Vincent Lingga | Sat, 09/27/2008 11:56 AM
yakarta
A region hit by natural disasters is highly vulnerable to corruption, let alone in a country like Indonesia with a public administration internationally notorious as one of the most corrupt in the world.
The sudden rush into the affected areas of so many domestic and foreign organizations and NGOs with cash and material assistance, keen to help the victims - many of them unfamiliar with local conditions, but eager to deliver aid as quickly as possible-- highlighted vulnerability to corruption and misuse of aid.
Some people, officials or even organizations, who were supposed to focus on taking care of the victims, were tempted to cut corners, paying less attention to processes and whether the aid reached the intended beneficiaries.
This was one of the major problems encountered by international donors and organizations in helping the victims of the devastating earthquake which hit Yogyakarta and Central Java in late May, 2006, killing more than 5,700 people and injuring around 60,000 others. The quake heavily damaged more than 275,000 houses, adversely affecting 300,000 small and micro enterprises and causing total material losses of US$3.1 billion.
The sudden changes caused by the earthquake adversely undermined the social fabric that normally sustained the community, weakening the sense of community and mutual trust.
One cannot expect standard normal procedures to work in disaster situations. The temptation to cut corners is quite strong.
The dilemma, though, is that speed is very crucial in delivering aid to victims, to recover lives, livelihoods and to accelerate the reconstruction of houses and community infrastructure.
Speed was critical in planning and implementing rehabilitation and reconstruction plans because most of the houses and buildings damaged by the earthquake turned out to be not earthquake resistant.
Victims could have simply reconstructed their homes to the same standards as their previous houses, exposing them again to a future disaster.
"Transparency and accountability therefore have been foremost in the principles applied by the Java Reconstruction Fund (JRF) when it began working in the two regions together with government teams and other foreign and local NGOs and organizations in mid-2006," said Imam Krismanto, deputy team leader in charge of monitoring and evaluation of the JRF program.
The US$84 million JRF, which was established by six donors under the management of the World Bank, from the outset engaged all its stakeholders, opening its projects and activities to public scrutiny and disseminating information.
The JRF was established by the European Commission and the governments of the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Finland and Denmark.
JRF project management engaged community members, through community-based programs, in planning and deciding on programs of action and setting up effective mechanisms to address complaints.
What made the JRF aid project different from many natural disaster programs was the involvement of the earthquake victims in the planning, design and implementation of housing rehabilitation and reconstruction programs.
The community-based Settlement Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Project (CSRRP) which was allocated US$60 million out of the $84 million managed by JRF, supported community planning to select and prioritize beneficiaries and develop community resettlement and reconstruction plans.
Communities received block grants according to their needs, and funds were disbursed in installments based on progress. This approach encouraged effective targeting and transparency through social accountability.
However, community based reconstruction could not run as quickly as work contracted wholesale to construction companies.
The suffering of earthquake victims in Bantul and Klaten was partly remedied more rapidly because CSRRP built safe and durable transitional houses for eligible families, while their permanent houses were under construction.
As it turned out, the provision of transitional shelters, not makeshift barracks, like those for the victims of the 2004 Tsunami in Aceh, was effective in fulfilling the basic immediate needs of affected families. They could resume daily life much quicker and most importantly many of them resumed their livelihoods, for example, by doing retail trading at their transitional shelters.
"We as the project management regularly disseminated information regarding our working programs and activities through outreach to beneficiaries and community groups, feedback handling and field visits," Krismanto added.
The JRF Secretariat forwarded complaints directly to project officers and monitored feedback from projects and tracked complaints and when necessary, made separate verifications directly with beneficiaries, JRF communications officer Nia Sarinastiti explained.
Krismanto said one of the important steps to select recipients was through public verifications, whereby a list of applicants and reasons for receiving or not qualifying to receive support for housing was announced openly on official notice boards. If no complaints were lodged within ten days, the funding for house reconstruction was granted .
This way, he added, instances of corruption could be detected early on and "we did discover several cases of misuse but we acted immediately and firmly to deal with such problems."
Such an early awareness of heightened opportunities for abuse of authority for personal benefit in such a disaster situation turned out to be quite positive in terms of accountability and acceptance of the JRF efforts by the targeted beneficiaries.
" I have recommended that the best practices, notably the multi-layer supervision, used in the JRF program be institutionalized into our national system of aid management for disaster victims," said Soetatwo Hadiwigeno, chairman of the National Technical Team, which was in charge of coordinating the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Java after the May, 2006 earthquake.
This team also coordinated and supervised reconstruction and rehabilitation programs that were funded by the state budget.
Soetatwo said the Java post-earthquake rehabilitation and reconstruction had been completed in less than two years after the disasters, whereby almost 275,000 earthquake-resistant houses were rebuilt and 253,000 others rehabilitated with a total budget of Rp 5.4 trillion ($587 million).
JRF itself funded the reconstruction of 15,000 of the total.
Certainly not everything ended happily in the damaged areas.
Several Yogyakarta and Jakarta-based newspapers quoted the Yogyakarta Ombudsman Private Sector Institution last February as alleging that 40 percent of the beneficiaries of the JRF aid had been wrongly targeted.
Based on a survey of 550 respondents in Bantul, the worst-hit regency in Yogyakarta, the ombudsman cited the most extensive form of misuse: a single household received two houses and certain beneficiaries living outside Bantul when the earthquake hit, returned to Bantul afterwards and still got assistance.
However, upon discussions with the ombudsman executives and field verifications with the community groups in charge of managing the planning, construction and allocations of houses, the JRF Secretariat concluded that the ombudsman misinterpreted some of the criteria for selecting targeted beneficiaries.
The ombudsman, for example, was not fully informed that based on the criteria agreed with the community groups, traditional multiple houses in the same dwelling were entitled to separate houses in the reconstruction programme if several independent families stayed in a single location but in completely separate spaces, Krismanto explained.
"Despite some misinterpretation, the JRF Secretariat considered the ombudsman's survey findings to be valuable in helping to increase transparency and accountability," said JRF communications officer Nia Sarinastiti.
An eventual field check and verification by the JRF team concluded that 5.3 percent of the survey's results did warrant serious investigation.
The executive board of the ombudsman, however, maintained that its survey findings were correct, asserting they had rechecked the criteria used by JRF for selection of beneficiaries.
"We rechecked the criteria used by JRF for its beneficiaries and the survey was entirely based on these criteria," the ombudsman chairman Imam Subkhan asserted.
"But having said all that I don't mean 40 percent of the JRF fund was corrupted. The survey only found that 40 percent of the beneficiaries did not entirely meet the JRF's own criteria. It is possible there were other humanitarian reasons whereby beneficiaries were still entitled to aid since, they were among the disaster victims, but that is another issue," Subkhan added.
Subkhan acknowledged though that, despite its weaknesses, the JRF-funded program was better managed and the houses built to higher standards than those under the reconstruction and rehabilitation program financed by the state budget.
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