In his most recent column for Foreign Policy , senior fellow Charles Kenny discusses why in post-disaster relief efforts like Haiti's our expectations are often too high.
From the Article:
Meanwhile, the donor community has given 1.1 million people access to drinking water, installed 11,000 latrines, and constructed 19,000 transitional shelters. Pregnant mothers are seeing doctors and nurses, many for the first time. Children are being vaccinated, and some are going to school. Quality of life for many in the camps may be better than it was before the quake.
Why, then, the widespread sense of disillusionment with the global response? A large part of the problem is that donors routinely promise too much too fast from aid -- particularly in the aftermath of disasters. At the March donors' conference which raised nearly $10 billion in pledges for Haiti, some spoke of a "Haitian Renaissance" or a "second independence" for the country. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon foresaw "a sweeping exercise in nation-building on a scale and scope not seen in generations."
We should know by now that after an apocalypse is not the perfect moment for outsiders to come in and remake a country. Following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, too many swallowed the heady idea that we were starting with a clean slate and could reinvent economies and societies for success. But the institutions that underpin economic development cannot be reconstructed overnight -- and they are never built from scratch.
Progress on reconstruction has been achingly slow, it's true. We could be doing better if we used more aid money to employ Haitians and if we had coordinated flows better and put at least some more resources through the Haitian government. We would be doing better if the donor community had actually paid up more than 10 percent of the reconstruction money it promised in March. And we'll never do as well as the lofty rhetoric of those donor conferences might suggest. Aid agencies and donor groups have done themselves and everyone else a disservice by inflating expectations about the speed of recovery. But what they can realistically deliver, and what they successfully delivered in Haiti, is the services necessary to elevate a hellish situation to a merely horrible one.