ActionAid’s response in Haiti

The true extent of the disaster in Haiti is becoming clearer by the hour with initial estimates that over 50,000 have lost their lives while up to 3 million people have lost their homes and livelihoods.

Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Amongst the devastation and loss of life there is still uncertainty over the fate of some ActionAiders working on our Haiti programme. Our thoughts are with them and their families.

We have a well established program in Haiti where we have been working for the last 15 years and we expect that our response will assist 20,000 people during the next few weeks before we provide longer term assistance to help re-establish livelihoods.

While the details of our longer-term response will be worked out in coming days and weeks, a central principle that will guide us is the need to “build back better” and supporting communities to develop their own action plans to ensure that they are less vulnerable to similar disasters in the future.

Tragically we have a lot of experience in dealing with these types of disasters and many lessons have been learned from our experiences in Haiti and other countries.

We know that the poor are the most vulnerable to earthquakes as their houses and livelihoods will have been destroyed: women and children are the most vulnerable of all.

It is critically important that we respond to the needs of the most vulnerable and at this moment we are flying in members of our International Emergencies and Conflict Team to assist our Haitian colleagues to do just that.

Our assistance will target the immediate needs of the most vulnerable and will include the provision of water, food, shelter and other immediate needs such as soap and sanitary products for women. From this point we will begin planning our longer term approach to ensure that people are able to re-build their lives.

In Australia we’ve spent the last 24 hours linking up with ActionAid’s International Emergencies and Conflict Team (IECT) to get an early indication of the scope of the disaster and how we should respond.

Our people in Sydney are on the phone with our NGO colleagues in Australia to assess how other NGOs are planning to respond and to ensure that we are working together rather than tripping over each other.

There will be a teleconference for all Australian NGO’s and the Government’s Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) later today to get an early indication of the Australian Governments response to this disaster.

In the meantime we’ve launched an appeal for the people of Haiti. You can learn more about our response and donate to the appeal on our website.

For updates on the situation and our response, you can also follow the ActionAid Australia Twitter feed @ActionAid_Aus.

As always thanks so much for all of your support, commitment and encouragement, we really appreciate it – especially at times like this.

Below are some photos from Haiti showing the horrible scale of the destruction from AlertNet:

Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Reuters/Eduardo Munoz, courtesy www.alertnet.org