HBS Dispatches from Banda Aceh
Editor's note: These dispatches come from the front lines of relief efforts in the Banda Aceh province in Sumatra, Indonesia. Author Daniel Curran is the Director of the Humanitarian Leadership Program, a three-year executive education program developed by the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School. Based in the Mercy Corps emergency field headquarters, Curran is helping the field leadership develop overall strategy in Sumatra—including the design of projects incorporating the entrepreneurial energy of local peoples and groups. "I will also manage the early coordination team of the NGO response alliance, an initiative mainly developed through our efforts here at HBS," says Curran.
The HBS Humanitarian Leadership Program, launched in 2002 in partnership with several major humanitarian agencies, created a three-year leadership initiative for senior managers from international development and relief organizations.
2/8/05
Observations from Banda Aceh
Return: The situation in Banda Aceh is one of steady recovery and spontaneous return. All over the areas in and around the city (within 30 kilometers), families are returning home and building with whatever materials they can find. Fresh water is their biggest concern, followed by shelter, electricity, and jobs/livelihoods. They are not only returning to areas where homes were only partially destroyed, but they are returning to areas that seem uninhabitable—framing houses on available land and salvaging whatever they can. The progress is rapid in some places. I'd say that they are still several steps ahead of us.
You would not believe one of our first villages—Mirek Lamdredup—the roads and paths are cleared, most of the surviving villagers have returned, they have drilled a bore well (with help from a university team) and have ten working faucets, a generator (from another NGO), electricity to run a few lights, and a water pump. We initially cleared that village with aid from Cash for Work (CfW) and we have teams providing brickmakers with loans. Further out towards the coast, we are aiding another group from the village of Lambada, who are resettling next to the shell of a mosque where nothing else stands. We have a bore well going in and we are providing a few materials to aid in the construction of "temporary housing."
The big themes coming from most of these villagers are: This is my land. I want to live where I know people and know my work (fishing/farming). I want to be able to control my life. It feels better to be working and making something with what I have than sitting around in a camp in the interior. I would like your help, but will make do without it. I don't know what the government has planned, but I am not waiting around to find out. I don't care what the government says (about building close to the coast), but I am not afraid. I survived a tsunami; I can survive anything they can throw at me.
Govt. Barracks: The last one has an interesting political/social implication. The people do really seem to feel stronger having survived the disaster and/or, after losing their families and their homes; they don't really give a damn. Having said all of this, the government barracks are going up with amazing speed—many of them are in and around Banda—and they do not look bad. They have nice roofs, spacious rooms, water and electricity…and villagers are moving in. They are not necessarily far from village centers. Some are quite close to people's old homes. So, a week ago, I would have said no one would move into the barracks. Now I reconsider—that seems to be the way here: As soon as you think you know something, you realize that you don't. The people here also seem to have a great capacity to hold complex and contradictory thoughts about the future, perhaps a survival mechanism developed from years of living in political ambiguity.
Military: Following the tsunami, our staff tells us that the Indonesian soldiers based here built almost a new relationship with the people of Aceh. Where they were previously controlling and distant from the society, they began to intermingle and connect during the recovery. The soldiers lost many of their own and felt a kinship with the Acehnese. They participated in the body recovery for six weeks. One of our staff said, "You used to see fear in their eyes. Now you see understanding."
Now, we don't see as many soldiers around the city itself. But last Saturday I traveled out of the city and down the west coast towards the village of Laeyun—one of our resettlement villages. The military has been tasked with rebuilding the road, and the area is swarming with engineering brigades and Special Forces. They are making great progress on opening the road and building temporary bridges. We were stopped at the final bridge before the village and told we could not continue. They were somewhat agitated and I noticed that our national staff did not want to engage with them. One of the soldiers yelled at our project manager and I could tell he was uncomfortable—so we retreated. As we talked about it on the way back, he said, "I think these ones are new—they weren't here during the tsunami or the recovery." I checked with the U.N. and found that most of the battalions are being rotated out and new ones are arriving.
NGOs: We continue to chair two NGO coordinating meetings. I would say that, in general, folks are still trying to get a handle on what to do here. Many are still committed to emergency programs—food distributions, medical assistance—and starting to think about livelihoods/recovery. But no one can clearly articulate their analysis for the future and their strategy based on that. It is my observation that the NGO world doesn't quite know how to assess this situation. It is not a normal emergency. Nor is it really development (since the communities are so motivated and moving ahead of us).
So I think that the International Non-governmental Organizations (INGOs) are trying to apply the approaches that they do know—working with local NGOs, developing overarching developmental strategies with the line ministries, developing long-term microcredit, community consultations, and so on. But we (the international NGOs) are in danger of either putting valuable energy into planning and assessments (building the capacity of ministries that have never, nor will ever actually hold power), or overburdening the small local NGO sector (whose past focus was on quiet advocacy on behalf of human rights and women's rights), or creating longer-term development structures that we know how to do, but may not be necessary (i.e., I still have not seen a strong causal link between microcredit development and a lack of access to capital markets for those affected by the tsunami).
At the last meeting, one director was arguing that we need to commit large amounts of funds to building the capacity of the local NGO sector—developing an institute where we train on humanitarian principles like those put forth by the Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP), DM&E, and the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response (The Sphere Project). He said that they were thinking of pushing much of its development programs through local partners. A long-time Indonesian-living expat commented that it would be like asking the International Crisis Group (ICG) to take on a large shelter project. "Do we really want to do that?" he asked.
This is a longer way of saying that I feel some of the most effective agencies are the ones that are NOT burdened with the "NGO way of thinking." For example, in a community near ours, a Yemeni group helped the people drill a new well; an alumni association from the University of Indonesia helped them with electrical needs; and a Korean group provided temporary shelter items. A local Indonesian association provided parts for boat motors. And—boom—the villagers are back living in their home community, out fishing again, and beginning to clear their yards and rebuild. All of the resources were organized and coordinated by the village leaders.
The unburdened groups recognized that the real need here is to quickly plug people back into the preexisting economy and that the people's own knowledge, skills, and motivations will take care of the rest. The ideas that we need central planning or that material or infrastructure assistance will engender dependence, generally do not apply here. I'd argue that the villagers are already at an understanding of community development that would take years to reach in some other parts of the world.
Coordination: By and large, I think the U.N. did a good job here—perhaps because they didn't have much to do. But they have helped provide information through the U.N. Humanitarian Information Center (HIC) and created the sectoral working groups. We are deeply involved in and currently chairing the Livelihoods Working Group. I would say that it has become an effective entity—moved beyond just sharing information and into active planning and coordination. We have already adopted a work plan, adopted CfW parameters, and drafted basic principles. We will soon be discussing parameters and guidelines for cash grants, soft loans, and microfinance in the next week. These will be key discussions because I think they will unlock a good amount of funds to flow to those in need. To be honest, the working group became much more effective when the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) chair went on leave and when the government ministry representative (who really only wanted to talk about NGO house rental rates) stopped showing up. I am sure that when they return we will get back to "building the capacity of government structures through appropriate U.N. bodies," and getting through to the people in need may become harder.
All the best,
Dan
1/25/05
Observations From the Ground
We are now one month since the tsunami, and I’ve been engaged in the relief and recovery effort for three weeks. There is much to be elaborated, but here are some observations from the effort so far:
1. The closer you are to the crisis, the less you know of the big picture: Before arriving here, I read all of the latest information and formed a composite view of the situation. I understood what the latest press reports were describing, what international leaders were saying, and what the heads of organizations were reporting about the overall situation. I felt that I had a good grip on what was happening. But, being engaged on the ground, managing logistics and establishing programs, takes my time away from reading those reports. They pile up in two binders on my desk, ready for me to read when I return. So I don’t really know what the experts are saying about what we are doing. Those that I do read—reports from New York or Brussels—I sometimes find outdated and wrong. An example is the widely reported difficulties with the Indonesian military. That has not been as big a problem as people say. We’ve been able to deal with it operationally—positive engagement—so far.
2. Time moves at different speeds on the ground and in distant headquarters: We’ve been here for three weeks, but it seems like a year. We are continually evaluating the situation and making decisions based on the best available information. We change our plans quickly and often to fit the changing realities. For example, we realized that the displaced populations have been moving around. Our numbers and locations for distributions were wrong. We met with our counterpart agencies and changed distribution patterns on the fly. Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of organizations—Jakarta, Washington, New York—time moves at a normal pace. They have weekends and normal hours. And they deliberate slowly on sometimes outdated information.
3. Real problems with coordination lie more in the HQs and not the field: When we are engaged in the crisis, especially at critical junctures, affiliation and jurisdiction cease to matter. We all work as a team—U.N., NGOs, militaries—focused on getting food out, setting up water systems, and arranging flights. In HQs, where time moves slower, their incentives are different. They are interested in coverage and credit and can criticize our operational decisions. Also, the further you move from the political or managerial towards the logistical and operational, the better the coordination and cooperation. The more clearly stated the goal, the easier it is to coordinate. Essentially, the logistics guys like to work together.
4. Assessment and action must be simultaneous: We do not have the luxury to carefully plot out all of the needs of the displaced and then carefully devise the best way to work. We need to orient ourselves, gather what information we can, and then act. In fact, I’d argue that we have reversed the order of strategy guiding implementation. We implement first, see what we’ve learned, and then devise our overall strategy. This crisis is immense—hundreds of miles of coastline with constantly shifting populations of displaced in places inaccessible by air and sea. But the international community has used precious resources to over assess the population. For instance, there are places that have been visited by three different helicopters on three different days by three different organizations to assess their psycho-social well-being (an ancillary observation is that many lack trust in the information collected by others). I maintain that it is better to get into action and learn in the process. Also, focusing on a definable goal (resettling one village) enables us to get a better handle on the enormous problem.
5. We must be sure to find the proper analogy and then use the right tools: This crisis in Aceh, though huge, is not like Somalia or the Congo. It is not a long-term complex crisis with endemic poverty, malnutrition, insecurity, and conflict. It does not require a deep analysis of the root causes. Many arrived to help with management, assessment, and program tools forged in those situations. It did not take us long to realize that Aceh remained a functioning society with a rule of law and working markets (the conflict notwithstanding). The right analogy is more akin to recovery from Hurricane Andrew in Florida or the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. We need to find ways to get people back on their feet (short-term works projects), move closer to their homes (temporary shelter), reestablish their livelihoods (economic support), and recover (trauma support, education, house construction). There are many still stuck in the “crisis response” providing emergency medicine and costly food drops—and holding meetings about “engendering dependence.”
6. Those who are doing the least, talk the most about coordination: I’ve observed that the most ponderous and unfruitful coordination meetings are the ones chaired by the non-operational U.N. agencies, attended by the organizations making assessments and evaluations for possible programming. In the early days, there were too many organizations here. In the words of Bob Turner of OCHA, “They just took up space and oxygen.” Also, some organizations sent too many unnecessary people—the USAID mission had twenty-four expatriates here. The situation has now improved. The best meetings are those attended by the organizations engaged in action. We are distributing food in Aceh Besar (around Aceh) in coordination with the World Food Program and with CARE, Oxfam, CRS, and Save the Children. Our operational meetings are short and to the point—we all have trucks to move. And, engaged in action, we learn about what is needed and how to improve.
7. In a situation of uncertainty, those who provide a definition become the leaders: The situation remains chaotic and people are at a loss about how to get their heads around the enormity of it. There has been some paralysis. Nigel Pont, a seasoned aid worker, arrived as the emergency coordinator for Mercy Corps within twenty-four hours of the tsunami. He quickly analyzed that the massive relief effort (ferrying supplies to the west coast, emergency medical assistance, and water and sanitation systems) was going to be short. While agreeing to distribute food and household items to seven IDP camps, he also worked with a capable national staff to quickly establish a program focused on economic recovery. Within a week, the team was paying crews of displaced men a daily wage to clean and clear access to roads back into the devastated areas. By the time I arrived, we had developed strong relationships with the leaders in our camps and with the work crews. They informed us of their desire to return. We ramped up our Cash For Work programs to 4,000 workers and have now established four areas for spontaneous return. We then backed into a strategy for a livelihoods recovery effort which focused on key job-creating businesses (brick-making operations, fishing vessels), linking distributions, to cash for work projects and, eventually, to economic rehabilitation projects. Meanwhile, Nigel had been taking these ideas with him to the U.N. coordination meetings. Eventually, we wrote out our strategy in simple terms with details from our programs and presented it to the coordinating group chaired by UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and held at the government logistics office. Yesterday, it was adopted as the basis for the livelihoods recovery effort.
8. Chaos is unavoidable and coordination is difficult until agencies are settled: It is hard to talk of coordination until organizations are settled and have some sense of what they are doing. I think that we can better develop a life cycle of a typical disaster to better understand the challenge of coordination. Within this life cycle, I see a time of general chaos as agencies arrive and try to orient themselves. Information is scarce and they want to express their relevance. But they have different incentives and mandates. Command (military) and management (civilian) structures are very different. The question is not how to do away with this phase, but how to reduce its time and disruption. Information here was fluid and helicopters were running helter-skelter, dropping food and running. Different U.N. agencies were arriving every day—eventually settling in the office of the OCHA (WFP, Joint Logistics, UNHCR, WHO). Soon they were joined by military liaison officers from the various navies. I sit in these meetings as the NGO representative. There was little coordination, just reporting. It was not until about the twentieth day that things started to click. A joint assessment mission (thirty-four people in teams of eight) from OCHA, UNHCR, CDC, US Navy, MSF, and Save the Children, began working off the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, assessing population locations and needs on the west coast. They used standardized forms prepared by OCHA and visited approximately fifty sites in five days, using U.S. army helicopters. As these reports started coming in, agencies could better target their work. Once they were engaged in actions, then we could better coordinate logistical and communication support. We soon did the same in the NGO community—we just completed a multi-agency mapping of the camps for targeted support.
9. General management and logistics takes enormous time and energy: It is so easy to armchair quarterback these efforts later from behind the ivy walls. But I forgot what it takes to set up a procurement system and logistics base. I imagined myself an expert in coordination and applying humanitarian principles. Then I forget about how it takes three hours to figure out how we are going to get cash to a logistics officer to purchase lunches for 4,0000 workers each day. I spend more hours working out our cost centers for material aid distributions. And even more hours responding to e-mails from people throughout our own organization who are trying to send supplies, hire staff, and figure out our overhead costs for donor funds—not to mention trying to coordinate with other agencies on the ground.
10. As with everything, people make the difference. By and large, I have been impressed with the coordination of this response. I find it all comes down to the quality of the individuals on the ground and the relationships that they make. It doesn’t matter the size and influence of the organizations they represent, if they are incapable of leadership and decision making, they become impediments to the effort. Considering the size of this disaster, most agencies sent their A-teams. In the ten years since Rwanda, I see a greater professionalism and maturity than in the past. Bob Turner has been leading the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and is probably the closest to an overall leader of the emergency response. He has been remarkable—he can set an agenda and stick to it. He is a gentle persuader and moves things along. He alone has improved U.N. coordination immensely. Tomorrow he is leaving and being replaced by someone new—we will see what happens.
11. Keep it on the ground: For all of the above reasons—decision making for emergency response must be left to the teams on the ground. All organizational and agency resources need to be directed to support the ground-level leadership. Real problems emerge when HQs and regional offices try to manage strategy and implementation.
Finally, I’d like to make an argument for the value of this model of active learning— imbedding an academic or researcher with management abilities—into an organization or effort. I could not possibly understand the difficulties or gain the insights from being here as a consultant or a case writer. We are beginning to be visited by academic assessment teams—arriving with notepads and asking about our impact indicators. When I drive away from my last meeting, I don’t go to a coffee shop and think about what I heard, trying to understand it; I have to get back to deal with submitting a proposal and meet with the local Colonel who is trying to thrust a military “protection team” on us for a fee. It takes incredible time and effort to hire our staff and set up a warehouse procurement system. It’s difficult to balance between reflection and action. But it is helping me to better understand and put our actions into a broader context. And, upon my return, I will have amassed great data and gained good insights to bring to you in hopes of better devising our research and classes.
1/15/05
First Impressions
I am writing to you from our office in Banda Aceh. We arrived a few days ago, but it feels like I've been here for years. As usual, realities and needs change so quickly that time gets compressed, leaving the perception that one experiences many days in only a few hours. We've slept very little. I have not even had the time to remove the security straps that seal my luggage. As you can imagine, the devastation is enormous, complete, and beyond comprehension.
I had hoped that I wouldn't write such a description—that I had seen worse—and this was not as bad as the media has implied. But we all feel the same loss for words that Kofi Annan and Colin Powell displayed following their visits. One of our key experienced emergency staff, Tom H., arrived in the first week and has been directing operations in Meulaboh on the southwest coast. I met him at the airport, arriving on a military helicopter. He just simply couldn't talk about the situation.
I'd expected to see that much had been cleaned up by the time I got here. Often after a disaster, relief workers and citizens begin cleaning and restoring order rather quickly. The cleanup is already underway, led by the Indonesian military, other militaries, and international agencies. But, on Wednesday, I stood in a part of the city that had yet to be touched. To properly consider the scale of the urban disaster, imagine that the entire east side of Manhattan from Harlem to Wall Street and three miles inland had been flattened. Then add a churning flood of water surging for four miles inland over 200 miles north and south along the New Jersey coast.
As far as I could see in this once vibrant city were piles of jumbled cement, steel girders, boats, trees, household belongings, sand, and cars. And an unbearable stench hangs in the air.
Underneath and intermixed in all of the rubble remain thousands of bodies yet to be uncovered and buried. The Indonesian military is fully mobilized and charged with uncovering the bodies. The military dot the flattened landscape in bright green uniforms, thousands of young men in their early twenties, wearing face masks and rubber gloves. On the day I arrived, day thirteen following the disaster, the military uncovered 3,200 bodies—loading them into the backs of trucks and burying them in mass graves on the outskirts of the city. And they have been doing that work twelve hours a day, for the last ten days. Tensions with the Indonesian military may soon emerge. But, at the moment, on the ground, they are doing an admirable and professional job with the cleanup. We maintain a friendly and cordial respect for each other.
Right away, I've been thrown into strategy and coordination and have had little time for further reflection other than on the management of the relief effort. Over the past week, the political and logistical difficulties of getting into and working in Banda Aceh have begun to emerge. I expect this will be the evolving story as we move forward with the relief and reconstruction efforts.
The place has become a relief circus, completely and unbelievably overrun with international agencies, militaries, media, and well-meaning individuals. This was expected and I think that I will soon be able to provide some humorous examples. In Kosovo, Clowns Without Borders, set up an office and performed (which, considering the trauma of this population, might not be a bad addition to the circus). There were only four international NGOs here in the first six days (CRS, Mercy Corps, IOM, and Oxfam). By the tenth day, there were fifty-two private voluntary agencies registered. By the end of the second week, there were uncomfirmed reports that 400 have established a presence. The U.N. agencies were surprisingly slow to get into motion in the first week. But they are here now—eighteen in all, I believe. The U.S. government (civilian) was also rather slow.
It was a struggle to even get here. I flew to Singapore where I picked up my Indonesian work visa and then on to Jakarta. I had to wait three days in Jakarta and then board a plane to Medan, a city south of Aceh. I waited several hours there before finally heading out to the affected province.
The airport is a key illustration of the madness. It was nothing more than a sleepy little airstrip with a small tower and a few outbuildings. Prior to the disaster, it usually hosted three flights a day, daylight hours only. As the relief efforts began to mount, business picked up to over 200 flights a day around the clock. But not before international efforts upgraded the facilities and staff such as the Norwegian military installing landing lights. Twenty of the airport's sixty staff members were killed in the disaster (the immense loss of trained civil servants and professionals in all enterprises is a recurring story we've been hearing). The tower was damaged and the remaining employees refused to return to work. (Another theme: fear and trauma limiting the effectiveness of national staff.) To complicate matters, the airport had only enough parking spaces for six planes at one time. The remaining ones were forced to wait in Medan, a town to the south, or forced to circle—maybe twelve at a time. The Singapore military brought in a temporary tower and eleven military controllers, yet language barriers made it difficult to manage. On the sixth day of the relief effort, a transport plane hit a water buffalo on the runway and held up traffic for a day. It delayed some key Mercy Corps staff for three days.
When we arrived, there were eleven helicopters on the tarmac, rotors in action, collecting supplies and taking off for the coastal areas. Four were U.S. military Blackhawks, two were from the Singaporean Navy, three were from European militaries, and one each privately contracted by Catholic Relief Services and Oxfam. Briefings from staff and partner agencies have indicated that the military coordination has become logistically and politically difficult, a dizzying array of command structures complicating efforts. I am not fully privy to the military coordination, but hope to seek out the story later.
There are no more than eight separate foreign militaries trying to operate and coordinate on the ground. I am not sure which are here and what assets they have in place, but they include Singapore, U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia, China, British, Malaysia—all with choppers, camps, trucks—picking up water, food, and other items and distributing them haphazardly up and down the coast.
The material aid has been overwhelming and slightly embarrassing. I'll write more about this later, but the airport and logistics centers are awash in clothing, food, medicines, shoes, and household items. Last estimates said that the province has three times more food than needed. At least five foreign military field hospitals have arrived, and another, the Russians, have been sitting in a transport plane camped out near the runway for six days, waiting for deployment. Part of the problem is that the world responded with overwhelming medical aid, where there's not a lot of wounded or sick. The disaster was of such power that most people either survived or perished. There were very few near misses.
Certainly, however, there are many outlying areas that have not yet been accessed and may need medical, food, and material needs moving forward. The operative words are may need, as we have found that our relief assumptions are not always correct. For example, the Indonesians appear to place an amazing value in looking out for each other. There are an estimated 500,000 displaced persons, but the majority of them are living in inland villages, sharing space, food and belongings with others. This is not a case where once the devastation of the entire land and population occur, people start living in the midst of a non-functioning state (i.e., the Congo or Somalia). Although the area I described was utterly destroyed and everyone suffered together in the path of the tsunami, there are strong and functional markets with good roads just a few miles inland. In fact, today I drove through a neighborhood market filled with small dried fish, fruit, rice, and every kind of household item.
It is common for the international community to respond with aid for acute needs, such as disease, starvation, injuries, and shelter. We've provided that. But the real needs, I expect, will be the longer-term assistance to help restore households, communities, and livelihoods. Who knows how long the communities can continue to extend their support to the disaster victims? Early assessment data show that in some inland villages on the inaccessible west coast, up to eighteen people are sharing a house with a typical family of four or five. This places great economic, social, and even political pressure on the entire population of the province. Nevertheless, there still remain many isolated communities that have had only cursory visits by helicopter and boats.
Politics and bureaucracy
If we are doing our job well, the logistical difficulties will diminish. But it may soon be replaced by political and bureaucratic difficulties. I don't entirely blame the authorities. Aceh has been closed from the outside for nearly four years, under the rule of the Indonesian military (TNI). Now a huge number of international and national relief workers and military personnel are pouring in and moving about, at will. Some are experienced. Many are not. There have been some good instances of coordination, command, and control. But that appears to be breaking down in perhaps the inevitable phase of "relief chaos" that develops at this point in a crisis. One CARE worker stated, "We have gone from North Korea to Woodstock overnight."
At the moment, we chair the Interagency NGO Coordinating Committee consisting of three of the international NGOs that participate in the HBS Humanitarian Leadership Program. We meet every morning at 7:30 a.m. with the director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the overall director of the civilian response, and the other U.N. agencies. They meet with the government and military authorities each night at 9:00 p.m., so they provide us with updated information each morning and we use it to determine areas of responsibility and actions (distributions, cleanups, population counts, and tracings) approved by the government and military.
It is not far from our minds that this was a tightly controlled military state before the disaster. At the moment, that has not been an issue as we in the international community are delivering several hundred tons of food aid and supplies. But we have already engaged in economic recovery. Mercy Corps has delivered over a million day laborers to help clear their villages and inject needed capital back into the economy. We plan to ramp this up rapidly in the next three weeks.
More later,
Dan