WASH = Water Sanitation Hygiene

WASH = Water Sanitation Hygiene

These situation (summary) reports may not have the detail that Peter (CA) desires, but I find some of them quite useful, in seeing what's going on, identifying GAPs between what we all desire from the relief efforts minus what is actually getting accomplished, and wrapping our minds around how come those GAPS are often systemic, going unresolved for months.  We can compare one Sitrep to the next within a cluster, and between clusters where they discuss or illuminate data sets, regarding similar target projects.

Some stuff is happening or has happened that I think is a good measure.

    * At each of several major municipalities, there are liaison persons from certain clusters, to facilitate rapid cooperation between the different efforts needs and approvals. 
          o This is reminiscent of very early in my computing career in the 1960's when larger companies would have an IBM office within the corporation. 
          o IBM staff would have as their home office staging areas, offices within major customer corporations, so when they are between missions, they would "rest" at offices supplied to them by their major customers, and if one such office ends up with a surplus of personnel, they'd move a few to other such offices, so that in any given community the tech support personnel spread out across a city, so that when a call for help comes in, there's always relevant people close at hand.

There are MANY problems illuminated by these Sitreps, and what we can see by comparing one to the next, within a cluster, and similar info between two or more clusters.  For some of these problems, it is not yet clear to Al Mac, how the relief effort got into a particular situation, or what exactly they are talking about.

• Data quality ... here we are 3 months into the relief effort, and what changes from week to week are astronomical changes in the #s of people to be served and microscopic changes in the #s actually served.
• Future Protection ... one of the areas it seems no one has a good grasp of, are the #s of people in harms way from the rainy season ... is it 40,000 or 400,00 or ... and NOTHING done yet to protect them from Hurricane Season, other than identification 2 months ago of land tenure problems not yet resolved
• Not so much WASH, but some other reports I recently shared ... people and debris get shuffled around ... a place is established to dump them, enormous effort is expended to fix it up, then they all get kicked out, demolish it, start over, and whatever started over is considered to be temporary.  No one knows when it will be recycled.  Legal documents are not honored by legal authorities.
  
• The latest WASH Sitrep speaks of ", the lack of an overall humanitarian strategy presents great dilemmas for agencies of how much and how to invest in current camps.  "
• There are official (UN+govs) red zones, where the military and police prevent aid from reaching the people in those zones.  I have never seen an explanation for this which makes any kind of sense to me.
  
• There are the civil society (land owner manager) red zones, where any aid supplied to quake survivors is regularly destroyed or sabotaged by local authorities or property managers, and/or the land owners demand to be paid $$$ in return for letting the relief workers in to help the victims.
  
• There are the NGO red zones, where the security situation (criminals and other reasons) is so bad, no volunteers will consent to going in there.
• Many relief efforts have had to shut down because the funds have run out.
• Many more are at risk of following them out.
• It has been known for over a month that there is a need to transfer funds from where there is an excess not being expended, to support underfunded operations.  There is only microscopic evidence of anything being done about that.
  

I noticed the focus areas had increased from 7 to 8, so I compared with the earlier WASH Sitrep that I had downloaded, to identify what had changed.

    * Situation Report 2010 Feb 15 CDAC (Communications) # 9 Word

    * Situation Report 2010 Feb 17 Nutrition Word

    * Situation Report 2010 Feb 25 CWGER (Early Recovery) Word (overall summary)

    * Situation Report 2010 March 6 Nutrition Word

    * Situation Report 2010 March 13 Nutrition Word

    * Situation Report 2010 March 28 Logistics PDF (cargo transportation border)

    * Situation Report 2010 March 29 WASH PDF 10 pages

    * Situation Report 2010 April 5 JOTC via RTF (kids food security) with Al Mac acronym translations

    * Situation Report 2010 April 5 PAHO PDF (health)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 5 PMCC via RTF (relocation drainage)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 9 USAID PDF (emergency shelter, sanitation, health, security)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 10 PMCC via RTF (relocation camps kiosks debris drainage)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 11 Logistics PDF (cargo transportation)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 12 OCHA PDF (camps farms food health promises schools) 10 pages (lots links)

    * Situation Report 2010 Apr 13 CCCM PDF (camps)

    * Situation Report 2010 April 13 WASH Word

7 areas to 8 … the new one is Household Water Treatment (Hygiene Group) … probably because UN etc. trying to move camp dwellers back to green homes

    * Situation Report 2010 April 15 PAHO PDF (health)

Another benefit to downloading these reports is the practicality of comparing key contents to see what has changed.  Otherwise it would be entirely too much hassle.

I shall also attach that earlier WASH Sitrep here, so Y"all also have the opportunity to correlate net changes, outside those that caught my attention.

Sorry for occasional glitches in my reports, I am having a bit of a hassle copying across types of formats, then removing unwanted oops's.  Also I happened to be in the middle of writing this e-mail when my Google session expired, and I had been in habit of saving only right before I switch windows to bring in something else.  Murphy's Law: whatever strategy I use, there will be holes, into which the next mishap will appear.
 

Summary of Key Issues/Priorities/Advocacy Messages in the MARCH 29 Sitrep

Al Macintyre Theories previously shared ... 
(a) TOTAL FAILURE of competent assistance OUTSIDE of the camps means starving and suffering people are going to the camps where the best assistance is currently located.
(b) As the infrastructure repairs advance, UN NGO personnel are waking up to notice clusters of people in trouble, who they would have noticed earlier had it not been for the nature of the disaster, and the nature of the relief effort structure, a mismatch in some ways to the actual needs of the region.

Summary of Key Issues/Priorities/Advocacy Messages in the APRIL 13 Sitrep
 

In Al opinion this is a no-win situation so long as the leading groups have an arrogance of exclusion for new volunteer groups and interests, data reporting sharing methods are time consuming, and the legal structure prevents profit and non-profit organizations from significant cooperating.

Needs moving forwards for WASH Cluster moving forwards, as of the April 13 Sitrep
 

There are also cross-cluster needs.  The differences between different cluster data sets will be much easier to manage when there is more consistency in identifying camps:
SSID, Lat+Long, GPS, street address, etc.  The last figure I saw was 3.6 million people in some kind of need.

You would think that with the UN being in the international humanitarian relief business now for 60 some years, that this kind of data management would be more advanced, but I suspect there's an inertia in how things are done, without the pressures to improve like in business where companies in competition with each other are driven to become more productive.  There is similar competition within NGOs, but it is to be more clever with PR.  Plus this data management issue is within the UN structure they are all in.  The UN has no competitors.  This is like how government infrastructure influences how capitalism can function within their world.  Pressures to improve it are overwhelmed by inertia and budget constraints.