Haitians.  We don’t know whether these programs worked. I found that very frustrating.”

Listen to the full podcast here.