Despite
raising nearly half a billion dollars and allocating $170m to ‘shelter relief’,
the aid organization built only six permanent homes, an investigation has found
The Guardian, Alan Yuhus, 4 June 2015
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| An undated American Red Cross handout photo of the aftermath of the earthquake shows the devastation to homes in Haiti. Photograph: Matt Marek/American Red Cross/PA |
Despite
collecting nearly half a billion dollars for Haiti earthquake relief, the
American Red Cross has built only six permanent homes and seemingly squandered
millions in the country, according to a new report.
A joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR uncovered rampant mismanagement, high
overhead costs and deeply rooted acrimony from Haitians toward the aid
organization. Among the investigation’s findings was that although the Red
Cross apportioned about $170m to the category of “shelter” relief, and although
it at first planned to build some 700 houses, it only constructed six permanent
homes.
The report
charges the Red Cross with consistent misrepresentation of its projects,
especially in housing. The authors cite promotional materials that say the Red
Cross provided more than 130,000 people with homes, and then note that that
total includes people in “transitional shelters”, recipients of short-term rent
assistance, and people who had been “trained in proper construction
techniques”.
The Red
Cross disputes the report and asserts it has “helped build and operate eight hospitals
and clinics” and “move more than 100,000 people out of make-shift tents into
safe and improved housing”. In a statement, the organization said it is
“disappointed” by the “lack of balance, context and accuracy” on the part of
ProPublica and NPR.
A major
problem for the organization was leadership and staffing, according to the
report. Integral positions, including experts for health and shelter, were left
vacant for months and sometimes years. The positions that were staffed were
predominantly held by expats or by people flown in from the United States, many
of whom could not speak French or Creole.
In one 2011 document, Red Cross official Judith St Ford notes that there are “serious
program delays caused by internal issues that go unaddressed”, including for
cholera relief.
“There is a
clear lack of foresight and planning,” she wrote, and “the lack of leadership
ability has contributed to poor morale in the field.”
She also
urged her superiors to hire more Haitians: “the implication that talented,
smart, competent Haitians cannot be found in Haiti has to be dispelled.”
In its
statement the Red Cross says 90% of its current staff are Haitians; the
organization did not break down the hierarchy or positions of its staff.
“If they
were an organization that had a real history in Haiti I think this would’ve
gone a lot better,” said Justin Elliott, one of the journalists who co-wrote
the report. “The entire Haiti reconstruction effort has been really
problematic, but the outside groups that have done better have roots there,
have Haitian people working at high levels, have people who speak the
language.”
In one 2013 email published by ProPublica, CEO Gail McGovern admitted a project had failed
and that she did not know what to do with a $20m remainder. “Now that the
Northern project is going bust and we are still holding $20 million of
contingency, any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?” she asked, before
mentioning a mysterious “wonderful helicopter idea”.
Without
Haitians in leadership positions, the Red Cross was particularly ill-prepared
to deal with Haiti’s land tenure rules, a system so tangled and unforgiving
that it has intimidated USAid and Vatican relief efforts.
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| Residents of the Jean-Marie Vincent camp for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake, wait for customers outside their tent where they have set up a stand to sell rice, oil and canned goods in Port-au-Prince on 9 January 2013. Photograph: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP |
“Land
tenure is probably the biggest stumbling block,” said Jonathan M Katz, a
freelance journalist and author of a book about the earthquake, The Big Truck
That Went By. The system has stymied aid organizations for years, and Katz said
that for years aid organizations have “thrown up their collective hands and
said ‘we don’t really want to deal with this.’”
The Red
Cross entangled itself in a web of other organizations, often paying them to do
relief work, themselves struggling in Haiti. This outsourcing is commonplace in
the international aid industry, Katz said, and leads to inevitable but not
necessarily unreasonable overhead costs. But eager to better solicit donations,
organizations often try to downplay these costs.
The report
notes that overhead charges by the Red Cross and its contractors undermine
McGovern’s claim that “minus the nine cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar
will be going to Haiti.”
In one
case, Elliott and his co-author, NPR’S Laura Sullivan, found that the
International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) exacted $1.56m in overhead
from the American Red Cross’s payment of $6m, all to help give Haitians rental
subsidies so they could leave tent camps. The IFRC said the costs were related
to “administration, finance, human resources”.
In another
case, the Red Cross commissioned Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies to
upgrade shelters, but still took 24% of the money for the project in additional
overhead costs, according to the report.
Where
exactly the $488m of the American Red Cross’s Haiti budget has gone is unclear,
Elliott said, since “the whole international aid sector is pretty opaque in
general. And the spending of the American Red Cross is incredible opaque. You
can tell hardly anything from their disclosures.”
He said
that the issue of money was particularly sensitive to Haitians who had
coordinated with the Red Cross.
“They were
furious basically over broken promises,” Elliott said. “About three years ago,
the Red Cross told people they were going to build hundreds of new homes in
this very hard-hit area, and this thing was just stalled. Over the next two
years they had meetings with the community, handed out juice boxes and so on,
and nothing happened for a long time.”
The Red
Cross is now helping build a road and install solar lights in the area.
Katz said
that the problems of the American Red Cross are “typical of the aid industry in
general. The Red Cross is sort of the biggest kid on the block. Because they
make way more money than anybody else, what they do is magnified.”
The interconnected
NGOs and aid organizations of the world, ranging from the many satellites of
the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders to the Clinton Foundation, Katz said,
should deserve more skepticism from the public. Reports have traced the 2011
cholera epidemic to United Nations relief efforts, he noted, adding that many
organizations operate more like businesses than anything else.
“Even when
an aid group is pulling off a project well,” he said, “if it isn’t going to be
there forever, if it isn’t going to be accountable for successes and failures,
if it isn’t leaving something behind that’s permanent, then it’s still capable
of doing damage.”
Last year
the Red Cross similarly took issue with another ProPublica report that said the
organization had disastrously mismanaged aid relief after hurricane Sandy.
