Putting USAID/OFDA Training to the Test in Haiti
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Residents of Haiti walk through the flooded streets of their community days after the rains subsided. |
January 2008
Disaster specialists sent to Haiti in November 2007 to help with the U.S. Government’s humanitarian response to widespread flood-ing in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel had a chance to informally evaluate the impact of a recently launched disaster-management training and technical assistance program in the small Caribbean nation.
“It was a great opportunity to see how the training was being applied,” said Julie Leo-nard, a regional advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA). Lessons learned during the response work could be applied to future trainings, she added.
More than six weeks of continuous heavy rains, exacerbated by the passage of Tropical Storm Noel, produced severe flooding throughout Haiti in late October and early November. The flooding caused 66 deaths, with 17 others reported missing, and affected 14,776 families, destroyed 2,801 houses and damaged another 12,020, according to the Government of Haiti’s disaster response au-thority, the Directorate of Civil Protection (DPC). Assessments also revealed that 24,000 hectares of croplands were wiped out.
“We thought Tropical Storm Noel was going to make a direct hit on Haiti, but it changed course toward the Dominican Republic, where it had a massive impact,” Leonard ex-plained. “In Haiti, flooding was not as mas-sive as in the Dominican Republic, but it was quite extensive. It affected numerous regions all over the country, coming as it did after six weeks of steady rains and storms that satu-rated the soil.”
In response to the disaster, USAID/OFDA provided $100,000 for immediate emergency assistance, and deployed a four-person as-sessment team to coordinate with the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, USAID/Haiti, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Government of Haiti to sur-vey the damage and assist affected families.
“Because of the sizeable number of people living in shelters who had lost everything, USAID/OFDA decided to provide $100,000 immediately to the International Organiza-tion for Migration (IOM) to provide basic non-food items to people in the metropolitan area,” Leonard said. Items included hygiene kits, kitchen utensils, blankets, mosquito nets and household cleaning items. The Red Cross and other international donors dis-tributed food items.
To continue assisting flood-affected residents in one of the Western Hemisphere’s most im-poverished nations, USAID/OFDA also pro-vided nearly $250,000 in disaster aid to USAID/Haiti ($100,000) and implementing partners World Vision ($105,559) and Save the Children ($43,169) for emergency relief activities.
Many affected areas were cut off by swollen rivers or inaccessible to foreign aid workers because of social unrest, which made the ini-tial collection of damage assessment data Page 1 of 2 very difficult, according to Leonard. That, in turn, complicated the assessment of inhabi-tants’ needs and the distribution of relief aid.
“That was one of our biggest challenges dur-ing the response – defining needs with scarce information available,” agreed Liliana Etche-barne, a member of the assessment team who has been involved in the USAID/OFDA Training and Technical Assistance Program for Latin America and the Caribbean, run by the International Resources Group (IRG).
Etchebarne also agreed with Leonard that the response work provided an excellent op-portunity to revisit the country’s needs in the area of disaster management training and technical assistance.
Regional Advisor Leonard arrived in Haiti Nov. 3 following a request from that country’s emergency-management agency that USAID/ OFDA deploy a team of disaster experts to assist with response efforts.
To support the efforts, IRG deployed Etche-barne and Alessander Tironi from Uruguay, and José Durazo from Colombia, experts who had been involved in the damage assessment and needs analysis course as part of the training program launched in Haiti about a year earlier. The three were familiar with the country and its emergency management or-ganization, and vice-versa.
“The fact that we were personally called in to support them on this occasion demonstrates that this team left its seed in previous train-ing activities,” Etchebarne said.
Being brought back to participate in the re-sponse also helped the consultants evaluate their work to help Haitians become better prepared for disasters, according to Leonard.
“Their return allowed them to gauge what from the training program has made a differ-ence when it comes to disaster response,” she said.
As it turned out, two-thirds of the partici-pants in the USAID/OFDA damage assess-ment and needs analysis training were in-volved with the data collection after the storm, demonstrating the country’s ability to capitalize on previous investments. Etcheba-rne also praised local leaders for their or-ganization and “their ability to rapidly con-vene participants to resolve problems as we went along.”
The USAID/OFDA team stayed in Haiti until November 14, helping the government collate the damage assessment and needs analysis data, and producing new forms for collecting sector-specific data in the areas of water and sanitation, health, education, infrastructure, and transportation, among others.
“One thing we did notice was that though the damage assessment capacity seems to have improved, turning that data into a determi-nation of needs must be worked on a bit more,” Regional Advisor Leonard said. “We’ll have to figure out how to refine future train-ings to focus more on needs analysis.”
Several other conclusions surfaced in the weeks following the response.
“We’ll have to make a greater effort to under-stand and incorporate cultural nuances into the training manuals, methods, time allotted for the trainings, long-distance follow-up and all other aspects of the training process,” Etchebarne said. “Additionally, we need to place more emphasis on training the locals, those who are most likely to be affected and those who are most likely to be in contact with events – the neighborhood emergency committees, for example.”
The response work and associated informal evaluation of the recently begun training pro-gram in Haiti provide a glimpse into the sym-biotic relationship between the two main ar-eas of USAID/OFDA work in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to Leonard: timely response to disasters and long-term efforts to help countries mitigate disasters through the IRG-run preparedness program.
IRG Technical Director Juan Pablo Sar-miento said members of Haiti’s disaster re-sponse agency and the UNDP “demonstrated their gratitude for the work done and high-lighted the need to resume the USAID/OFDA program for institutional development through IRG, once the current emergency situation has been overcome.”
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