Tuesday, November 22, 2005
FYI, NGO coordination
Someone asked me: NGOs is non-governmental organizations, a.k.a. nonprofits (I think there's no diff between the two but they're called NGOs here). I’ve taken a big interest in coordination between NGOs during disaster relief. It’s an intersection of a lot, a lot of factors, and the way coordination takes place differs from site to site and disaster to disaster. Espec. interesting I think because setting the stage for the coordination happens during the earliest, most emergency months of the disaster, when everyone’s rushing around. I sense—though not 100% sure—that the way the coordination takes place is often not well-documented for future learning. Each agency may document how it worked for that agency, but overall I'm not sure there are solid snapshots of, say, coordination in the Nagapattinam district in India v. the Galle area of Sri Lanka.
Poor coordination may result, in the worst (and not too common) scenario, in, say, a villager getting two houses built for him. In more common scenarios, six agencies may distribute the same relief items to the same village in the same few weeks---Would you like your seventh mosquito net? Your 6th blanket?
I had been wondering if one organization could position itself as a reconnaissance team, going into villages and camps to just find out what needs to be done—did someone never get their mosquito net, for example, or did a school get a fan that subsequently broke; are the latrines out of order, etc. The amazing Project Galle, a project in the district of Galle in South Sri Lanka, has been doing it, as they told me yesterday, although not all NGOs are responsive to suggestions and it’s absolutely impossible to find funding for. And THAT’s what’s interesting. I just thought you should know.
Thanks to Dad for good Sunil questions; he definitely has all the documentation Dad asked about and hmm, maybe someone--I don't say who--is supposed to stay and help him make a documentary. Also, word to my family that cousin Paul Kaplan is a very funny man, AND in all his years at Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal he's never missed a day of work.
Poor coordination may result, in the worst (and not too common) scenario, in, say, a villager getting two houses built for him. In more common scenarios, six agencies may distribute the same relief items to the same village in the same few weeks---Would you like your seventh mosquito net? Your 6th blanket?
I had been wondering if one organization could position itself as a reconnaissance team, going into villages and camps to just find out what needs to be done—did someone never get their mosquito net, for example, or did a school get a fan that subsequently broke; are the latrines out of order, etc. The amazing Project Galle, a project in the district of Galle in South Sri Lanka, has been doing it, as they told me yesterday, although not all NGOs are responsive to suggestions and it’s absolutely impossible to find funding for. And THAT’s what’s interesting. I just thought you should know.
Thanks to Dad for good Sunil questions; he definitely has all the documentation Dad asked about and hmm, maybe someone--I don't say who--is supposed to stay and help him make a documentary. Also, word to my family that cousin Paul Kaplan is a very funny man, AND in all his years at Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal he's never missed a day of work.
