Red_Cross_Jonathan

Hi, my name is Jonathan, and I'm work for the Reporting and Analytics team with the International Services Department of the American Red Cross who is very familiar with the data behind some of their claims. What Justin and his fellow reporters fail to do is accurately explain what the 130,000 number means, and the context that would help someone understand why the Red Cross planned its strategy as it did. My team and I responded to over 100 questions over several months about the details of this number, which these authors chose to ignore.

As someone that lives and breathes what are called "logframes" (or logical frameworks), I can try to explain what the authors failed to. Indicators are built into these logframes, which organize your work in order to show progress towards your goals. The 130,000 people are shelter beneficiaries from different indicators across many different projects. Justin failed to capture in his article the context of the housing issue in Haiti. Simply building houses would be an easy indicator to measure, for sure, but wouldn’t solve the problem. A “build it and they will come” is a strategy that has been tried, and does not work in Haiti. People want to remain close to their families and livelihoods. So greenfield development is out. When it comes to building in cities, obtaining land rights from the government became a challenge that was too difficult to overcome at the scale we were looking to work on.

So what else goes into the 130,000, if we only build six permanent houses?

We put tens of thousands of people into new “transitional shelters,” built with the help of organizations like Habitat for Humanity. Helped pay the rent for people to move into apartments (after all, the vast majority of displaced people were renters to begin with). We’ve trained people how to build stronger, more disaster-resistent homes. We helped relocate people with unconditional cash grants. And much more.

And not included in this count are those that benefitted from more than 850,000 tarps distributed in the first days of the response.

EDIT: I forgot to mention one of my favorite projects, a retrofitting project that fixes and strengthens existing homes!

Hey Justin, thanks for the reply! What I don't think your article did, however, was give context. Our approach to housing has shifted as the needs of people in Haiti shifted. In the early response phase, we looked to provide tarps and other goods and services to meet the immediate needs of disaster victims. Permanent homes, as we learned in Haiti, posed too many challenges given the environment (see other comments for what those challenges are).

I would be happy to verify my identity with a moderator via my work phone or work email! I'm also the contact person for the ARC work on the NGO Aid Map.

Nope. As I said, that doesn't count towards that total.

I wasn't smart enough at five to understand this topic, so hopefully you'll accept a ten year old level response? :)

Land tenure refers to who has land rights for a piece of property. The Haitian government's capacity to identify, record, and maintain that data has been a challenge, with little to no ability to enforce what data they do have. There are cases where someone goes to a piece of land, builds a house, then just "claims" it.

Before we were going to invest in building new structures, we wanted (I would think, understandably) to make sure we had the right to build there. When we couldn't get that, we decided to shift our strategy.