NZ relief organisations condemn Vanuatu's bid to reroute aid

Transcript

The official bill for rebuilding Vanuatu after March's devastating Cyclone Pam has been put at more than 400 million US dollars.

The Vanuatu government is keen to start on reconstruction work and has called for all future aid funding to go through its own coffers.

But the chair of the New Zealand Disaster Relief Forum, Ian McInnes, says that's a bad idea.

IAN MCINNES: I mean quite frankly I think its a knee jerk reaction to feelng that they are under fiscal pressure they don't have a lot of financing and I sympathise with that for moving stocks around. They are quickly running out of money for fuel and transportation. And so I can see here potentially a bid to get their hands on more resources so that they can run a larger coordinated response. Especially since they are feeling some of that criticism for the response being slow. Routing all aid through governments is a very bad idea for all the obvious reasons not least it can be hard to trace. There can be problems with corruption and that was the case in some of the early food distributions and I saw the government move quickly and rightly to say that they would prosecute anyone found stealing food aid and that is the right message to send people. And so just thing centralising it was a very silly thing to say, its not how the humanitarian architecture works. And ironically twenty four hours later we saw the Nepali government, just to jump to another disaster here for a second, say exactly the same thing. But I think they are feeling the same pressure and of course they have a massive response to deal with. And so in wanting to coordinate the knee-jerk reaction is to say lets get it all in the centre and run it from there. But that would be a very inefficient way to run a rapid and large scale humanitarian response.    

KOROI HAWKINS: As the media spotlight turns away from Vanuatu, the smaller NGO's leave. What happens after a disaster like this? Do people just need to get on with their lives after the emergency relief effort?

IM: Well no and obviously you get a lot of attention early on and non-government organisations use that chance to raise funding for years of response if required and that is the case here. And so the rebuild plan is out now for Vanuatu and it includes and extensive amount of work I mean 90,000 people are in need of homes. There is significant damage to a third of all housing in the country. And so the rebuild begins or the plans for that begin on dayone after the cyclone and they really step up in pace now as the provision of humanitarian supplies start to wind back.