After the deluge, aid agencies find themselves in unfamiliar terrain

By Shawn Donnan,By Shawn Donnan and Taufan Hidayat
Published: October 2 2006 02:00 | Last updated: October 2 2006 02:00

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 $13.5bn (£7.2bn, €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 $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 $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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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006