[Kabar-indonesia] FT Analysis/Aceh: Aid agencies find themselves in unfamiliar terrain

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Financial Times (UK)
October 2, 2006

Comment and Analysis

After the deluge, aid agencies find 
themselves in unfamiliar terrain

Lack of expertise in construction has prevented Oxfam 
and others from making best use of plentiful resources.

By SHAWN DONNAN and TAUFAN HIDAYAT

In a place where more than 160,000 people died and whole bustling
villages were reduced to rubble within minutes, Heni Flora is one of
the lucky ones. The 26-year-old housewife, her mechanic husband and
their three children lost only the new home into which they had sunk
all their savings when the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami ravaged
through Indonesia's Aceh province.

Yet 21 months after the tsunami, to ask her how she feels is to
encounter a whirlwind of dissatisfaction, most of it focused on the
dismal state of the house built for her family as part of a project
overseen by Oxfam, the British charity.

The roof leaks. So do the gappy water-stained wood-plank walls. In a
place where tropical rains pour down for months at a time each year,
that means the house "is very uncomfortable", she says. "How can it be
comfortable if there's rain and wind coming in all the time? They
(Oxfam) should demolish it."

The international response to the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
has, with at least Dollars 13.5bn (Pounds 7.2bn, Euros 10.6bn) raised,
been held up as a heart-warming example of how generous the world can
be. International aid agencies have made ambitious promises to "build
back better" in affected areas from Aceh to Sri Lanka. For anyone who
saw the disaster's immediate and grisly aftermath in somewhere such as
the Indonesian province, it is hard not to be impressed with what has
been accomplished in the past 21 months.

The equally valid reality, however, is that rebuilding has been
fraught with difficulties that ought to be a wake-up call for the aid
community.For the time being, it is people such as Ms Flora and her
bemused neighbours on the outskirts of the Acehnese capital, Banda
Aceh, who are shouldering the burden of the system's shortcomings.

"If the walls are a problem now, what will happen in the future?" asks
Mutaqin, a 35-year-old widow who lives in an Oxfam house across the
road with her three children and a clutch of orphaned nieces and
nephews.

Ms Flora and her neighbours are far from the only ones pointing to
problems. In a July report, consultants working for the Tsunami
Evaluation Coalition, a grouping of 40 charities and development
agencies established to monitor the tsunami response, identified a
"growing frustration with the speed, direction and ownership" of the
reconstruction process from Aceh to Sri Lanka.

Spread across the 175-page report was a list of shortcomings ranging
from co-ordination issues that, in at least one case, saw an aid
agency erect houses where another had agreed to build a road, to a
plethora of broken promises by international aid groups.

In his foreword to the report, former US President Bill Clinton, the
UN's special tsunami envoy, described the findings as "uncomfortable
reading" for an aid community more used to patting itself on the back
than absorbing criticisms.

The report's authors wrote pointedly that the "generous funding"
available for the tsunami response meant the "humanitarian industry"
was "deprived of its customary excuse for built-in systemic
shortcomings". Moreover, many of the systemic issues listed had been
identified as much as a decade ago, in the aftermath of the
international response to the slaughter in Rwanda.

"We can and must do better in responding to ongoing and future
disaster relief and recovery challenges," Mr Clinton wrote.

In the case of Heni Flora's leaky house and those of her neighbours,
Oxfam says it is reviewing what to do. But Melinda Young, the senior
staff member in charge of Oxfam's Banda Aceh office during an August
visit by the Financial Times, said the charity was unlikely to go back
and do any repairs. "If you go back and repair that house then another
person doesn't get a house," she said.

Oxfam has pledged to build more than 1,600 houses in Aceh and by last
month it had completed nearly half of them - although Ms Young said
building homes "is an area that we want to phase out of".

The agency is far from being the only one to have encountered problems
working in Aceh. After spending more than Dollars 2m and finishing 571
homes using an Indonesian contractor, Save The Children this year
fired three in-house building inspectors when it discovered big
problems that meant 371 of the houses would have to be torn down.

When the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies unveiled a Dollars 100m plan last year to build 20,000
temporary homes, it struggled for months to find the
sustainably-logged wood it needed. By August only about 13,000 had
been erected and it seemed unclear whether the rest would ever be
built - although Red Cross officials insisted they would.

The issue in Aceh is at least partly that the funds generated by the
huge public response to the disaster prompted many agencies to embark
on projects they had little expertise in, says Kevin Duignan, the New
Zealand builder in charge of the IFRC project.

"No one had ever heard of the Red Cross construction company before.
Or of the Concern construction company," he says. "Those are aid
agencies!"

But even groups with significant experience in rebuilding in disaster
zones say they have faced difficulties with corruption and land
ownership, as well as price inflation for building materials.

The international community does not bear the responsibility for all
the problems. In a September report, the World Bank warned that local
governments were spending too much new-found wealth on flashy new
offices and not enough on infrastructure.

The news is also not all bad. The Indonesian government's Aceh and
Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, for example, has begun
working with state-owned banks that buy up building materials in bulk
before "loaning" them to contractors, resulting in less price
inflation for items such as bricks and timber.

But the tsunami reconstruction is clearly replete with frustrations.
For German contractor GITEC, the biggest has been a shortage of
qualified labour. In the coastal village of Lamteungoh, where just 161
people out of a population of more than 1,300 before the tsunami
survived, it has caused delays in the construction of houses that
should have been finished last month in time for the start of Ramadan.

"We don't really care how much is spent on the houses," says Sanusi,
the local village head. "What we really need is the houses to be
finished for us."

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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