As the date of the international meeting on earthquake assistance to Nepal on 25 June nears, the Nepali media is suddenly festooned with headlines about the transparency, efficacy and even the necessity of international assistance. There are concerns about most post-disaster aid being siphoned off by expensive consultants from donor countries, of lack of coordination, the cost of relief flights by the militaries of various government being counted as part of the humanitarian assistance package, wastage and duplication.
A lot of these concerns are valid, and emanate from the disastrous wastage of relief after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where various evaluations have stated that only 16 per cent of the $16 billion pledged for emergency relief actually ended up in Haiti. There have been shocking revelations of waste by the American Red Cross. Five years after the quake killed 300,000 people, many are still living in tents in Haiti.
“Nepal should not be another Haiti” is the popular refrain from senior government officials. The Finance Ministry’s aid coordination division has accused Nepal’s donors of deliberately bypassing government in disbursing funds and distributing aid. Now, in an effort to take charge, the government is asserting itself and adopting a hard line on how aid in cash and kind can be spent.
Unfortunately, the government has done this in the ham-handed fashion that we have all come to expect of it: not for better coordination, but for control. Ministries involved in preparing for the donor meeting are working at cross purposes. New policies and rules are utterly confusing and often unenforceable. When in doubt about something, the government’s knee-jerk reaction is to immediately ban it. The attempt to channelise the money charities send to Nepal has stopped millions of dollars in donations that would have benefited survivors.
Contradictory and ever-changing tax rules have stopped relief material like tarps, tents and food urgently needed by the 2 million people whose homes went down. Rudely refusing offers of helicopters hasn’t just damaged Nepal’s image abroad, but created a logistical bottleneck, with a backlog of hundreds of tons of relief supplies stuck at warehouses (see page 14-15). And on Wednesday the government tersely announced a ban on all relief material after 22 June to stem ‘dependency’ among survivors. Most aid groups would be perfectly happy to hand over their relief material to the government for distribution if its systems were efficient and equitable, but we have seen they aren’t.