On February 18, the United Nations had the largest fund-raising in its history, garnering $1.44 billion for emergency aid to Haiti in 2010. However, there has been a lot of criticism regarding the failure of coordination of such a humanitarian aid among the UN agencies and NGO recipients of these funds. Huge humanitarian needs remain unmet in spite of the billions of aid being earmarked for Haiti’s rehabilitation.

There is a grave need to revise the approach currently being used in the distribution of aid in the devastated country. Such basic coordination benchmarks such as lists of requirements in respective areas, strategies by which to accomplish the tasks in the lists, and analyses of deficiencies are not being checked, thereby hampering the timely arrival of aid to victims.

Haiti will command a steep cost in its reconstruction. Global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) peg the reconstruction cost, though only from partial and yet to be official estimates, at $14 billion. It could even be higher, as a thorough damage assessment has not been completed. Some say that this is just an estimated cost whose projection is based on the cost of past largest natural disasters. Reconstruction may be a lot more expensive. Another point of contention is the dilemma as to who will be in charge of these reconstruction funds.

By and large, one million people apparently remain homeless in Haiti. After the devastating earthquake, the country is now being ravaged by failure of humanitarian relief. Bill Quigley in AlterNet writes that amidst all these aid coordination problems being experienced in Haiti, ‘the U.S. ambassador brags it’s going really well’ and ‘that people will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we’ve been able to sort ourselves out as donors on the ground and responding to an earthquake.’

Photo Courtesy of IFRC in Flickr