Worldwide preparedness for major disasters and the international community's ability to respond quickly to provide food, shelter and security to those affected are inadequate, according to a report commissioned by the United Nations.
The report comes at a time when the Bush administration is receiving flak for being slow in poviding relief to New Orleans in the aftermath of the deadly hurricane Katrina.
Analysts say that since aid started flowing in only on the fifth day after the disaster struck, it showed that the American administration was still unprepared to meet a major crisis effectively and in a timely fashion.
Commissioned much before the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the report identifies major weaknesses in the international relief system, including among non-governmental agencies, donor organisations and UN agencies.
Despite possessing the right sense of urgency, most organisations cannot ramp up their human resources and sectoral capacities quickly enough to respond to a humanitarian emergency adequately, says the report.
Gaps were identified in 'water and sanitation, shelter, camp management and in food aid, nutrition and livelihoods.'
In addition, these problems were magnified when the crisis rapidly outstripped relief capacity.
Citing gender-violence in Darfur, the report says that 'protection requires special and urgent attention', a reference to the need for armed protection of victims of a disaster or humanitarian crisis and also to the need to ;restore dignified conditions' of human life.
The report recommends that in a humanitarian crisis, one lead organisation take control, a concept that should be
adopted 'system-wide'.
More donor organisations should also be brought into the process and all organisations involved in humanitarian
relief should be included in a 'global mapping' of response capacities.
Finally, the report recommends that humanitarian assistance efforts should be 'need-based', focussing more on whether the beneficiaries have been taken care of rather than the bureaucratic 'benchmarks'," which have been imposed on the agency.
The study was conducted at the behest of Jan Egeland, UN emergency relief co-ordinator and the under-secretary general for Humanitarian Affairs and was undertaken by four independent consultants between February and June 2005.
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