Friday, April 17, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
CHALLENGES 2005-2006: Website Opens Tsunami Aid to Public Scrutiny
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- As survivors in Asia struggle to rebuild after last December’s devastating tsunami, a new window of hope has opened in cyberspace for four affected countries.
A website is offering comprehensive details of how much money has poured into Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives, as against the billions of dollars pledged by the international community in response to the unprecedented natural disaster.
The five-month-old Development Assistance Database (DAD) also holds out the promise of enabling individuals to track down at the click of a button how aid has been spent by their respective governments, local authorities and non-governmental groups.
Tsunami survivors in Thailand are able to learn, for instance, how far more privileged the resort island of Phuket has been as a recipient of funds than the neighbouring Phang nga province.
More houses were destroyed and more deaths were reported from Phang nga. But more than 26 million dollars have been committed for Phuket’s recovery effort as compared to a little over 18 million dollars for Phang nga, according to a DAD Thailand analysis.
Similarly, there are disparities in the amounts actually received by countries for the massive reconstruction efforts and the amounts that were pledged in the wake of the tsunami.
Sri Lanka, one of the worst affected countries in Asia, has received only about one billion dollars, which is less than half the amount – 2.81 billion dollars – committed by the international community.
”This is a work in progress aimed to make aid flows more transparent and to have the information available to the public,” says Aidan Cox, who is spearheading this aid-tracking effort at the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Asia-Pacific office. ”It will make some agencies and donors very uncomfortable.”
This mechanism also places the governments receiving foreign assistance under tremendous pressure, he explained during an IPS interview. ”It serves as a gatekeeper to track in detail every existing project to the village level.”
The database could transform the politics of aid in the developed and developing world. “The previous system we had measured donations and not expenditures and not how fast it was spent,” Terje Skavdal, senior disaster response adviser for Asia at the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told IPS.
The database “has made the aid tracking system more visible, requiring a new mindset, because you become much more accountable to more people,” he added.
The DAD initiative was first used with very impressive results in war-ravaged Afghanistan. “Huge discrepancies” between what was promised to rebuild Afghanistan and the amount that had actually come in were tracked.
According to Cox, ”The U.S. chief of staff admitted at a meeting that the Afghan government had better data about what the U.S. government was doing in Afghanistan than the information the Americans had.”
Former-U.S. president Bill Clinton, who is the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy for tsunami recovery, has endorsed the DAD in an appeal. “I am convinced (it) will greatly facilitate our collective efforts to enhance transparency and accountability, as well as to ensure greater coherence in the recovery process.”
Within one month of last year’s Dec. 26 devastation, a UN flash appeal for 1.3 billion dollars to help with emergency relief had received a 94 percent response. By the beginning of this month, UN officials confirmed that 11 billion dollars in pledges had been made.
Indonesia has been promised the largest slice of this aid pie, 6.5 billion dollars, followed by Sri Lanka, 2.81 billion dollars.
Updating information on the website has been a challenge. Rachel Perera, who is tracking the flow of aid to Sri Lanka, admits there can be gaps. ”But DAD is an important tool that we need to monitor the work done on the ground,” she said in a phone interview.
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