 Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you for being here. My name is Andrew Schwartz. I'm our Senior Vice President for External Relations. And I'm thrilled to host the second edition of our partnership with LSU and the Stevenson Disaster Management Institute. This is a series that we put together really from the vision of a very important and special person in this field, Lori Bertman, who runs the Pennington Foundation, was really her vision that helped us put this together. And I'd like to recognize Lori in the front row right here. Thank you for your help with this. Thank you for your vision. I'd also like to recognize Joey Booth, who's the Director of SDMI, and Tom Anderson from SDMI, and Jamison Day, who I hadn't seen yet, here from SDMI. But this is a terrific partnership for CSIS because we get to work with some of the experts, people, and fortunately, as we all know, in Louisiana, who have had some very firsthand and personal experiences with disasters. And their role with us is to work together, to learn from each other, and to hopefully advance the ball on many of these issues. With that, I'd like to introduce my colleague, Rick Ozzie Nelson, who leads our Homeland Security program here. And Ozzie is going to moderate the panel today. Ozzie. Thank you, Andrew. Well, welcome, everyone. This is a great crowd. We're very excited to have this many people. I'm Rick Ozzie Nelson, the Director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism program. I found out this is problematic. When we were doing the RSVPs for this event, this is an area where people, when I started getting into disaster management and working on this issue, I was looking at it really from a domestic perspective. And then it went from a domestic perspective and talking to our folks in Louisiana and realizing the significance of the international component, the significance of the coordination issues and realizing that domestic management just isn't really a U.S. or a Homeland Security issue. It's actually a global issue. So then they started talking about, we have to coordinate better with state and local governments and the federal governments. Well, that's kind of the easy part, and that's yesterday's news. We now have to coordinate better with our international partners. We have to coordinate better with the private sector and we have to coordinate better with non-governmental organizations, NGOs, which I have limited experience with, actually. So when I saw that I was trying to get people to come to this event, they were low on the NGO RSVPs. And so one of my colleagues joked and said, that's because you have counter-terrorism in your title. So we were here as a Homeland Security and Disaster Management. We'll delete counter-terrorism for the purposes of this meeting. But I have to admit, this is a new audience for me. I could not have done this without the help of my colleagues who have a tremendous amount of experience in this area, such as Mark Quarterman, I'm not sure if he's still here. He runs our new, and Stacey White. Stacey, what's our new program called Conflict? That's the opposite of counter-terrorism, right? But they were very, very helpful, as well as some others in the organization. Heather Connelly, he used to work at the American Red Cross and I think, and Hardin Lang, who just came back from Haiti. So thank my colleagues for bringing this wonderful crowd together. So obviously our event tonight is on international cooperation. We're going to have Craig Fugate here in February and then in March our next event will probably be on public and private sector cooperation. So we're trying to get a broad brushed overview of some of the challenges that are facing the disaster management and preparedness and response communities. Obviously, you know, last year's devastating earthquake at Haiti highlighted the importance, once again, of international cooperation and disaster relief. There was an estimated 400 international organizations, as well as military and government entities from over 26 separate countries that rushed to provide aid. For the first six months, they fed 4 million people and provided 1.5 million with emergency shelter, with clean water and medical care. Despite these successes, as many of you probably know from firsthand experience, there are still struggles, there are still challenges that remain today. We have challenges with the local government officials there. We still have government coordination between the government NGOs and the private sector that remain. And we still have obviously a lot of challenges there. There's still a million Haitians without homes. Still have rubble and we're still working on trying to get the funds that have been committed spent. These are all challenges that are way outside of my area of expertise. That's why we've invited these three distinguished people here to come speak. So using that as an overview, what we're going to do tonight is we're going to have each of our speakers speak for seven, ten minutes, give us an overview of their thoughts. But really the benefit of this is going to be the dialogue from you all, the conversation. So when they're done, we're going to open up to questions and answers. And again, it's not statements and answers, it's questions and answers. And we ask that you just state your name and the organization you're from. The bios of all of our speakers are in front of you. I'll give a short intro to each of them. First to my left here is Mark Ward. He's the Acting Director of Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at U.S. Agency for National Development. Prior to this, Mark was a special advisor on the development to the head of the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan. Next to him we have David Meltzer. David is a Senior Vice President of International Services for the Red Cross. David is directly responsible for the international activities of the organization, including health programs in over 30 countries, a $580 million tsunami recovery program, and disaster response activities throughout the world. And then batting cleanup will be Joel Charney, and we're absolutely thrilled that interaction is here. So Joel, thank you for coming. He's Vice President for Humanitarian Policy and Practice at Interaction, an alliance of U.S.-based relief and development organizations. Joel has conducted humanitarian missions in Pakistan, Congo, Rwanda, Chinese border with North Korea, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Central African Republic, Burma, Syria, Kenya, and Sudan. So these individuals have an immense amount of experience and expertise in this area. So enough from me. Mark, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you for comments. Thank you. Thank you very much. David Joel, nice to see you again. And terrific ideas, CSIS and LSU, to get all of us in this town to continue to focus on the importance of being better prepared for disaster response from my perspective outside of the United States. So thanks very much. You know, we'd like to think 2010 was an aberration, an exceptional year with the Haiti earthquakes and the floods in Pakistan, but I'm not sure 2010 could be the new normal. And that's got us very concerned at USAID. And I know it's got UN agencies very concerned that we deal with on disaster response on a daily basis. And that's why this topic is so timely. And the support from Pennington, from LSU, and others, the growing support for discussion of this topic is so important. We think we've got to grow our response capacity and integrate new actors to meet those challenges. And that's what I'm going to focus on today. To put it bluntly, we've got to change our approach and we've got to start welcoming all the help that we can get. Look at Haiti and Pakistan. My office, the Office of U.S. Foreign Disasters Assistance at USAID, we responded to 77-0 declared disasters in 2010, but obviously Haiti and Pakistan were at the top of the list. And to be frank, responding to those two disasters strained our structures and approaches, I won't say to the breaking point, but strained them significantly, between us, all the UN agencies, all the other international organizations, the wonderful international NGOs, the local NGOs, other donor governments. We did great work. We benefited millions of people providing emergency shelter and food and water and heading off serious disease outbreaks at least until a few months ago in Haiti. But the scale of the demand was simply too great for the international community to meet all of the needs. Not to minimize what was done immediately following the earthquake in Haiti. We and others mobilized search and rescue teams from USAID, from FEMA and elsewhere that saved more than 130 people pulling them out of the rubble. That was a record. We worked with the United Nations World Food Program to feed 3.5 million people and with other partners gave basic shelter materials to another 1.5 million people before the rainy season. That was a record. Up to 1.3 million people got safe drinking water. That was a record. And in Pakistan, we provided basic shelter material to between 3 and 4 million people. That was a record. But none of them was enough. We've got to expand our capacity, bring in new organizations the private sector, businesses, philanthropy, private contributions adopt and adapt to new technology and do more to mitigate disaster response before the next disaster hits. So how do we do it? First, we need to put our own house in order in the old United States government. President Obama said, and he's right, absolutely, that we need a whole-of-government approach. I wasn't here. I was in Kabul on other business at the time. But I understand when the earthquake hit in Haiti, one of the first things the president said to the interagency team is, I want a whole-of-government response. This is so big. And that brought new expertise and resources to bear, which is great. But coordinating that effort here in Port-au-Prince was a challenge. And the QDDR, which some of you have seen, talks about the need for an international response framework to help the United States government figure out faster and more effectively when a disaster hits who is going to have the lead within our government on coordinating that whole-of-government response. And we at USAID very much look forward to working on that because we can and have to act faster when the whole-of-government is going to be put to work on one of these mega-disasters. That's on the inside. We've also got to embrace more help from outside the government. And let me start with private contributions from the public. I'm delighted that Pennington is here to join us in this discussion. You know, after the Haiti earthquake, there was a massive outpouring of private contributions from the diaspora, from all Americans, far more, well, we'll never know exactly how much it was, but we think far more than the United States official contribution. We saw the same thing after the tsunami. And the challenge, if we will take it, is how to coordinate those private contributions to make sure that all that money is spent well on the ground. Some private contributors, citizens, organizations, companies approach us after a disaster and ask, who should we give to? And we're very happy to share with them information about which international NGOs we are working with on the ground that are taking contributions. Organizations that we know are doing good work, and some of them are represented here tonight. Hello, Randy. Speak of one, Mercy Corps. And organizations that we know are working through the UN cluster system in that country so that their work is also coordinated with what everybody else is doing. And we've all heard horror stories of when that doesn't happen. I'll never forget I've been in this business a long time. Look at me. I'll never forget that day in Sri Lanka after the tsunami when I visited the ovens. The ovens were sheltered, erected overnight by a very well-meaning charity who arrived with a sackful of money, bought local building materials, and erected shelter. All that was left for building materials was corrugated iron sheeting. They built ovens. And we all remember those of us that worked on the Pakistan earthquake, the scene at Chakalala Airport next to the Islamabad Airport piled high pallets as far as you can see with, are we allowed to use colorful language at CSIS? Absolutely. You're on webcast too, though. Crap. It was piled high with crap that had to be buried, but took time unloading, took time on those runways and delayed the delivery of stuff that we really needed. So we have a mantra at OFDA that cash is best. And after the tsunami, I had the pleasure of working with former presidents Bush and Clinton, and they were great on spreading that message. The Clinton-Younger Bush Haiti fund has similarly pushed the private contributions towards cash. Now, we're never going to be able to coordinate all of the private money that's coming in, but I think this is an area where we have to focus more attention to get as much of it coordinated with what the real needs are on the ground as we can. I also believe that stuff, the opposite of cash, isn't always bad, and this is not the most popular view in my office. Sometimes equipment and commodity contributions can really help. I'll never forget working with Jeff Immelt during the Pakistan earthquake. He was one of the five CEOs that accepted the call to help us raise corporate funding for the Pakistan earthquake effort. And he said, I'll give you some generators, and we turned them down. We shouldn't have done that. We bought a lot of generators, and the GE generators would have been very, very welcome. So we've got to be more flexible and figure out how to talk to the major corporations that have business interests in these countries and a philanthropic spirit better. In the Haiti earthquake, there are some good stories. The Penske Corporation worked with the Clinton Bush Haiti fund to donate 40 trucks. It was the right equipment, it was absolutely needed, and it was immediately put to work by WFP and the government. And I remember the contribution of UPS after the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, where they donated a significant amount of lift free into the country, and they let us decide what to put on. But this is going to require a lot of discussion and a meeting of the minds between my organization and the private sector to figure out how to better communicate what we need on the ground so that this is a question of pulling what's needed and not pushing what's available. But it is one of our priorities going forward, particularly after 2010, and I'm delighted that there's an office at the State Department who can also work with this on global partnerships. I think we need to do more to take advantage of indigenous capacity in the countries where the disasters hit to increase our capacity. Pakistan, where the floods hit last year, is a great example. Civil society in Pakistan is fantastic, and the United States government knows it better than most and helped give birth to some of it decades ago. And we have to make more of an effort in my organization to look for that capacity in country and use it when it is there, when it is reliable, when it is accountable for the funds that we give it. Now my friends in the audience that represent the international NGOs need not worry about this. I'm talking about increasing our capacity, not substituting our capacity. And what we found in Pakistan as the floods spread south seems to me I shot right here and talked about that, as it spread down into Sindh and Balochistan and the Punjab, we needed more capacity. We needed more NGOs. The international NGOs were saying to us we can't spread that thin. And so the Pakistani NGOs that were available were a godsend. We need to be willing to work with them more. And I encourage and we will continue to encourage corporate philanthropy, businesses with interests in those countries to create relationships with Indigenous NGOs in those countries, in between disasters, so that when the next disaster hits those business interests in the country know who they want to work with, have established those relationships and can use them quicker and be more effective more quickly. And that's the final point which I've just hinted at and maybe the most important one of all that I hope everybody can get more excited about and more involved in. And that's the importance of disaster risk reduction activities. If I'm right, and sometimes I am, that 2010 is the new normal and we do not have the capacity to respond to the disasters that are coming our way between the disasters so that when they hit, they're not so big. It's a challenge for us. I get a very generous budget from the United States Congress. Thank you very much. But I have to balance, we have to balance at USAID, funding for disaster response with funding for disaster risk reduction activities. Now you look like a fairly intelligent group. Where do you think comes from when a disaster comes along that we weren't expecting? And disaster risk reduction activities always seem to get left behind. So again, we need help from outside sources of support. And I'm delighted to be able to begin that discussion, I hope, with some of the outside players here tonight. Thanks very much. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it, Dave. Thank you, Rick. I also want to thank the Center as well as LSU and the Pennington Foundation. This is a great opportunity to talk to an audience that we don't normally talk to on the international disaster side of the shop, if you will. I'm going to borrow a phrase that is often used in the military context where you hear about the fog of war. The same is true in disaster, the fog of disaster. Disaster relief recovery is never going to be surgical. It's never going to be clean. It's messy stuff. I do think there are really good ways, which I'll talk about, to mitigate the mess, to reduce the mess. I also feel that in an international disaster, there are a number of factors that make it more complicated, more difficult to do a good job than a strictly domestic disaster. And let me just talk a few factors that contribute to the fog of disaster. In an international disaster, you have many more actors. You have international nongovernmental organizations. You have certainly what we call the host government, Haiti, but you often have a number of other governments that for humanitarian reasons and really for political reasons have an imperative to respond. You have multilateral organizations, the United Nations, chief amongst them. Everyone will descend upon the site of the disaster with the best of intentions and will step on everyone's toes because this is something Mark mentioned a number of times, coordination. Coordination is really tough. Particularly if you're not in your own country. You have language barriers. You have cultural barriers. You have the fact that you're bringing people in and there's no place for them to sleep. Really simple things that just weigh down the response and weigh down the effectiveness in the international context. So coordination is really, really difficult in an international disaster. And in Haiti it was multiplied I would say a thousand fold because in Haiti and it's as clear as the Republic of NGO. And what that meant in practical terms is that you had before the quake I forget the number, how many thousands of NGOs. Very good NGOs. Most of them focused on a very small community. Perhaps an orphanage. Perhaps a school that do very good development work. But relief, disaster relief is a business. It's a science. All of a sudden these organizations were overwhelmed with need in their little communities and they didn't have the resources to sit through the necessary but painful meetings required to undertake effective coordination. So in Haiti we saw the great weight of NGOs weighing down the response in many ways. And it's not a lack of good intention. It's a lack of means to sit through these meetings and coordinate and make sure that that small NGO sitting next to you isn't providing assistance to the same community you are and that you're not both forgetting the community just down the rutted road a kilometer away. In addition to the many actors what makes international disaster I think more difficult is role confusion. If we have a disaster here in our country it may be a bit messy more than a bit but I think each agency has a general idea of what its role is from the federal government state government and yes we certainly see conflicts but there's opportunity to plan ahead to prepare and to mitigate a lot of that role confusion. It's much more difficult in an international context. There isn't as much planning. There is not as much tabletop exercising on a multilateral basis. And so when an international disaster strikes and everyone comes to the table it can be a bit of a food fight and it can be very confusing. You have the added complication of media in a large international disaster where every many country is responding and at least in the case of Haiti over 100 countries responded through their local Red Cross or Red Crescent Society to Haiti. The local media wants to cover that story and so they are running around looking for their story looking to highlight in a good way what their local government or local Red Cross or local NGO is doing to the people back home. Well all of that creates a real opportunity for what I referred to earlier the fog of disaster. So how do you mitigate that? How do you reduce the inevitable inefficiencies of the companies and international disaster and the inevitable inefficiencies? At least within the Red Cross, Red Crescent Network and I don't want to hold us out as unique. There are many other organizations and governments that have similar frameworks but we have been doing disasters for decades over a century and what we have learned and this will come as no surprise to those of you familiar in the domestic is understand where it is. So for example the American Red Cross in an international disaster we do distribution of relief supplies really well. We don't do mobile field hospitals. We don't do logistics. Now I know the British Red Cross they do logistics. The Germans and the Canadians they have mobile field hospitals. So understand what your role is understand what your capacity is and understand more importantly you cannot do well. And let someone else play that role so that at least in our little Red Cross Network we understand each other's roles and capacity and I'm overstating it to make it sound like it's really clean but we generally stay within our lanes and that to me reduces some of the natural waste and inefficiencies that you see when the sky is falling. So I think that is a real key success factor to an international disaster as well as domestic. Understand your roles stick to your lanes. The other thing and this was also mentioned by Mark is Indigenous capacity. Following the Haiti disaster we fielded I would say thousands of calls from well-intentioned Americans saying I want to volunteer I want to go to Haiti I want to help. Bless them. It's really sincere but please do not go to Haiti. You don't speak the language you don't understand the culture and we've got no place to put you. You want to sleep under the stars with all sorts of disease and security issues so what we get our legs our feet on the ground is through the local society there were tens of thousands of Haitians who understand the culture understand the language and have a place to rest their head at night humble as it may be after the quake and they are dying to volunteer. They really want to volunteer and the great thing about volunteering is it helps your psychological recovery. You're now playing a role in the recovery of your community whether it's your little neighborhood or your country you're playing a role. So take advantage of what the local capacity can afford. The other thing I want to touch upon is the significant advantages but also concerns in working with military authorities if you're an NGO or you're a Red Cross. Capacity is great we saw in Pakistan in 2005 the only way to get to some of these remote communities were through helicopters and military helicopters that's great if you have only one way to help a community use it but you have to avoid creating confusion. I'm the American Red Cross I'm not the US government I'm not the US military part of my ability to deliver assistance is my independence and my neutrality that gets blurred if I start flying around in US military aircraft doesn't mean you never do it it's about how you partner with military it is very much an important partner and we saw it in Haiti when we partnered with the US Navy and they deployed the hospital naval ship the Comfort and the US Navy said can you American Red Cross can you train and deploy Creole speaking volunteers to work on the ship and act as interpreters and in four days we trained and deployed 70 interpreters and they did wonderful work we subjected them to all sorts of stress and pressures by literally putting them in the OR and they became the means of communicating horrible news to family members or survivors there is a way to really develop a very good partnership so that's how I think you can avoid some of the fog of disaster but I just want to come back to a point that Mark said at the end which is around preparedness and disaster risk reduction and not to engage in the whole debate about climate change and whether it's caused by humans or it's just happening to me that's not relevant in the disaster business what is relevant is it is happening and you can look at all the statistics which demonstrate and there's an institute in I think Belgium CRED I can't recall what the French translation is but we've got wonderful charts if you can call it wonderful that show the number of disasters and the damage those disasters bring are increasing at a rather steep rate and they go back a couple hundred years and with increased population, increased urbanization increased poverty all that contributes to the fact that with increasing natural disasters we will have more damage more deaths, more vulnerability and more insecurity someone told me I haven't checked the math but they said I think 20% of the world's population is in the Indus and Ganges river valleys and so think of the impact we saw in Pakistan flood 20 million people homeless so to me the important question is in addition to how do we respond, how do we prepare, how do we mitigate the risk and there are all sorts of academic studies so the return on investment from disaster risk reduction is anywhere between four to eight to one, four dollars return for a dollar invested and to echo what Mark's point about congressional appropriations for disaster risk reduction American Red Cross we rely in public donations and when there's a high profile disaster like Haiti or the tsunami we don't fundraise, we fund catch the money comes pouring in from generous Americans but I've got to work 30 times harder to raise a dollar for disaster risk reduction, it's a great business case but it doesn't have the emotional appeal you know I can bring a donor corporate individual foundation and show a community in Indonesia doing a mock disaster drill and that's great it prepares them we can take them to Vietnam and show them how the community can read the Mekong River and understand when it's about to overflow its banks and what to do or I can take them to Haiti and show them how we have marked out hurricane evacuation routes and developed a really low tech early warning system to get to the 1.3 million now maybe 800,000 people who are homeless that is a great return on investment it's just not unfortunately sexy now we have seen the US government fund some of our programs we've seen and the corporate America fund some of our disaster risk reduction programs and to me that's a priority when there's a high profile disaster the money will come Americans are extremely generous it's during those quiet periods when you're preparing for a disaster that I think the investment needs to be made so just some general observations and look forward to your questions I'll obviously echo the thanks of my colleagues Rick to CSIS and to LSU and Pennington Foundation I am really impressed that we can get a standing room only crowd at 5 o'clock on a normal Monday in January for such a topic so we kudos to the audience and CSIS for doing the outreach and organizing this the premise of the discussion that we were given is a humanitarian surge that there's increasing interest in humanitarian response there are non-traditional actors and so on and I'm going to push back a little bit on that one of the problems in our communities we do tend to overreact to the most recent case yes Haiti, everyone showed up in Haiti but did everyone show up in Pakistan? absolutely not let's not even talk Pakistan let's talk Somalia 3.5 million people are facing an immense food crisis in Somalia in the midst of war even as we speak I don't even see Sean Penn going to Somalia in Thailand post tsunami humanitarian surge helped by Thai food and Thai beaches in northern Sri Lanka post tsunami very thin on the ground was the humanitarian community much less these non-traditional actors so one of the issues remains this whole question of equitable response response commensurate with need in places where access is difficult where there's little public attention I mean the basic injustice in the humanitarian system remains and I think we have to make sure that we continue to focus on that and not be overly concerned about the fact that you know everyone and her brother was heading down to Haiti it's a special case it's a special moment yes it was chaotic but again let's not overreact now having said that I will confess it's very depressing to be a 30 year member of a profession that basically anyone thinks she or he can do I mean soldiers ministers actors high school students everyone is ready to sign up for the humanitarian venture and just really and it's almost like in fact there's almost this sense that you know if you're a professional in this field it's somehow you've kind of sold out or you've lost the kind of heart and soul of that may have motivated us what I'm interested in is I mean Mark I want to I mean yes let's expand the capacity but let's expand the capacity through professional organizations what I'm interested in is sure let's talk partnership but let's talk partnership in terms of support for individuals and institutions that actually have expertise in humanitarian response I'm not really frankly personally and I think I will stress that I'm speaking for myself here I'm really not that interested in facilitating the access of many people who have no experience in this area just to increase the capacity let's get funding for what we do what we know how to do that's what I'm interested in now the challenge I think for our community in some ways is to demonstrate impact and show that we really are effective I mean I can't turn to a foundation or to a potential corporate sponsor or something and you know say just give us money because you know we're good I mean we have to do a better job in our community of documenting impact of being transparent about the funding that we receive I think that's one thing that's fundamental we have to do a better job I mean the reason everyone thinks they can do this work is that we don't do a very good job in our community of communicating what our standards are how many people in this room are familiar with the sphere standards okay decent percentage probably more than half but I mean the point is I think virtually no one outside our community knows that we have over the last 15 or 20 years developed professional standards in all the technical areas that we engage in whether it's water and sanitation or food distribution protection this time to the new sphere guide interaction has its own member standards so we need to do a better job of you know kind of making people familiar that this is a community that does among its most responsible members try to abide by the rules one of the things that we've talked about as a result of Haiti when you did have so many untraditional actors is thinking about perhaps a threshold for participation in the formal coordination mechanisms so instead of having 400 organizations in a meeting of the health cluster can you find a way to define who needs to be around the table who has the capacity to actually deliver assistance because those are the people that you want in the meeting those are the people that you want to be part of an effort at coordination and you know this Republic of NGO thing I mean one of the messages that interaction developed in the context of the one year anniversary was that from a US perspective 90% of the private assistance was delivered by 10 to 15 organizations so let's not again let's not over react to Haiti the bottom line is there about 15 organizations that matter and those organizations need to make sure that they're collaborating cooperating living up to community standards and so on because if a save or a world vision or a mercy core in American Red Cross if our community fundamentally is an effective that's the problem that we should be that we should be focusing on and I think we would be remiss if we don't think a little bit about the donors and their role in the government agencies that give to these efforts and you know we need from an NGO perspective I know this is a tough one but greater flexibility in the funding we need adherence the US was a leader in developing the good humanitarian donorship principles are we living up to those principles I mean the whole premise of good humanitarian donorship is that you leave political criteria aside you focus on where the need is and you provide a based on need is that really feasible in the context of the war on terror I'd say our our success as a US government and living up to those principles is mixed at best so I'm that would be kind of the agenda that I would lay out the one area that hasn't come up yet in terms of expanding our community is the humanitarian enterprise unfortunately right now is seen as and is often in fact a western enterprise a northern enterprise one that's driven by the US the Scandinavians the EU and so on a lot of the response in Pakistan was from the Gulf States from Saudi Arabia from Islamic charities and there has to be a dialogue between these communities if we're going to be if we're going to maintain humanitarian values as as universal so I think I mean a thousand flowers are going to continue to bloom I mean that that's the way I look at it but again they're not going to bloom in Somalia they're going to bloom in places like Haiti and I think it's fundamentally the fundamental challenges increasing our professionalism and effectiveness and then using that as a case to build the partnerships that are needed to expand our capacity thank you well those were great let's give our panelists a round of applause real quick ok well I did thank you all for those wonderful remarks I learned a lot I do can't believe we have standing room only we brought in a bunch of extra chairs so thank you all for coming I'm overwhelmed by the attendance here and thanks again to Stacey and Mark and everyone for getting the folks here who wants to start off with the first question I have a couple but I'll let you guys go first please state your name the gentleman in the blue suit right here in your organization and we have microphones so if you can just wait to there and also in your question if you don't mind picking one of the panelists to address your question or maybe multiple ones just let's know who you want to answer it thank you my name is Clyde Piras and I'm from the Embassy of Barbados I found the thoughts expressed by Mr. Charney very very sobering and I think a perspective that we really need to pay a lot of attention to especially in today's world the whole question of the confusion and so on that we've had in the Haiti situation but I wanted to ask in terms of international cooperation when we go back to previous examples I wonder what lessons we have been able to learn from any previous examples I mean there's so many of these situations have been going on around the world and so in the Haiti situation obviously in the initial stages yes there's a lot of fog and so on but what have we really learned what lessons have we learned from the previous international situations and then a question that always came to my mind is again alluded to by Mr. Charney there the NGO, the volume in Haiti for example we are told that there are 10,000 NGOs operating in Haiti what have we seen as the benefit over the time that they have been there either before or even after the earthquake situation and what therefore do we think is a future with respect to maybe look at the volume or the number of NGOs in a place like Haiti and how does that compare to any other part of the world and I think the question was answered by Mr. Charney already the fact that in other similar situations there's not that desire for NGOs to get to those locations so I'm very interested to understand how the dynamics here in this particular situation thank you Joel you got the easy question first okay well settle back and David and Mark please lessons learned I think one fundamental one is precisely that we need to be more humble and that the life-saving activity is often if not always done in the first instance by local people I mean when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka the lives were saved to the extent that they were by villagers by local governments and then the aid agencies ramp up and come in and try again it's all done out of goodwill and a need to help but this whole one aspect of prevention is supporting local people in their ability to be resilient and respond to what's needed in a given situation I mean I think that's a very important lesson among many that could be that could be cited NGOs are an aspect of civil society and we want vibrant civil societies that have organizations that express you know community will that meet community needs and so on NGOs cannot solve all the problems of a country you need the government you need the private sector and you know it in other words it's not Haiti is not poor because there are 10,000 NGOs I mean Haiti is poor because of all I mean we can have the Haiti seminar that can be tomorrow but you know I mean I think it's totally unfair to say the reason people are poor in Haiti is because there are 10,000 NGOs I mean to a large extent NGOs are trying to deal with problems and represent a legitimate response to what the needs are and you know I point to a place like I mean there are places where NGOs do absolutely phenomenal do transformational things like in India you take an NGO like the self-employed women's association that's organized tens of thousands of women and fought for better wages etc etc I mean you know that's a development context where organizing local people through NGO action has brought real change Bangladesh and the Philippines would be other places that I would cite where NGOs have made a real difference David? A couple of points one on lessons learned and you've heard mention of cluster leads or cluster the UN cluster system and for those of you who are not international disaster experts a number of years ago to address that issue of coordination the UN with others developed the cluster system and essentially each sector call it health or maybe it's shelter or protection has an organization that leads the relief effort so in food it's the world food program they're the quarterback they don't run all of food relief following the disaster but they are the quarterback they convene the meetings to coordinate and the cluster system is not perfect it's labor intensive it can be really painful and messy but I think a lesson learned from earlier disasters is the need for someone to play quarterback so there are agencies often UN but not exclusively that step forward and the international community recognizes the world food program you're the quarterback for food world health organization you're the quarterback for health and so on and so forth so that is to me a positive lesson that has been learned in terms of benefits of NGOs you heard a few examples I would also say in its early days but I think the relief and recovery effort following the tsunami was very successful we can point to homes we can point to improve water improve sanitation improve livelihoods and say that has gone reasonably well the challenge for NGOs and I'll just use mine for example the Red Cross today is providing clean drinkable water to about 300,000 people every day in Port-au-Prince this is a country that before the quake few within a third had access to clean water what happens when the money runs out and the Red Cross water trucks are idled will someone hopefully the municipal water authority in Port-au-Prince, Dineppa will they have the capacity to step up and backfill those very large shoes what is difficult for an NGO is balancing the need balancing the desire to fulfill humanitarian need a desperate need at the same time preparing your exit the challenge for us is not only to provide the assistance but build that road map to transition that to someone else in a sustainable manner we can't in good conscience hand it off to someone if they're not going to be able to continue to provide that water but we have to find a way I love a question that a lot of people have I love a question that allows me to make my point again so thank you what have we learned what we've learned is we're going to fail if we focus on the response we've got to start investing in activities between the disasters to mitigate the disaster and I'll give you a couple of great examples that I've seen in person Cyclone Cedar hit Bangladesh in the early 90s no Cyclone I remember what that one was called a Cyclone hit Bangladesh in the early 90s and killed almost 100,000 people we spent pennies on earthen dams and planting mangrove trees in the delta Cyclone Cedar hit a few years ago and we lost 10,000 people and I visited after the Cyclone and I saw those earthen dams and they looked awful and I saw those mangrove trees and they looked awful why did they look bad because they did their job they held back the water and the communities were basically okay and those communities knew how to maintain those walls and they knew how to take care and plant those trees and the pennies saved probably of course we'll never know probably tens of thousands of lives every once in a while the United States government gets something right and it happened in Pakistan a few years ago we invested in something called the disease early warning system with WHO very simple system for identifying the first signs of a serious infectious disease when that kicked in during the floods and we used the disease early warning system to tell us where the isolated cases of cholera were showing up and we zapped them and it didn't spread pennies invested in dues saved us potentially a public health calamity on top of the floods so what lesson has my office learned those pennies invested and maybe we could get it into 10s and 20s in risk reduction activities between the disasters we'll really pay off because we can't win if we focus entirely on response thank you next question over on the right Bob to a Homeland Security Institute Mr. Ward you suggested that we need to have an international response framework and you said AID would be willing to participate who in your mind should lead that what organization should lead the development of an international response framework thanks Bob depends on the disaster I mean I can't presage what we will come up with it'll be an interagency effort to develop what that framework is but I think what I expect will happen will be a process in place for depending on the disaster and the complexity of it and where it is and the security situation in that country and the resources that have to be brought to bear some senior official in our government will decide the state's going to take the lead on this one maybe USAID's going to take the lead on this one maybe the NSC if it's a truly whole of government effort and you really need a strong coordinating mechanism will take the lead on this one I don't think I may be wrong I don't think that when we develop this international response framework it will say, unlike the national response framework that this agency is always in charge or this department is always in charge I may be wrong it may come out that way like FEMA is always in the lead for the national disasters the domestic disasters that's my expectation it will be a process that will quickly identify who is in charge but it will not say it's always this organization and that would be progress we're happy to lead it but I think everybody in the interagency has to participate including Homeland Security absolutely and we have a lot of lessons to learn from FEMA so I hope they're with us there too stay away from that one anybody from the side of the room I like to mix it up back to the middle thank you Bruno Hemler I work for Public Health Service Asper within Department of Health and Human Services quick question first to Joel and David the media has been kind of critical of our international response in Haiti one year afterwards but given the status of what Haiti was beforehand the difficulties they had in trying to develop their capacity over the several years is things as bad as the media portrays or is this what is to be expected if we're trying to help rebuild a government at the same time then my second question to Mark is to say when we try to do it by through and with the host nation but if the government lacks the capability or we hear about the issues of corruption that will often times interfere with the development happening are we setting ourselves up for failure by trying to do it through the local government or through a government that's not capable of helping us achieve our objectives and would it be better to look at just doing it at the local level versus trying to go through a national government go ahead who's first on Haiti my feeling is that the relief effort was remarkable with the obstacles and basically 1.3 million people have been provided with