The biggest revelation to me in that article, which I feel should be highlighted more, is that the Red Cross provides almost zero information about how it spends its money.
It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.
When the author challenged the general counsel of the Red Cross to provide more detailed information ("because clearly you must have it") he just gave her some evasive boilerplate spiel about having provided the summary information he'd provided already.
How can anyone donate to a charity that's so stunningly opaque about how it spends its money?
After the first investigative story into their Hurricane Sandy response efforts [1], the Red Cross argued that how it spent its money was a "trade secret" [2]. It later stepped back from that position [3]. Later that year (Oct. 2014), ProPublica/NPR published their first indepth story about Red Cross [4]; I haven't read the entire project but I think the OP is the second big feature. And full disclosure: I used to work at PP but not on this project.
Could it be that actually getting things done in horrible environments requires interacting with, and paying off, some shady people? This is of course a charitable guess, but could it be that the Red Cross has made a decision to make morally questionable choices in the short term in support of the greater good, and they know they can't publish such truths and continue to exist?
Perhaps, but I have a friend who worked in water quality in Haiti after the earthquake, and it's possible to get things done even with corruption and graft present.
More likely, the Red Cross is one of many charitable organizations with low direct payout (combined with inexperience on the ground). This is a notorious problem, and was enabled by an earlier era of no-questions-asked donations. But in recent years, big investors have demanded much more accounting of the money, and some organizations aren't up to the increased scrutiny.
No, don't go to Charity Navigator, go to Givewell (http://www.givewell.com). The quality of their research is much better, and they focus on the question that really matters: what effect your donation will have on the margin.
It's good to do things where you can witness and verify what's going on, but soup kitchens are many orders of magnitude less effective than distributing insecticide-treated bednets to combat malaria, or Givewell's other recommended charities.
soup kitchens and bednet distribution programs are trying to solve two different sets of problems, so I am not sure what you mean when you say that one is 'orders of magnitude less effective' than the other
The problem with all the talk about 'effective charity' is that it invariably focuses on magnitude while ignoring sign. The great thing about donating to local soup kitchens as opposed to interfering in other people's countries thousands of miles away where we know little or nothing about what's really going on is that there is a much better chance of being able to verify that all the activity is doing more good than harm.
A priori, it seems quite plausible to me that Sub-Saharan Africans find insecticide-treated bed nets significantly helpful for guarding against malaria, and rather implausible that they find them significantly harmful. You can invent far-fetched stories about how anti-malaria nets are somehow harmful, but you can do the same for soup kitchens.
Apparently, they use them for fishing in some areas, which causes a lot of environmental damage given the insecticide-laden netting. You just can't win.
Wait, are you saying that soup kitchens are ineffective at combating malaria (which goes without saying)? Or are they simply ineffective at the problem they are trying to solve, hunger?
We're obviously Min/Maxing charitable giving. Why would you give to a local soup kitchen where you can see the effects, and even donate time and labor when the cost/benefit ratio is so much less than giving money to far away lands for cheap materials that protect against incredibly deadly diseases, which is obviously a better option?
Or, every one of us could do something different, instead of loading all our eggs in one Red-Cross basket? Sorry. I don't see a reason for this disagreement. Anyone that donates time and/or money to help other people, whether they are on the corner of the street they are standing on right now, or literally thousands of miles away, is a good person in my book.
And yet that doesn't speak to your parent's actual question, which is a good one: how does an organization balance transparency and the necessity to get things done despite potentially awful conditions on the ground? Certainly organizations doing longer-term work can afford to spend time finding ways to route around corruption, but that could be incredibly difficult in many emergency situations, and incredibly damaging for an organization's reputation when shady dealings come to light.
Most of the shady dealings that would come to light here will be within the organization. How much time have you spent in the Caribbean or the "third world"? Time and time again I see charities pop up but just to take advantage of donations.
Its always easier to point the finger in the opposite direction when time comes for accountability. Expose the shady dealings and set the truth free. Then you will see the "shady dealings" and yes if the organization is indeed corrupt exposing the truth should hurt them if not close them down all together. Let the donated funds go to a more effective and honest charity
DO NOT MAKE EXCUSES
All charity based organizations should have no problem being totally transparent. Failure to show the impact and details of what was done is indicative of an opportunistic organization that may be corrupt. “Money and funds without obligations and accountability?...Don’t mind if I do!" That is the apparent mindset
Unlikely. Far, far more likely, according to a friend who is very senior in the British Red Cross, when I asked her about how they use their money, is one of two scenarios:
1) They misreported how much they collected. Apparently they regularly say they've collected more than they have in order to encourage people to give yet more, and to appear to be "the big magnet charity".
2) They've lost it. This apparently happens with alarming frequency - money just kinda vanishes, and they find themselves deployed to some godforsaken corner of the planet with inadequate materials and funding, end up coming back, spend a month waiting back in blighty, go out there, still nothing ready, fly back... oh, we spent all the money on flights and meetings and figuring out how to spend the money.
Hi, can you confirm that the British Red Cross is a different organization and more transparent? Ideally they should confirm this on their webpage, but they don't.
If the only way they can exist is by doing things so morally reprehensible that they have to keep everyone ignorant of their actions then they shouldn't exist.
"Morally reprehensible," in this situation, could be something like "bribe a corrupt official." If it takes bribing a corrupt official to save lives, I don't think most donors would have a real issue with that.
However, admitting that publically would embarrass the official (if named), remove the efficacy of all future bribes (which are by nature secret), and could even open the organization up to legal action.
I don't, FWIW, think that's what's going on here, but it's a plausible enough line. Certainly better than "I already told you everything you need to know!"
> If it takes bribing a corrupt official to save lives, I don't think most donors would have a real issue with that.
Except in this case it seems they bribed so many corrupt officials that there was nothing left for actual aide...
I think it's far more plausible they just waste the money away on "Administrative" fees and project mismanagement at enormous scale.
This is a "charitable" organization which has run rampant and unchecked for a long, long time. Nobody has dared to question the organization before because of the stone wall of "charitable projects and relief" they've constructed.
The fact that they are a "not-for-profit" foundation that survives on donations (2.9 Billion USD in 2014) yet wont disclose financials really turns me off. I can't help but feel there is corruption within the organization leading to purposeful waste of income as well as possible embezzlement by high ranking executives.
When people expect you to pay far below market rates for management (and sometimes expect it to be volunteer only), it is inevitable that you will suffer massive mismanagement. Even organizations with great management make massive expensive blunders.
Compared to what the private industry would pay for the same set of skills? Massive doesn't mean much if it is still a fraction of what those skills would otherwise be valued.
Something about non-profits seem to make them sacrosanct. If you criticize them among friends, it's almost certain that someone will rip into you for being miserly and not caring about the poor $VICTIMS.
Cynically, I think the root of this tendency is the fact that many people don't care about the efficacy of a donation, as such, but only about how it indicates the giver is a morally superior being, over all those non-givers. Whether the organization blows the money on coke and hookers (or, more plausibly, ineffective staffing and programs) is besides the point.
Especially organizations with powerful brands, like the Red Cross.
If I were a "big bad charity" I'd much rather spend my millions hiring Blackwater to go bust a few corrupt heads than pay them off. If we're going down the conspiracy theory path, at least make it exciting!
Actually, a charity devoted to rooting out corruption in developing countries would probably end up being one of the most efficient and effective for raising living standards.
Hire someone to offer the bribe. Target a well-known corrupt official, and gather lots of evidence to make it obvious that a bribe has happened. Publish the results, get a scalp.
On top of punishing the individual corrupt official, if every official knows that any bribe offered might be a trap, they'd be much more likely to turn it down. Certainly makes the cost of bribery for bribers a lot more expensive to account for the extra risk.
Hell, you don't even need to hire someone. Just have an open offer that if someone can prove they successfully bribed an official, you'll pay them three times the bribe amount.
I doubt it. Right now, in Guatemala, they have an ex president in prison. And the current tax admin under investigation. And the vice president resigning because she was stealing all over. And on and on. Same thing every 4 years. It's no secret, nothing happens or changes.
Busting lower level folks probably won't fix anything. You'll just get mired in their terrible slowness and endless rules, pointless paperwork and so on. At least bribing folks, you can get stuff done.
That's great in theory, but should the people suffer more of Haiti because of these individuals? I'm guessing that none of these organisations could exist without compromising things for the greater good.
This assumes that the Red Cross is the only organisation that could help in Haiti, and that their approach is the only one that could possibly work. Neither of those things are necessarily true. If they're bribing people then they should report that - not the details (although maybe they should), but they should at least be saying "We raised $500m, and spent $50m on bribes so we could get the job of helping people done. It sucks but that's what we're working with here."
Also, at what point does "compromising things for the greater good" become untenable? To go down the argumentum ad absurdum route, if we learned that the Red Cross were hiring contract killers to eliminate officials that were standing in the way of building homes for Haitians would that be something they shouldn't do, or that they should do but they should keep quiet about? At some point it is right to say "Let's not do that even if it means people will suffer." That's definitely before killing people, obviously, but is it before bribing people?
You may be a bit too charitable to the ARC. This is not the first time that these kinds of questions have been raised about ARC disaster relief projects and gone unanswered.
>>$170 million providing shelter
>>the number of permanent homes the charity has built is six.
I know their primary mission is not housing, but that is a large number for some tents and a vanishingly small number of houses. Where did the rest of the money go?
If they need to bribe people, they could hide that in some "Administrative fees" budget item. They could still disclose how much they spend on projects and aid.
If you find that distressing, consider donating to https://givedirectly.org/ instead. They keep their admin costs very low, they're remarkably transparent, and all they do is hand your money over to the extremely poor - a tactic with a growing amount of empirical evidence supporting its efficacy.
While it never provides as much information as one might like, I've found it extremely instructive to look up the 'form 990' of any nonprofit I deal with (including if I am considering applying for a grant or something). You can find out how much the executives are paid, and something about their major relationships with both donors and receivers.
You can also learn about relationships with other nonprofits, which can be particularly interesting in the political sphere. For example, if you look up the 990s of some conservative immigration organizations, you quickly find that what seem like 10 or 12 independent advocacy groups representing a broad swell of public opinion are actually all financed and managed by the same small set of people. Or that quite a few nonprofits don't actually do very much beyond draw down the bequest left by some dead rich person who cared about a particular issue. It'll make you view the charitable tax deduction ver y differently - there's a lot of people making a nice living and effectively getting a 20% subsidy from taxpayers.
This is a fluff piece full of pictures and words. No numbers or financial statements. On page 26 there are a couple pie charts that vaguely outline some general categories of outflows and inflows. No details. If a NYSE company (or even a private company) tried to put out an Annual Report with this kind of glossed-over detail, they...well, they couldn't get away with that.
People who run these 'not-for-profit' 501(C)(3) institutions are ironically not held quite as "accountable" as people running normal businesses who have to report to shareholders. In the N4P world, where the "shareholders" are reduced to the general public or generic taxpayers or even to the disaster victims themselves -- it's a lot more difficult to get them to own up accountable to the people they serve.
Most of the time the donors are just happy to get their tax write-off and they leave it there.
The article basically implies they use exceedingly broad categories, and don't exactly characterize everything the way they should. See also this Propublical article:
There's a chart half way through that shows, by NPR and Propublica's estimates that instead of 90% spent on actual charity, they only spend 60%. This would tank their rankings in places like Charity Navigator and Givewell.
So the short answer to your question, is that they are vague as hell about how they spend the money, and they probably cook the books.
I don't know, perhaps they're particularly opaque about Haiti or other "big" disaster relief efforts, or perhaps other charities are just as bad.
I'm just summarizing what I took from the article, in particular skip ahead to around 4m50s. The audio is much clearer than the transcript on this issue.
This is actually a common issue with charities; there are few sources of data on their effectiveness and no one wants to poke the dragon so to speak because there are hundreds of thousands transferred each day to charities.
most charities appears to use up the money given to them for purposes other then their stated primary goal... it is always better to donate directly to the people who needs help (unless maybe if you are only doing it for a tax break)
I stopped giving to 'big charities' twenty years ago and since then have only helped people locally where I can see what happens to the money. That's a real pity because of course on a relative scale those are probably much less in need than the people in Haiti (and Nepal and other areas devastated by natural disasters). But the red cross - once a paragon of virtue - and a number of other big time charities that were very successful at raising capital but extremely poor at spending it well - if at all - except on themselves are directly to blame for this and I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only person that feels that way.
They'll never get another cent out of me until at least one of their large scale disaster responses works out well. If they can't spend a few million in a direct, useful and efficient way then I don't see how they could spend orders of magnitude more.
Governments are similarly inept at spending their money efficiently (well, maybe not quite this inept but there is plenty of incompetence there too), but we can't avoid paying into the tax coffers and where applicable we do get roads, healthcare, education, national defence, a police force and social security in return.
Because of the total lack of end-to-end accountability with organizations like the red cross and others like it there is nothing to stop them from squandering what they rake in. It would be a lot more efficient to mail an envelope with cash to a random address in a disaster area than it is to expect these organizations to make a go of it. They really ought to be ashamed of themselves rather than belligerently defensive such as illustrated in the article.
Security situation indeed, I think he meant 'job security'.
> Governments are similarly inept at spending their money efficiently ... [big charities] will never get another cent out of me until at least one of their large scale disaster responses works out well...Because of the total lack of end-to-end accountability with organizations like the red cross...
Your post is ideological - sweeping application of game-theory style logic, but without the evidence to suggest that the logic applies to this case.
1) 'Governments are similarly inept at spending their money efficiently' is overly simplified. The most obvious counter-example is that the US and the UK spend the same amount of tax money as a percentage of GDP on healthcare; the former gets limited programs covering a minority of the population, the latter gets a universal health service (albeit obviously with limitations).
2) On what basis do you say that no large scale NGO disaster responses work out well? I would say that is an incredibly difficult conclusion to draw.
I offer one empirical counter-example - with direct reference to easily verifiable evidence (public expenditure on healthcare as a percentage of GDP, and the differences between the levels of coverage of Medicare, Medicaid, and the NHS) - and then one request for proof, and not much else.
One of jacquesm's central assertions is extremely broad: governments are inept at spending money. No qualifications. Brakenshire's contention is that there is clearly a broad spectrum of efficiencies (and offers an empirical example), which is a call for a more nuanced view of things. I think you may need to revisit your definition of ideological.
> One of jacquesm's central assertions is extremely broad: governments are inept at spending money.
Yep.
> No qualifications.
Indeed. I've seen enough of government projects on all levels (Municipal, Provincial, Country and European) to know this to be factually true and if you would so much as read the freely available news sources you'd probably agree with that unqualified statement.
Government projects that are on-time, within the budget, useful and good value for the money spent are very rare.
> Brakenshire's contention is that there is clearly a broad spectrum of efficiencies (and offers an empirical example), which is a call for a more nuanced view of things.
There is indeed a broad spectrum of efficiencies, though I'd rather re-word that as 'there is a broad spectrum of in-efficiencies', since efficient would indicate something close to the theoretically achievable.
Really, I don't know what your experience is but I've been fairly interested in the machinations of the various governments that I've found myself a subject of over my life-time to date and efficient is just about the last term that I would use to describe any of them, and most of the literature seems to agree with that.
I have a hard time taking your unqualified assertion seriously if your source is "freely available news sources". If that's the best you've got, you are almost certainly the victim of confirmation bias, at the very least.
There's a reason that published, peer-reviewed studies are important. They're the antidote to people like you who hang around the water-cooler chat of newspapers and figure they've got a handle on extraordinarily large systems such as governance and economies. Turns out these things are nuanced and very complicated, and the fact that you don't recognize that is what makes you an ideologue.
Looking back, my response was rude. I'm sorry about that.
Yes, you don't have to look hard to find examples of government projects that are plagued by agency problems, incompetence, and grift. However, those exact same things play out in the private sector. They're problems endemic in /any/ large undertaking.
You feel it's worse in the public sector. I feel it's just as bad in the private sector (just that it's reported much, much less). You've worked in both sectors, I've also worked in both. Only way to tell which of us is right is some sort of serious, objective research. My stance is that newspapers and other popular media are just noise, especially since government waste is such a easy go-to narrative (a good example being the "$20,000 hammer").
The difference is we all need to pay for public sector mistakes. We are all forced to pay for them. Poor, rich, doesn't matter. And the amount of money in public sector is much higher almost by definition.
In private sector, let's face it. Someone owns that business. The owner looses money if they are ineffective. Not all of us. Not all taxpayers. That's part of the reason why private business are better at not loosing too much money. Because this is Owner's money. He/she will make sure not too loose too much. Not to waste it. If he/she doesnt, more cost effective competition will take their place.
Maybe is time for them to modernize of close.
I think that Internet make possible new models of charities. A donation can be, at the same time, not local and very personalized.
You can donate to concrete people and, they give you an accurate report, after the fact, of what happened.
I think we need more charities like them. Maybe something with education?
I second the Watsi recommendation. The combination of their transparency, their 100% donation distribution, and clearly showing me who gets my money/what they get it for has made me comfortable giving to a non-local charity for the first time in years.
More importantly you need to organize WELL in advance, before the specific need is known. If you wait until the hurricane actually HITS, you'll be weeks late getting shelter, food, etc, inbound. That stuff needs to be bought and warehoused in advance.
Stuff can always be shipped from other parts of the world on the moment's notice if you have enough cash ready, so you don't necessarily need to stockpile it on site before anything happens. But what you can't really buy quickly is trained personnel that can organize relief works on site - this alone justifies having them as a standing organization.
I don't think that's really. Lots of speciality goods like survival shelters actually CAN'T be ordered in large quantities on a moments notice. Something like bottle water or MREs, sure. But not so much durable goods.
Most manufacturers these days run super-lean, often not stockpiling inventory at all.
There are some large-scale charities which I think do use the money well. For example, I felt no hesitation in donating to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak, when they were the only ones with boots on the ground actually helping people.
I was always impressed by them too. They used to display the amount of administration costs on the homepage of their website. IIRC it was 10% then and it's under 20% now [1], but it's still a very good figure and they're open about it:
> More than 80 per cent of the money you donate goes directly to our humanitarian activities.
>It would be a lot more efficient to mail an envelope with cash to a random address in a disaster area than it is to expect these organizations to make a go of it.
Interesting that you mention that. Charity evaluator Givewell has evaluated hundreds of charities based on whether they actually deliver results for your money. One of their top rated organizations is GiveDirectly, which does almost exactly what you describe. Here's their evaluation page for it:
I appreciate this viewpoint, and maybe you have made charity a priority in your life. I know that if I don't set up some on-going donation, I'm just not going to do it. So I have a monthly donation set up for small, local organizations. For example, I volunteered a few times with the SF Bike Coalition and really liked them, and now they get my money :)
I have found similar hardships in finding a large group that I can trust. I've found that with Partners in Health, but I also think small amounts to people to build local communities is one of the best ways to make changes.
I think this is a great tool for doing that in places that might need it more then my local community here in the US.
I was upset to hear that nearly $30 million of the tsunami relief money ended up subsidizing the Japanese whaling fleet. (Heard that on Whale Wars, so I'm not 100% sure it's true.)
It's not that hard of a connection to make when Extremist Logic is used: Use relief money to clean up water and coastal fishing towns. Whales like to live in water and fishermen like to live in fishing towns. Therefore, relief money subsidized the Japanese whaling fleet.
Not much probably. Practically al fishermen's fleet was wipped and aquaculture where also damaged. Luckily, most yellowtail production was sold in the winter market a few weeks before, so seafarmers have enough money in the bank to start again.
Most whalers were probably offshore when the tsunami striked thus not so damaged. I'll bet that this $30M where for families that lost their relatives or houses, instead to buy better whalers, but i'm just guessing...
My take-away from that is that I would never, ever donate a dime to that organization. The people in the local chapters who were the first to respond immediately after the disaster were fantastic. But when the national org eventually came in (and brought layers of on-site bureaucracy with them) it was a train wreck, and they started throwing their weight around cluelessly and got in the way of everyone and everything. If the full-time, paid staff of the Red Cross had just left things entirely in the hands of the local volunteers and had stayed out of the area entirely, things would have gone much more smoothly.
Private companies did so much more than many of the relief orgs. Sprint, for instance, gave us free event phones for the shelter residents to use to try to contact family. No worries about billing, or even if they'd get the phones back. Home Depot's efforts in the aftermath have been well-documented. And I believe it was IBM (my memory may be faulty) who donated thousands in computer equipment to the shelters where I was working, which the shelter residents used to track down friends and family who they'd been separated from by the storm.
I don't know if I'll ever have another experience like talking to some lower-level person at a big company, telling them that I'm there from a Katrina shelter where I just showed up to volunteer and have no formal association with any org, then immediately being escalated all the way up the chain to someone who makes decisions and that person says, "just tell us what you need from us and we'll do it. Don't worry about any cost or billing issues. Tell us what and when and where." That was awesome.
It was also a stark contrast, to be totally empowered by the likes of Sprint and IBM on the one hand, and then ignored and pushed aside by the Red Cross on the other. Pretty crazy.
The Salvation Army was maybe the one aid org that had their act together. Red Cross national staff and FEMA were worthless. Anyway, I regret that I didn't write all this down after it happened. Between my wife and I there's a great book -- or at least a really long magazine article -- in there somewhere.
I find it interesting that your main complaint is that the red cross lets bureaucracy and red tape get in the way of actually helping people on the ground, while the article seems to complain about the lack of accountability and transparency from red cross (which would require some bureaucracy and red tape).
Maybe the Red Cross has trouble reconciling these seemingly conflicting goals (in addition to their alleged lack of competence)?
Thank you for sharing. If you and your wife happen to recall some more details, please write that book (or article); it sounds like you have a lot of interesting and important things to tell. I'd love to read it.
Hannibal! Your presence at Ars is still dearly missed. Your Katrina article affected me profoundly; even now a decade later I think about it frequently. It gave me a bit of a vision which I had somehow lacked until then, of how I'd like my own career and technical skills to actually benefit society in some way.
nthing the request for you to write it. The more you write the more you will remember. A great approach for this if you're not ready to do in public is write emails to each other, then organize the content periodically.
That's the way to do it. In kind contributions is every individual and business's social responsibility. The profession charities specialize in....fundraising , not concrete benefit.
>TLDR: The article has accidentally or deliberately confused the earthquake relief project with the much smaller neighborhood renewal project, and attacked them both for not doing things they weren't intended to do. The Red Cross did much more in Haiti than build six houses.
Already in the TLDR there is a figure of speech used to attack a point: "accidentally or deliberately".
In neutral speech, there is no need to bring that up, as everything is either accidental or deliberate. Yet people use this to hint at the "deliberate" part of the phrase while having the other part in there for deniability.
I disagree, I think people use it to emphasize the possibility that it was accidental. Without that phrase, such assertions tend to be interpreted with implicit "deliberately".
> neutral speech
Is not ideal or practical in the real world. It's a nice idea, but to best facilitate understanding we should recognize the realities (unfortunate or misguided as they may be) of how we actually use language.
(If you really want to imply "deliberate", but want plausible deniability, then you just leave out the phrase entirely. If you don't say "accidentally or deliberately", people will infer "deliberately", but you never actually said that word and therefore you have deniability.)
> First the Red Cross took a customary administrative cut, then the charities that received the money took their own fees. And then, according to the Red Cross' records, the charity took out an additional amount to pay for what it calls the "program costs incurred in managing" these third-party projects.
> In one of the programs reviewed by NPR and ProPublica, these costs ate up a third of the money that was supposed to help Haitians.
[...]
> said that a fifth of the money the charity raised would go to "provide tens of thousands of people with permanent homes ... where we develop brand-new communities ... including water and sanitation."
> The charity built six permanent homes and, according to their own account, no new communities.
[...]
> the project manager [...] was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, including salary, it added up to $140,000.
---
These are the only factual bits I can find. I'm not saying the rest is untrue, but they include statements from locals who "cannot see that $24 million has been spent here," whatever that means.
Another example is where it says "first, the plan was to build houses," then going on to describe that people are still living in tents. But how many people live in tents? What percentage? How many houses were actually built? Or did they build 10 villas and leave the rest in tents? There is no real information that I can find.
A bit further on, it does include this:
> The original plan was to build 700 new homes with living rooms and bathrooms. The Red Cross says it ran into problems acquiring land rights.
... so then out of the 700, how many were built? It doesn't say anything about that.
Hi -- I'm Justin Elliott, one of the reporters on the piece, with Laura Sullivan of NPR. FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers, and link to various documents: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
Hey Justin, great journalism here. Really good job.
Something I was wondering. Presumably those chintzy press-board shacks shown in the article that are predictably disintegrating are not in Campeche right? Were you guys able to survey how many and of what kinds of these ratty shacks they built and in what areas? They keep saying they provided housing to hundreds of thousands of people, I wonder how many of them are these shacks and tents. We know the number of real houses with toilets was 6, and I see that other charities had no problems building 9000 permanent houses with water and toilets and didn't run into all these land title disputes that Red Cross blames. Would be interesting to have independent data on what exactly they did do since they seem to be having a hard time verifying any of their own claims.
Hi Justin, thanks for getting back on this! Always nice to see authors be involved in the community.
> FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers
I haven't checked it out, I'm not so really interested in detailed reports, it's just that this article has a lot of claims and mentions a lot of plans, but then doesn't mention how much of the plans did succeed.
> To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
Ugh, that's worse than I suspected the number would be. Might have mentioned that in the article, I guessed it would be somewhere between 50 or 200 or so.
The NPR story I heard yesteday went out of its way to emphasize that Red Cross did do some good things in Haiti. So, in your view, is the failure mainly due to difficulty in operating in Haiti and their lack of local expertise? Or is Red Cross just hopeless and we should stop donating to it ?
That said, according to our sources -- about a dozen current and former Red Cross employees -- and a bunch of internal documents, many of these problems were of the Red Cross' own making. Sometimes it was basic issues like leaving key jobs unfilled for months. Or prioritizing public relations concerns over aid. But a lot of it flowed from the fact that the Am Red Cross doesn't do international development and no roots in Haiti. The more successful groups tended to be the ones that had roots there, had Haitians in high positions, etc.
As for the next big disaster: I think it's case by case. Look for groups in the country in question -- whether actual local groups or foreign groups who have been there for a long time and have deep ties.
Hey, can PP use Google Maps satellite imagery to count how many houses got built where? I bet google or other computer folk could help do AI to count houses.
I think the other issue which is buried in the article is they couldn't get the rights to build on the land. That still begs the question of where all the money went but sounds like there is enough blame to go around.
> they include statements from locals who "cannot see that $24 million has been spent here," whatever that means.
I took it to mean that the area didn't appear to receive redevelopment projects worth $24 million. Isn't that a reasonable quote to include in the context of the article?
We could fund 83,000 homes in Haiti with $500,000,000.
We're Newstorycharity.org - a current YC nonprofit working in Haiti to crowdfund homes
- 100% of public donations go to home construction
- donors see exactly who they give to before they donate and a video of the EXACT family they funded in their new home after
We're launching a summer campaign "100 Homes in 100 Days" [newstorycharity.org/100] in Haiti, and would love for the support of this community in showing how the future of philanthropy is built on transparency and technology.
New Story's other co-founder here, Matthew. Here's an example of video proof of impact that we show to EVERY single donor - http://newstorycharity.org/maria-rose
Hey - I'm the CEO at http://newstorycharity.org - we crowdfund houses in Haiti and give 100% of donations to home construction. We actually partner with MOH - they are great.
I don't agree that the modern Red Cross has anything to do with Christianity. I've never heard of them evangelizing or take any position on religion. Why do you think that?
$500M sound like a large sum. It is if that is you personal wealth. However for Haiti with a population of over 10M it is only $50 per head.
According to the article the Red Cross built shelters for 130,000 people. The would be $384 per shelter if that was all the Red Cross did. But they also fed people, provided clean water, medical aid...
It is easy to attack big charities. You get support from people who feel guilty for being mean bastards, for people who don't like foreign organisations, from big business who want to profit out of natural disasters...
The article later clarifies that the Red Cross did not, in fact, build shelters for 130,000 people. According to the Red Cross' documentation, many of those people attended a seminar on home repair or were provided temporary shelters.
This is not the first time the Red Cross has had problems aseembling or executing a cohesive plan. Indeed, this seems to be a problem all of these large aid organization suffer.
> The American Red Cross says it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians, but acknowledges that much of that is made up of people who went to a training seminar on how to fix their homes, received temporary rental help or lived in shelters like these in Bon Repos, which start to disintegrate after three to five years. Residents say they
don't have bathrooms, kitchens or running water.
> Providing homes does not equate building a brand new home. Why would people think that?
>> When land was not available for new homes, the Red Cross provided a range of housing solutions including rental subsidies, repairs and retrofitting of existing structures, fulfilling our promise to ensure tens of thousands of Haitians are back in homes
> Red Cross takes a tough stance in NOT paying off greedy government officials. Saying there was a lack of land is the same thing as saying they couldn't justify paying outrageous prices for land. Many charities have to enter environments like these knowing they are going to be inundated with scammers. And that's the kind of news they don't need, being tricked into doing business with them.
How about this little gem from their response[0] to the NPR article, where they talk about the "myth" that they call "temporary, or t-shelters, permanent homes."
> In no place has the Red Cross called a t-shelter a permanent home. We consistently refer to the range of housing solutions that the Red Cross has offered in Haiti to provide people safe housing.
So, essentially, they admit that they're not going to call it "permanent housing", but if they include those numbers under the banner of a "range of solutions" then they can continue to make public claims with numbers that look happy.
Just wanted to note that even if each home is for one person, $500,000,000/130,000 is $3,846, not $384. If you assume the average family size is 5, that jumps to $19,230 per home.
It's $166/head counting every person in the area affected by the earthquake, and $2000/house counting all the houses destroyed by the earthquake. Most Haitians did not lose their homes to the quake.
Can $2,000 build a whole house? Even in Haiti? I would think 10x that for anything we would call a "house". Its not surprising there is a vast unmet need in Haiti given its poverty and the scale of the disaster.
Habitat, which has built several hundred houses in Haiti, estimates $4000-$6000 per "core house"; core houses are expandable, seismically sound permanent housing structures.
Habitat also estimates 105,000 "totally destroyed" pre-quake houses.
Obviously, all of these numbers are better than the six houses the Red Cross built.
The larger problem in Haiti is legal, though: getting the rights to land to build on is complicated and slow.
Sure. Millions of Americans reside in "trailer parks" at a standard of living that is the envy of much of the world, and surely orders of magnitude better than the situation in Cite de Dieu. Also, on their own terms, probably the envy of many a Manhattanite.
Haitians aren't looking for 2-car garages and island kitchens. Running water, electricity, and a structure that won't collapse in the next natural disaster would do just fine.
I imagine a challenge with deploying manufactured housing to Haiti is that anything new that's built needs to be earthquake-resistant.
If you had $500M, the best move for the community would be to create a Hati community long term investment of 100M. The community gets the dividends/interest from the investments. Long term sustainability is automatically achieved. That's free money over the long term for clean water projects, community buildings, etc.
Did Red Cross do that? Nope, people got tents and pocketed the rest.
I think I agree with the sentiment, but your per shelter example is a poor one, it should be "per person sheltered". And any examples would benefit from comparisons to regional costs.
The Red Cross has provided more than 132,000 people with safe and durable housing, through a variety of methods.
In no place has the Red Cross called a t-shelter a permanent home. We consistently refer to the range of housing solutions that the Red Cross has offered in Haiti to provide people safe housing.
This January press release refers to "shelter programs":
"To really understand what happened, take a look at one of the Red Cross' marquee projects — a housing project. [...] He explains in Creole that about three years ago the Red Cross came with glossy booklets saying it was going to build hundreds of new homes, a water and sanitation system and a health clinic. None of that happened."
"They never had a real plan for what they wanted to do in housing," Malany says."
"McGovern wrote an email to her senior staff in November 2013 saying that a particular housing project was "going bust.""
"Now the U.S. government is holding the money and is currently trying to find a different charity to run this 4-year-old housing project, which has yet to produce a single home."
"But if you go in search of those tens of thousands of new permanent homes in Haiti, you won't find them."
I don't know about you, but the general vibe I got from the article is that Red Cross has not provided the housing they said they provided. Even if they provided some, this further undermines the claim of providing shelter for 130k people:
"Not long ago, the charity hired a group of consultants to review one of its projects in the north of the country. They found the charity's math unreliable when it came to counting people it helped. There was double-counting, undercounting, and in one instance the Red Cross claimed to have helped more people than actually lived there."
NPR is targeting ARC, but this is actually a bigger, more difficult problem for the charity industry than one organization not disclosing where it spends its money.
I used to work for a large ($500 million+ annual revenue) NGO fundraising department, both in major gifts and direct response marketing (digital), and I have colleagues who now work for similar organizations (including ARC). We would all tell you that most organizations, even (maybe especially) the largest ones, are absolutely horrible at having any idea whatsoever of the impact of their programs. Even worse, the leadership in these organizations are ambivalent at best at assessing the impact.
Why? Because organizations simply don't have much, if any, incentive to do so. And perhaps more shocking to me, the vast majority of donors don't care. Most people are content to give and reap the warm/fuzzy feeling they get, then not think about it again until year end when taxes are due. Simply put, most people treat giving like buying a product at the store: they hand over money in exchange for the warm and fuzzies. Transaction over.
The people who actually demand some sort of accountability are a minority who are often treated as anti-charity, as in, "Why would we spend money on assessing impact when we can spend that money helping more people?". The result are token 'watch dog' groups like Charity Navigator that latch on to red herrings like 'efficiency' ratings which non-profits have learned to manipulate to the point that they are functionally useless.
ARC is simply the product of a rotten system, and it is far from the only one. If you want to help cure this sickness, only give to organizations that can demonstrate the impact your dollars are having on the cause you care about. Ignore the so-called efficiency splits that say charity Y gives z% of your dollars to programs. These are accounting shenanigans, and nothing more
Sadly this kind of mismanagement and questionable decision-making isn't new [1] [2] [3].
It really seems like a lot of big charities are simply in the business of raising money rather than helping people. One wonders how that money is actually spent.
It seems very much like good local charities are a far better conduit for charitable gifts.
Just think the impact that would have had if it had been divided up and given directly to each Haitian adult. The adult population of Haiti is roughly 6 million, so we're talking about almost $100 per adult Haitian. Roughly, it's about 1/8 of the per capita GDP of Haiti.
Imagine what you could if you were a poor American and received 1/8 of the American per capita GDP after a disaster (~6000 USD). That's a new roof, or a replacement vehicle, etc.
It's not life changing, but it would have been very significant, and massive in scale.
But maybe good ol' capitalism would have worked then, if many people had some income to spend, an enterprising importer could have shipped some stuff out of China or something :) . Relief can be very inefficient in those cases.
Edit: I think a combination of both approaches might be needed. I'd really like to know what the Red Cross did and the effect it had, but we can't if they're being so opaque.
Good 'ol capitalism is more likely to operate the other way though: the since all my tenants/customers have significantly higher cash reserves than before and this village's supply chain and living options are actually even worse after the earthquake, I can put my prices up by even more way.
A fair amount of GiveDirectly's recipients' success comes from it only being a fraction of people in the village that receive the funds
And what happens to the local farmers and roofers when you start shipping in goods and handing them out for free? They have a few more bags of rice but are out of business, and dependent on the next aid shipment for their other necessities. If you want to ship goods, then ship them to the harbor and sell them to local truck drivers for slightly more than the locally produced equivalent.
For those wanting to help, I highly recommend Givewell[1]. I imagine many of HN readers are (were) also lesswrong readers. This article[2] gives you some insight how Givewell evaluates organizations that they support.
I've spent years working in sub-Saharan Africa with defense, security, oil firms etc. and have spent a fair amount of time interacting with non-profit, NGO, microfinance orgs. Not only do they operate with the weakest of reporting requirements, taxation burdens and investigatory/compliance statutes, but the people they employ are usually doing so out of a desire to help people, often taking seriously sub-standard salaries for similar work. So the top brass at these orgs are killing it and raking in money, while most of the grunt work is done by hapless bleeding hearts who are seriously underpaid for the work they do. It's a win at both ends for management.
I just finished reading The Big Truck That Went By [1] by Jonathan Katz. It's an amazing account on what happened after the earthquake has hit and why most development help didn't have the impact we had hoped for.
One of the reason he touches is that emergency relief groups like the Red Cross (and other, e.g. MSF) aren't setup to do the nation-building Haiti actually needed, but for more rapid and short term support as is needed in war zones, refugee camps or rural disaster areas (tents, water, food etc.).
I can only recommend the book. I found it through his article on the NYTimes [2] which touches most points.
Most embarrassing for a journalist, they were wrong in ways that would have immediately been made clear had we taken the time to ask some basic questions.
Food and water, for example. When I was in Haiti two years later, to research the relief effort for a book, I was shocked to discover that no one could tell me with any precision if there was ever a food or water shortage in the first place. No one among the responders had even contacted the Coordination Nationale de la Sécurité Alimentaire — the Haitian government agency overseeing food security — to find out what might be needed. Indeed, earthquakes tend to inflict the worst damage on cities, not farms — especially in countries that already have limited infrastructure — and Haiti’s urban areas didn’t have any sewers or piped drinking water to begin with.
People indeed lost their homes and incomes, and markets closed. But the World Food Program had enough supplies in its Port-au-Prince warehouses — which survived the quake — to feed 300,000 people one full meal for three weeks. There was no acute food or malnutrition crisis after the quake; that much we know. But it seems very likely that the city could have avoided one even without the frenzied aid push.
Some good points that I've never considered.
It seems some basic needs aren't always food, clothing, shelter in all disasters. Communication is key and clearly lacking in Haiti's case.
Went to a friend's wedding in 2007. One of the guests worked at CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). I asked the guest as many questions as I could. There was a preliminary research trip before a Canadian official made her visit to Haiti. The purpose? To geolocate and photograph the facilities. And when I say facilities, think toilets. Making sure the white Canadian could poo-poo comfortably counted as aid.
Sure Haiti is incredibly corrupt, I remember that one of the ex-president's (Not Aristide) was head of the local kidnapping ring in Port Au Prince. But that's just small stuff. America and Canada use Haiti like it's their own toilet and want it to remain that way, in spite of the intentions of a select few and the limited posturing to the contrary.
One of the most disturbing things for me is to look at Hispaniola on Google Maps. The Dominican Replublic is lush and green. Haiti is a greyed out ####-hole.
I could go on and on, but reading up on an actual humanitarian in the region, Dr Paul Farmer, and his publications is a good start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Farmer
About the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the regionally-unique levels of poverty in Haiti: I think this can be traced historically to the Haitian slave revolt of 1791-1804, and the resulting shock and revenge taken on Haiti by the U.S., France, and other powers.
Such action-at-a-distance may seem fanciful, but here's a surprising fact: Haiti was still paying reparations to France until 1947, as compensation for damage and lost property from the slave revolt, including the value of the freed slaves themselves. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti)
Indeed. The US and Europe owes Haiti billions, but the real challenge is in getting a stable nation in place so USA and Europe can pay the reparations usefully.
> Making sure the white Canadian could poo-poo comfortably counted as aid.
Well, yes of course, it is aid.
And making sure also that this doctor can wash his hands before their next chirurgical intervention (is really so relevant to notice that is canadian, thus probably white?).
Doctors also need to go to the bathroom (is not so easy if you are a woman). Or clean itselves of vomit and blood after a hard day. Somebody need to assure that the volunteers have their most basical needs covered and can focus all his precious skills in doing the job (instead to just get ill and totally useless just 24 hours after their arrival). To study first the access to clean water and a way to avoid faeces spreading all around your clinic area and contaminating hundreds of wounded people is not corruption at all. Is to invest wisely your resources.
I'm going to counter with the fact that the CIDA worker thought that this was a complete waste of resources. Sending a team of people to look at how pretty the toilets are is ridiculous. If you can't see that, please don't oversee any charity money.
And I never said it was a doctor. And it wasn't. Just an official taking a tour.
> Sending a team of people to look at how pretty the toilets are is ridiculous
Not if you have paid big money for those toilets.
To survey and document if the work was really done is a normal procedure all around the world to increase transparency in organizations. And yes, it costs a lot of money (it saves money also).
Again, no aid was done for these toilets. Seriously, get the point. A team was sent to check out the crappers for the sole sake of the comfort of a senior official in CIDA. CIDA employee was complaining about it. Yikes.
At the end of the story, they mentioned that local Haitian organizations were building lots of homes. It was also mentioned that there is lots of money still unspent. It seems that the Red Cross (or the US Gov) just needs to fund those organizations with a proven track record.
Sometimes I think news organizations are (unintentionally) exacerbating the root cause of these problems. They report on incompetence but don't report on how the public can fix it. I don't think the Red Cross will fix it without public pressure. It leaves the audience with a sense of helplessness that leads to cynicism and apathy. It would be better to end the story with suggestions on how the average citizen can fix these issues.
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I would not let a single news story exclude you from including them. I've seen too many cases where journalists completely botch an investigative story due to biased sources and their own ignorance.
I personally would like to see the Red Cross's response.
From my memory, they had a reputation for bait and switch - raising money during a disaster, but spending it elsewhere. I think they cleaned that up, including a change in leadership.
This article is new in claiming innefectiveness at usefully spending money to help disaster victims. I would love to see a detailed audit.
It's not that they are duplicitous really - it's that stockpiling large amounts of supplies has a leadtime measured in months. Money you give today can't buy tents in Haiti tomorrow - those have to be ordered, manufactured, shipped...
Sure, but if the lead time is more than about 12 hours, it doesn't matter how long it ACTUALLY is, it's too long, people are dead before whatever $essential gets to them.
NPR and ProPublica were "creating ill will in the community, which may give rise to a security incident," the email says. "We will hold you and your news organizations fully responsible."
No security incident happened — but residents did ask if they could keep the brochure.
OH man this infuriates me. I’ve spent time volunteering in two different locations (Bolivia and Haiti), both were great experiences for me, but I only feel that my time in Bolivia really benifited the people there in the long term.
I spent about three months on the ground in Haiti after the earthquake. I wasn’t a first responder or anything, I actually arrived 6 months after the earthquake, so most of the emergency relief was over. I left during some unrest and was told not to return by the nuns there for fear of my safety. I regret not going back to this day.
After that I went to Bolivia for 6 months. There I was a teacher and mentor to some of the more rural communities. Again, both were great experiences but we actually helped in the Bolivian community in a long term manner, where as in Haiti, we didn’t really help anyone, we just floundered like fish out of water. Which is what I think most people were doing.
The reason I think this was the case for most NGOs in Haiti is because of the bias that is expressed in the article. NGOs come to work on the Haitians not with them. I was there to sell them a bill of goos, and not to ask what they needed.
This was made very clear by one example. I was shown a “groundbreaking” new technology, where you could assemble a house from simple materials made of compressed wood that would stand up to hurricane force winds. The issue is that it wasn’t something the Haitian people wanted to use. When we showed it to them they seemed baffled as to how this was a permanent house. They all aspire to the same things we do, that is a solid 4 walls and roof over our heads, not just temporary shelter.
The shelters ended up being a dead end project that floundered because we couldn’t get Haitian support, and I left feeling that I had been more a burden then a support for my friends in Haiti.
In contrast my time in Bolivia was focused and intense. We were working for the nuns in Bolivia, not on them. The goal of this project was to build up a school on the shoulders of American volunteers and then leave the community when it was stable, and when the nuns said they didn’t need us anymore.
In the beginning of the program the volunteers taught core math and science courses and they were integral to the operation of the school. 10 years later (during my time there) we taught basic English classes and visited the neighboring communities. It was rewarding work, but we could see that soon they would no longer need volunteers. After about 20 years of volunteers in this community the school was self-sufficient and the nuns let us know that they didn’t need any more volunteers.
The main difference between our success in Bolivia and relative failure in Haiti was customer buy in. In Haiti we were working on the people not for them. The trust (as stated in the article) wasn’t there and the Haitian people were not leading the effort. This led to some very beautifully created architecture that the people didn’t want to live in.
In my opinion the goal of any NGO should be to build self-sufficiency in a community so that it can stand on its own. The Red Cross didn’t do that. There are organizations out there that have (even in Haiti) if you’d like some references on how to donate to a meaningful charity read Mountains Beyond Mountains and help Paul Farmer out, or just donate to Partners in Health. Note: I have no affiliation with him or his foundation.
I do have more anecdotes, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Edit: Re-Wrote the whole thing. Thank you nate_meurer, I hope this is clearer, if not please let me know where I can clean it up and I’ll try to get it right. The original in comments in my response to nate_meurer.
I can tell you have rich experience and strong opinions, but your writing is so unclear I can't understand what you're saying. I have a vague idea which of your experiences (Haiti or Bolivia) was positive and which was negative, but the reasons are unclear. Would you be able to clarify a bit?
Thank you, I'm going to re-write this. I was angry when I wrote the first draft and just posted it.
I've decided to post the original here just so that people can read what was originally there, even though it wasn't very good.
Original Below
OH man this infuriates me. I spent about three months on the ground in Haiti about 6 months after the earthquake. Ii was both in Port Au Prince and Cap Hatien. I am no expert on how to make donations and aid help in a long term manner, but I have seen two different attempts at this.
1) My time before Haiti and in Haiti, American's were telling Haitians how to fix things. They were thinking without consulting their "customers" and doing so in a very authoritarian way. I saw one project, where they came up with compressed board houses that they could live in permanently. When we showed the result of 100s of man hours to the Haitians you know what they said? We want a permanent house.
2) In Bolivia the nuns were given American teachers to teach the students instead of requiring them to pay Bolivians. But the GOAL of this program was to remove the teachers over time. My sister was at the same site about 2 or 3 years after inception. She taught Biology, Math, Science, Etc to all of the High school age kids. There were 4-6 volunteers. When I went there 10 years later we were teaching middle school kids English and traveling out to the boonies (because Okinawa Numero Uno was no longer the boonies) to teach, and play with the kids to give the parents a break.
2 years later they shut down the program. It was the sadest and happiest moment I've had regarding missionary work. They no longer needed American teachers. This community had grown with a culture of calling white people "Teacher" even the adults and now there were no more Teachers going there.
What was the difference? Customer buy in. Just like a successful company, in Bolivia they worked for and with the nuns(and people), in Haiti they worked on the nuns and people.
It appears that the red cross did the same thing by not hiring Haitians to higher positions of power and giving them control over their own lives. If you read Mountains Beyond Mountains, written about Paul Farmer you'll see someone who went and worked with his customers to an extreme level.
Thanks! I'm struck by the time commitment made by organization you worked for in Bolivia. Decades of work indicates a depth of relationship that seems to evade most NGO work done in Haiti, and your experience reinforces that for me.
Did you come away from your Haiti experience with a favorable impression of any other organizations there?
I love the group Partners in Health. Mostly because of their founder Paul Farmer, I don't know how they've made the transition to being a bigger organization but when they were smaller they rocked Haiti in a good way.
I personally met the founder of 1000 jobs. He goes down there a LOT and has personally spend his time and money on Haiti to a degree most people would find staggering. https://www.1000jobshaiti.org/jh/mission.asp
Excellent, thank you for taking the time to tell your experience. I find the most valuable feedback comes from folks like you who are closest to the action.
That Bolivia was positive, because the interventions there actually worked. (E.g., developing local education to a point at which American volunteers are no longer needed.) Haiti wasn't because they didn't.
That the underlying reason why the interventions in Bolivia worked better than the ones in Haiti was because in Bolivia they treated the people they were helping with more respect -- working for and with rather than on them, and providing them with things they actually want rather than (e.g.) compressed-board houses that feel like temporary stopgaps.
These myths come with consequences. Rash decisions made in the heady days after a disaster, when everyone is committed to the response and the money is flush, are fiendishly difficult to undo. In Haiti, fears of insecurity led to a militarized response that concentrated too much assistance in certain parts of the capital, poured money into defense and security measures when it would have been better spent elsewhere and often treated survivors as threats rather than people to be helped.
The Haiti responders’ desperation to push food into the quake zone helped increase the size of the post-quake displacement camps as people gravitated to the handouts.
[..]
And the ensuing fixation on those camps as potential sources of infection meant responders were looking in the wrong place when, nine months later, cholera was seemingly introduced into Haiti by a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers — from Nepal, coincidentally — starting an epidemic that has killed more than 8,900 people and has yet to be fully contained.
[..]
The sum of all this was an uncoordinated and improvisational relief effort that failed to work with Haitian institutions and people, or to strengthen the Haitian government to face future calamities. Those missed opportunities continue to haunt the country.
Their defense is pretty weak. Essentially they're claiming the reason houses didn't get built was because they didn't know how to build them, or that there were land disputes. All of which are true. But that should have prevented them from spending any significant amount of money.
"I'd have rather thrown the aid in the water, said Michaud. The Canadian Embassy intervened and the $10.000 'custom fee' demanded by port autorities was later waived".
"Large tracts of land, including former sugar plantations are in the hands of a few elite families. Much of the rest is divided into small plots for farming"
The article also notes that other charities that said they would build houses were able to build thousands of houses. This suggests the land disputes claim was a made up excuse since other charities don't mention this, they just show the houses they built.
The temporary shelters shown are interesting. They are made with a few 2x4s as rafters, some tin panel roof, and press board on the outside. No water, toilet, etc. Appears to be under $500 in materials per family of several people per shelter. Press board of course in a humid rainy environment will disintegrate in a couple years, which is what happened. I wonder how many of these particular shelters can be verified that they built.
I find it interesting that no one here has mentioned the Clinton Foundation, they raised a LOT more money and we have the same problem. They did build a hotel though... And they're getting more involved in gold mining.
We need totally transparent charities across the globe. A lot of my friend here in US prefer to support small local charities that they exactly know how money are going to be spent, even more, they can donate time and participate in those activities. Unfortunately for the charities of a large scale other concerns comes to play, especially here in US - taxes.
One of the best and most transparent charities I've ever donated to - https://www.charitywater.org/ I heard the founder speak at a company event a while back and it's truly inspirational.
Sorry for the plug - but that's why I invested in https://publicgood.com - I think they can make it easier to donate to more nimble, locally focused and potentially more effective organizations
This looks very interesting. So donors can pick a family and fund a house directly. Your spreadsheet shows a total building cost of about $6000 including everything and the houses are clearly not pressboard shacks.
Is your agency having problems dealing with title claims like the Red Cross is claiming is the issue that prevented them from fulfilling any of their promises to build?
Also, another source claims that the Red Cross only spent $400 on each of the 6 permanent homes they managed to build (http://hotesfoundation.org/500-million-for-6-shacks-in-haiti...). Since you've been down there and are involved with building I wonder if you happen to have seen the 6 permanent $400 Red Cross homes? What are they like? I wasn't able to find photos of those, only of the temporary shelters made of press board, and the tents.
Yes exactly! re: So donors can pick a family and fund a house directly.
We haven't seen those Red Cross homes, but we are focused on building sustainable homes that will last for decades. Much different than quick temporary aid.
coldcode, we're New Story (YC S15 nonprofit) focused on crowd funding houses for homeless families living in danger around the world - http://newstorycharity.org
We show each and ever donor a breakdown the home cost and then a video of the EXACT family you help - here's an example - http://newstorycharity.org/maria-rose
this is the exact scenario in envision whenever someone asks for donations, which happened /a lot/ when i was living in London, where it appears to be a thriving "industry"
imo, working for charitable organizations is unethical
Our mission to show donors EXACT what their money goes to funding (by showing a home breakdown costs) and EXACT who they help by showing donors a video of the family in their new home - here's an example http://newstorycharity.org/maria-rose
Wait. Didn't VICE do an excellent expose on this very topic, relief capitalism? edit: they call it disaster capitalism, but relief capitalism is also a real thing.
America's dirty little secret is that the majority of our "aid" is really not aid at all an not really meant for aiding and assisting. This is not really a new thing. It's actually a very old and disastrous thing.
"The original plan was to build 700 new homes with living rooms and bathrooms. The Red Cross says it ran into problems acquiring land rights. Their internal memos, show there were other serious problems, including multiple staffing changes and long bureaucratic delays. And then there was a period of almost a year when the whole project appears to have sat dormant."
Haiti people was claimed as one of the worsts enemies of Haiti.
A lot of projects were stopped for months by bureaucracy. Some volunteers even claimed to had been menaced with a trial if they dare to move a single rock blocking the street without papers (that often never arrived). Volunteers and doctors did what they can, and it was a lot (thousands or probably hundreds of expensive chirurgical interventions). Finally, tired to sit and wait for months, volunteers spend their last pennies and started returning to their homes and former lives. Other big disasters with hundreds of lifes in danger occur, and Haitians just lost traction and their opportunity to use all those talented people.
Red Cross provides information about how spends the money and pass external audits from independent companies. Each year. In all countries. Local finances are published in red cross bulletins that are available each six months to all people supporting the red cross with their money or time. Maybe this periodist just didn't knew how to use google:
It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.
When the author challenged the general counsel of the Red Cross to provide more detailed information ("because clearly you must have it") he just gave her some evasive boilerplate spiel about having provided the summary information he'd provided already.
How can anyone donate to a charity that's so stunningly opaque about how it spends its money?