Some of the millions of letters containing donations for Britain's Disasters Emergency Committee Tsunami Earthquake Appeal are sorted in London, Reuters file photo by Russel Boyce
Disaster appeals do more harm than good, says MSF. LONDON (AlertNet)- Massive public appeals by aid agencies in the wake of disasters are wrong and should stop, a senior Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) official said.
Gorik Ooms, head of MSF-Belgium, said such appeals did more harm than good and were based on a "convenient illusion" of benefit shared by nongovernmental organisations and the donating public.
Emergency donations are too late to be of use, and swiftly turn to poison as they encourage incompetent interventions by NGOs desperate to dispose of earmarked cash, he said during a debate at the London School of Economics.
"If we take this money we end up doing things we shouldn't do," he said. "Many NGOs don't have real disaster relief capacity but they go for an appeal because it is a source of funding. NGOs that have real capacity are crowded out by those that don't."
Ooms urged NGOs to have the bravery to debate whether they should appeal for vast sums after emotive disasters.
His call coincides with the first anniversary of the Pakistan earthquake, after which the cost of relief supplies soared, making emergency donations worth much less than they would have been during "peacetime", according to Ooms.
"The real relief work during the first week of a disaster is already prepared, pre-planned and pre-paid," he said. "You buy tents months or years before you need them."
Just a week after the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, MSF took the unprecedented step of announcing that it had received too many donations and would divert them to other emergencies.
"After the tsunami, the dead people remained dead," Ooms said. "The survivors didn't need that much real relief - for the first 48 hours, yes they did, but if you couldn't be there then, after that you were not very useful."
As for long-term reconstruction: "That was beyond the capacity of most NGOs. I'm sure this disaster was not for MSF and I don't think it was for many NGOs."
MSF repeated its approach after the Pakistan earthquake, stipulating that donations would be siphoned into its general emergency fund.
But Ooms, who was taking part in a debate titled "NGOs: a disaster for disasters", said the level of donations seemed to fall as a result.
Ooms called for "education" of the public into giving regularly, out of emergency time instead of emotionally at the time of crisis. But he admitted that this call goes against a powerful public sentiment.
A common response to MSF's tsunami announcement, he said, was: "You have ruined our way of showing solidarity with these people. Shut up now and tell us one month later that you are going to spend the money elsewhere."
Sir Nicholas Young, chief executive of the British Red Cross, agreed that waves of disaster funding could cause problems for NGOs.
But he said aid agencies were the only bodies the public trusted with its money at the time of disasters.
"We raised 100 million pounds ($188 million) from the UK people for the tsunami, and 20 million pounds ($38 million) for the Pakistan earthquake from generous people who would have trusted no government to spend that money wisely," he told the meeting.
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