In late July, with CARE, Oxfam, MercyCorps, Medicos de Mundos, U.N. agencies and hundreds of other logos flapping from tents and other installations, it was easy to see how multilateral, bilateral and nongovernmental organizations might occasionally step on each other’s toes. Indeed, one senior field officer said it was time the “NGOs were thanked and put on a plane.” And there were stories of some agencies dropping the ball—like one that agreed to build a school before disappearing, stalling work that officials assumed was being done. Meanwhile, foreign aid poured in, not all of it helpful—like container loads of tinned ham for the world’s largest Muslim country, and out-of-date food and drugs.
Even seven months after the tsunami, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of Indonesia’s reconstruction oversight agency BRR, was urging the aid groups at a meeting in Lamno to “lower down your egos” and stay focused on the task. “We are here to help people,” he reminded everyone. “We are not here to be the first to put out our flag.”
Kuntoro blamed an information vacuum that persisted in the earliest months. NGOs, he explained, didn’t know the vast geography that had to be covered, and were clustering instead of spreading out. But he was unapologetically grateful for everyone’s help.
By September, Claude Saint-Pierre, Oxfam International’s senior program director in Banda Aceh, said he and his staff would rethink where they should put resources and perhaps pull some out. Nine months after the disaster, NGOs were getting a better sense of each other’s strengths, and the early days of “turf wars” seemed over.
Scott Guggenheim, the World Bank’s Jakarta-based lead social development specialist, pointed out that “without the NGOs, there would have been no money,” because government cash can take half a year or more to clear legislative and bureaucratic hurdles. The NGOs had record amounts of donations and were organized to act quickly.
Ramesh Subramaniam, principal economist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Jakarta, also sees NGOs as indispensable. With their development specialists deployed in village after village, only they have the manpower to ensure that, for example, microfinancing is efficiently disbursed and monitored. In late July he was looking for NGOs to take on that very task, since the ADB and Kuntoro’s agency had $9 million to disburse to 20,000 entrepreneurs by year-end.
“Each of the big [governmental] agencies has strengths where they can provide quick support,” Subramaniam said. “In health, education, roads, agriculture, where there’s a very clear division of labor, the big agencies have worked well.” For example, while USAID would concentrate on its west coast highway project, the ADB would focus on rehabilitating the road east from Banda Aceh to Medan, Indonesia’s second-largest city. And while UNICEF took over rebuilding primary education, ADB concentrated on secondary schools—and Aceh’s two universities, where it had ongoing programs.
But in areas like housing—which involve not just building, but waste, water resources and other sectors, and multitudes of NGOs—coordination was “still emerging,” Subramaniam said. One idea doing the rounds in September, according to the World Bank’s John Clark, called for giving bigger NGOs overall coordinating duties in specific zones.
“I think we’re all frustrated at the pace,” Clark said. “BRR is building up staff, but it’s still not an agency that has developed anything like maturity. Everyone is really impressed with the leadership of Pak Kuntoro and his deputies, but the list of tasks is really daunting.” Clark also blames Jakarta’s “appallingly slow” release of budget. “We’re getting the feeling they just don’t have any sense of the urgency.”
As others did, Reiko Niimi of the U.N. Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator’s office described Kuntoro as honest and savvy. “We’re all hopeful,” she said. “And he was justified to complain about the lack of progress when he started,” she added, but noted that by December, recovery will have to be brought up to speed. It won’t just be the Acehnese, multilateral agencies and foreign governments watching, she said, since people everywhere bankrolled the NGOs. “He has to answer to the world.”
