If there is any lesson to be learned about how to donate to international disasters, it is this — don’t give your money when you first see the disaster splashed across TV.
To ensure the rebuilding effort survives over the long term, donors need to stagger their funding and guarantee it over many years, instead of sending the money all at once.
Yes, as hard as it may be to watch the dying and pain on our news, realize that money is not the impediment to getting aid to Haiti right now. They need military and security forces to help organize rescue, logistics and transport and security operations.
What your money can do is help the long- term food and medical aid necessary while rebuilding takes place. It will be a rebuilding that will take years, if not decades.
Case in point — the Balkan war left some 150,000 dead and half of the country homeless. Responding to the shocking humanitarian situation, donors around the world poured an astounding amount of money into it. More than $5 billion was injected into Bosnia alone, almost $1,000 for each of the country’s 4.5 million people.
But there were serious coordination problems. According to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation review, “No central coordinating body recorded, kept track of, or disbursed the aid. Donors did not communicate with one another, and sometimes double-funded projects or funded similar projects in the same town. In some instances, donors turned a blind eye to financial abuses.”
Ten years later, in Sarajevo, when most of the aid money was dried up and the donors were engaged by other causes, there were few agencies left to continue the rebuilding.
For Haiti, my advice is to mentally set aside money now for what you would give to Haiti for at least the next three years. And then wait until efforts get coordinated, when you can get reports on which nonprofits are doing what and which ones are actually on the ground making an impact.
Perla Ni is the CEO of , a website providing reviews of nonprofits. To check out the latest info on which disaster aid agencies to give to, see reviews of these agencies at .
