Co-ordinated disaster response

This article in today's Trinidad Express suggested that the T&T government has mandated that all T&T organisations collecting money and supplies for relief efforts in Haiti must handover their collections to the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM). To quote the article:

"The decision to have the ODPM take over the entire process ... was made by the Government, who mandated that they coordinate and manage the delivery of cash, goods and services to the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) in Barbados and the Caribbean Disaster Relief Unit (CDRU) in Jamaica. ...

To facilitate the collection of the donated goods within Trinidad and Tobago, the ODPM will coordinate the establishment of a number of collection outlets to be managed by the Adventist Disaster Relief Agency (ADRA), United Way of Trinidad and Tobago, Chamber of Industry and Commerce (TTCIC) and ODPM offices across the country.

While ODPM will be in charge of collecting goods and money from Government, ADRA will collect from all the faith-based organisations, TTCIC from all corporate entities and United Way from all non-governmental organisations. Everything will then be dropped off at one of ODPM’s warehouses in San Juan, then be taken to CDEMA and CDRU, who will then take it to Haiti."

On the face of it, this appears to solve a problem I perceived with T&T's response efforts.  Anybody could claim to be collecting on behalf of the latest headline disaster, including con artists.  Apart from major organisations, the average person has no way of confirming whether the collector is bonafide.  In the UK, even though there is a greater level of expected honesty, I still give directly to organisations via their website or telephone numbers advertised on national media, instead of giving donations to people on the street.  I thus thought T&T would benefit from having a government-initiated organisation for collection of national donations, similar to the UK's Disaster Emergency Committee (www.dec.org.uk).  In the T&T context, the ODPM appears to be a logical holder for this mandate.

However, what gives me doubt is the ODPM's public track record of managing its own existing mandate: disaster preparedness and management.  According to this Trinidad Guardian article, of Sat 16 Jan 2010, the ODPM's evacuation plan for our capital city, Port of Spain, is still in draft form and yet to be tested.  Though one can understand that such a plan would be complex, given the amount of stakeholders involved, this plan has been in draft form for well over a year now, as can be seen in this Trinidad Express article, from 10 Dec 2008.  Isn't this too long?

When coupled with the general feeling that government-initiated activities are inefficient, corrupt or ineffective, the ODPM faces an immense challenge to be viewed as a credible co-ordinator for this new mandate concerning national disaster relief donations.  Consider this: as quoted above, United Way of T&T will collect from NGOs and all donations will be channeled to Haiti through CDEMA and CDRU.  However, two representatives of United Way of T&T appeared live on Talk City 91.1fm this morning and said that all donations to United Way will be sent to United Way Puerto Rico and then sent to Haiti.  There was no mention of ODPM at all.  This contradicts the ODPM mandate and adds to my concern that the ODPM's attempt to co-ordinate is very ... unco-ordinated.  I would hope that I'm wrong, since I suspect much of the ODPM's good work has not been properly publicised.

On top of this, Caricom can't even get into Haiti.  So if folks send donations to ODPM/CDEMA/CDRU, what guarantees are there that it will get to needy Haitians any faster than the Red Cross or UN organisations with proven distribution structures on the ground in Haiti?

When it comes to disaster response, speed is of the essence.  If this ODPM initiative adds too many layers of bureaucracy - too many moving parts in the process - then speed will be undermined.  Perhaps ODPM should be concerned with evaluating the credibility of the many organisations who're vying for public donations and publish a list of bonafide organisations and their contact details in the local press and on their website.  And leave the mechanics of relief logistics to these bonafide partners.