LONDON (AlertNet) - Moved by the devastation caused by Haiti's earthquake, donor governments and the public have responded to the disaster on a scale unseen since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Now comes the hard part of spending all that cash.
While the outpouring of generosity, particularly in the first weeks of the emergency, marks a welcome change from the usual underfunded appeals and broken donor pledges, aid agencies say the need to allocate aid responsibly makes absorbing big bucks surprisingly tricky.
"I think there is a lot of pressure to spend quickly and visibly," said Katharina Samara, acting chief of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP), a group dedicated to raising standards in the relief world. "And that, I think, is hugely problematic."
Within two weeks of the quake, Americans alone had donated $519 million and were on track to give more to Haiti than to the tsunami. Soon after, U.N. humanitarian coordinator John Holmes announced a U.N. "flash" appeal for $577 million was virtually fully funded, calling the response unprecedented.
Though the U.N.'s revised relief and reconstruction appeal for Haiti of $1.4 billion this year is only 49 percent funded, it is faring better than the Afghanistan Humanitarian Action Plan 2010, which is 14 percent funded or the Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan for six months to July, which is 1.4 percent funded.
You only need to take a look at AlertNet's jobs page to get a sense of the work ahead in Haiti - and the funds already in play. There are currently 100 vacancies for everything from camp coordinator, supply chain manager, country finance director to accountability specialist, hygiene promotion manager, humanitarian advocacy officer and environmental health manager.
CHALLENGES OF SPENDING BIG MONEY
One of the first challenges is how to scale up fast.
Alastair Burnett, disaster recovery manager at the British Red Cross, said country teams used to running an annual budget of anything from $500,000 to $5 million could, as the result of emergency funding, find themselves with 100 times that.
But that's not to say they're able to immediately source the warehouse space, the vehicles, the logisticians and other staff needed to handle and distribute an influx of relief material.
"It's difficult to sensibly spend large amounts of money in what are potentially insecure, often chaotic environments that lack infrastructure and lack resources," Burnett said.
"And also, bear in mind the responsibilities we have as custodians of that money to make sure that the money is spent well, spent wisely and accountably," he told AlertNet.
Spending is unlikely to be a problem in the days and weeks following a disaster when aid agencies are covering the cost of large supplies of tents, tarpaulins, medicine and other non-food items as well as the cost of flying or shipping in the material.
Burnett said it could potentially cost a couple of hundred thousand pounds to get an emergency response unit on the ground, and a couple of million euros to get a field hospital running.
But what about after the emergency phase?
"It's usually shelter which is real big money," Burnett said.
WHY DOES SHELTER TAKE SO LONG?
Keen to see progress, the public and major donors are likely to latch on to reconstruction as visible proof of money spent.
Yet progress is often slow.
Wrangling within the aid community about the kind of shelter that should be built (temporary? semi-permanent? permanent?); determining land ownership when documents may have been lost and owners killed; finessing design (hopefully in consultation with survivors) and spatial planning; making sure the contracting and tendering process is carried out transparently - all take time, which means big spending is put on hold for a while.
Critics question whether aid agencies should do reconstruction, saying they do not have a particularly good track record.
"If any area needs reform, it is that one," said James Darcy, of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). "The fact is these are essentially relief organisations and the job that needs doing is essentially not relief - that's the problem."
This was highlighted after the tsunami when generous funding was found by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition to have not only "exceeded the absorption capacity of an overstretched humanitarian industry" but also encouraged established actors to work outside their area of expertise and inexperienced actors to proliferate.
However, there is less money for Haiti than the tsunami, Burnett said, adding that the Red Cross would return to its "traditional role" - focusing on areas such as water, shelter, sanitation and income-generating activities - with the private sector expected to take the lead on reconstruction in Haiti.
"What we did after the tsunami was unusual - permanent housing, big infrastructure projects and so on," Burnett said. "There's going to be a gap of three or four years before people start moving back in significant numbers into permanent settlements and ... the role of the Red Cross is to help fill that gap."
Click here for a selection of experts' views on other Haiti response issues
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