LONDON (AlertNet) Â? Transparency International (TI) is working on setting up an aid monitoring project for Haiti to prevent corruption in the relief effort, the group said on Monday as it launched a handbook to help aid agencies combat practices that stop help from reaching the needy.
TI is already in discussion with major donors to Haiti about the project, which the anti-corruption watchdog feels is vital given the country's history of graft, the desperate state of its population after the Jan. 12 earthquake and the logistical problems of the relief effort.
"Just as in the (Asian) tsunami, there's a huge amount of resources going in and it's really important that someone is keeping an eye on it," said Roslyn Hees, a senior TI advisor and co-author of the handbook called "Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Operations".
"It's what I'd call a perfect storm for high corruption risk: you have a seriously damaged institutional infrastructure, a country with endemic corruption, a weak or fragile state in the best of circumstances and sudden influxes of huge amounts of resources to a highly vulnerable population," Hees told AlertNet from Geneva.
The 7.0 quake killed as many as 200,000 people in the Caribbean country and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Billions of dollars have been raised for the relief effort.
Last year, TI ranked the country 168th out of 180 nations on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index and Haitians have
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N26227164.htm" target="new"> already expressed concern about aid not reaching the people who really need it.
The Haiti aid monitoring project could be up and running within a month or two, provided TI secures funding and is able to bring in some outside expertise to help support its small Haiti chapter, which is currently working with a civil society coalition.
"Obviously we're not going to monitor the entire aid. We'd have to be working with the major donors to do sampling," Hees added.
PRACTICAL TOOL
Given the challenges of the Haiti relief and recovery effort, TI's handbook comes at an opportune moment.
It grew out of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when huge amounts of money were raised for the affected countries but not all the funds reached those in need or were put to good effect.
"The objective is to give aid agencies a very practical, hands-on tool," Marie-Luise Ahlendorf, co-author of the handbook, told AlertNet. "It's a compilation of good practices and tools to help agency staff both at headquarter and field level to prevent corruption in their operations."
TI acknowledged that anti-corruption practices are not the first priority in the immediate aftermath of a disaster the scale of Haiti but that they are vital in later stages.
"There is a moment ... where things are so difficult that humanitarian agencies really do have to take shortcuts and just do anything they feel is necessary to try and get aid to people because at that stage lives are generally at stake," said Hees.
"Once you move from that immediate stage of extreme danger and risk into what I would call the recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation stage, it's probably worth taking the time to set things up and do them properly," she added.
Corruption in the humanitarian sector can cost lives or worsen the living conditions of the very people the aid is designed to help.
Sometimes money raised is not spent on relief but goes into people's pockets. Other times, goods and services are correctly procured and taken to the relevant sites but that they are given to the wrong people, said Hees.
Aid can also be misused, as was seen amongst West African refugees in 2001, who were forced to give sexual favours in return for relief - one of the case studies in the handbook.
In Aceh, following the 2004 tsunami, thousands of families were left without homes after contractors employed by Save The Children built houses without foundations. The discovery prompted Save The Children to overhaul its construction policy and to root out corruption, the handbook said.
The handbook was compiled with the help of seven humanitarian partners as well as researchers and took some four years to put together.
Despite all the research that went into it, however, TI has no way of knowing how endemic corruption is in the global relief effort, Hees said. It will also be difficult, therefore, to know how successful the handbook has been in preventing it.
But TI hopes aid agencies can use it to strengthen their own existing anti-corruption structures and that they will also add to it as new information arises.
Here are some of key recommendations made in the handbook:
* Bring the discussion of corruption into the open, break the taboo around it that inhibits people from taking action such as whistle-blowing
* Understand what corruption is in different cultural contexts
* Note that corruption is not only confined to financial mismanagement and fraud. Nepotism, cronyism, sexual exploitation and the diversion of aid resources to non-target groups are also corrupt practices.
* Integrate the identification of corruption risks into emergency preparedness. Build it into inductions and staff training.
* Ensure there is group decision-making and careful vetting when selecting humanitarian staff, partners and suppliers
* Use civil society organisations such as TI national chapters to help with independent monitoring and evaluation
* Information should be shared between humanitarian organisations on anti-corruption practices systematically and the problem should be addressed jointly
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