October 31, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?
By Linda Polman
Rather than lessen human suffering during wars and disasters, humanitarian organizations instead compound the very problems they seek to alleviate, argues Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist.
The debate over the merits of humanitarian aid is not a new one. Ms. Polman writes that its earliest critic was the nurse Florence Nightingale, who said that volunteer groups served to remove responsibility from governments to take care of their own wounded or sick soldiers and end wars as quickly as possible. Opposing this view was Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, a founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who felt that help should be provided no matter the circumstances.
Ms. Polman takes the side of Florence Nightingale, after 15 years worth of watching aid gone awry in war zones.
She takes particular issue with small nonprofits that relief workers create out of a belief that they are more effective than large, established aid organizations. Due to the lack of requirements for the standards that aid groups must meet, Ms. Polman says that small, poorly qualified groups are gaining more financing from government ministries and well-established aid organizations. She tells of groups ill qualified to perform surgery operating on amputees or sending packages of ski gloves and rotten cheese to children in Africa.
Poor oversight and competitiveness are the main culprits for why humanitarian efforts come to naught. Ms. Polman criticizes aid groups for not insisting on accountability standards and refusing to form alliances to streamline relief operations or stand up to dictatorships. She concludes: “If the aid industry is left to control itself instead of being controlled, then reforms aren’t going to happen anytime soon.”
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010; http://www.henryholt.com; $24.00; 228 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8050-9290-5.
