Hong Kong helps Nepal: five ways to 'build back better' after quakes
After his visit to earthquake-damaged Nepal, John Wood, Hong Kong-based founder of international education charity Room to Read, considers how to tackle the challenge of rebuilding schools and communities
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Haiti earthquake in 2010, former US president Bill Clinton urged the world to “build back better”. If and when future tremors struck, he asserted, there would be far less devastation and far fewer casualties if the decimated structures were rebuilt with earthquake safety and sustainability in mind.
The jury is still out on how well the global community performed on this goal. While billions of dollars (close to US$13 billion was pledged and almost US$6 billion in official aid was disbursed to Haiti) flooded into the country, much of it has allegedly been misspent or left sitting in bank accounts - potential energy never made kinetic. Celebrity visitors brought media attention, but there have also been accusations of mismanaged donations and outright fraud.
As the Room to Read team in Nepal and I travelled together this week, we were in constant conversation about what lessons the world could take from Haiti - and also the lessons we’ve learned from our own past mistakes. We asked: how can we be part of assuring that the rebuilding in Nepal will be a success story of which the world can be proud?
Together with our global colleagues, we have devised some core strategies as we tackle the challenges ahead and move towards getting one million students out of their “tent schools” and back to the normality of learning in their classrooms.
1. Be transparent with investors. In our view, no investor should ever have to ask the question: where did my money go? NGOs should be candid and clear about their goals and budgets. We are providing our investors with very detailed plans for our work in Nepal and we’re also allowing them to adopt specific projects. We believe that when investors see a direct causal link between what they give and what we achieve, they will be more compelled to act. We want and expect our investors to hold us accountable for deploying their donations effectively and efficiently.
2. Communicate and collaborate with other NGOs. When the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, chaos can ensue. Our team has met other leading education NGOs and multilateral agencies like Unicef. We are exploring how we can leverage each organisation’s unique strengths in a collaborative effort and where it makes sense to avoid having our programmes overlap geographically.