Some Tsunami relief organizations stop accepting donations

Posted by irishg on March 18th, 2005 at 05:22am

The New York Times reports that a number of Tsunami aid groups have stopped accepting money targetted for Tsunami relief. View full article here (free registration required).

Sensitized by recent charity scandals, agencies say they’re being careful not to accept more money than they can legitimately spend to help tsunami victims.

In fact, Doctors without Borders has reportly returned $500,000 dollars that they received for Tsunami relief, but which cannot be applied to their Tsunami-relief programs. (This follows an earlier announcement, reported on this blog, that Doctors without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres was contacting some Tsunami donors to ask permission to unrestrict their donations, allowing them to be used for projects other than Tsunami relief).

These announcements come at the same time that the Asian Development Bank said there was a shortfall of more than $4bn (£2.1bn) promised by foreign governments for post-Tsunami reconstruction.

The complex nature of disaster relief and reconstruction can cause concern in donors who are aware of the real, tnaigble needs of the Tsunami victims, and who can’t understand why the aid is so difficult to deliver. I recently watched a news report on CBC Television about how aid organizations in Banda Aceh, Indonesia are competing in turf wars for the opportunity to provide aid to local projects. It’s a serious problem if the story of the Tsunami relief starts to turn into one of competitiveness and egoism between relief agences rather than focusing on the great amount of good work being done each day.

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