Hi -- I'm Justin Elliott, one of the reporters on the piece, with Laura Sullivan of NPR. FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers, and link to various documents: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
Hey Justin, great journalism here. Really good job.
Something I was wondering. Presumably those chintzy press-board shacks shown in the article that are predictably disintegrating are not in Campeche right? Were you guys able to survey how many and of what kinds of these ratty shacks they built and in what areas? They keep saying they provided housing to hundreds of thousands of people, I wonder how many of them are these shacks and tents. We know the number of real houses with toilets was 6, and I see that other charities had no problems building 9000 permanent houses with water and toilets and didn't run into all these land title disputes that Red Cross blames. Would be interesting to have independent data on what exactly they did do since they seem to be having a hard time verifying any of their own claims.
Hi Justin, thanks for getting back on this! Always nice to see authors be involved in the community.
> FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers
I haven't checked it out, I'm not so really interested in detailed reports, it's just that this article has a lot of claims and mentions a lot of plans, but then doesn't mention how much of the plans did succeed.
> To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
Ugh, that's worse than I suspected the number would be. Might have mentioned that in the article, I guessed it would be somewhere between 50 or 200 or so.
The NPR story I heard yesteday went out of its way to emphasize that Red Cross did do some good things in Haiti. So, in your view, is the failure mainly due to difficulty in operating in Haiti and their lack of local expertise? Or is Red Cross just hopeless and we should stop donating to it ?
That said, according to our sources -- about a dozen current and former Red Cross employees -- and a bunch of internal documents, many of these problems were of the Red Cross' own making. Sometimes it was basic issues like leaving key jobs unfilled for months. Or prioritizing public relations concerns over aid. But a lot of it flowed from the fact that the Am Red Cross doesn't do international development and no roots in Haiti. The more successful groups tended to be the ones that had roots there, had Haitians in high positions, etc.
As for the next big disaster: I think it's case by case. Look for groups in the country in question -- whether actual local groups or foreign groups who have been there for a long time and have deep ties.
Hey, can PP use Google Maps satellite imagery to count how many houses got built where? I bet google or other computer folk could help do AI to count houses.
To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.