Land of Confusion: Dynamic air cargo NGOs bring relief to Haiti

Rethinking NGO operations

Several miles to the east of Grand’Anse department, Brad Barker, Airlink’s in-country team leader, air-drummed to Genesis (from the Peter Gabriel years) playing though his noise-cancelling earphones as our Bell 429 arced around the town of Miragoane, with its famous Co-Cathedral Saint Jean-Baptiste a few hundred feet below.

The small coastal commune plays a major role in driving the country’s informal economy, as bales of used clothing, appliances and used cars from Miami are unloaded here and resold around the country. That trade, however, is part of the problem, as the availability of cheap or free goods from the U.S. disincentivizes local manufacturing and entrepreneurial activity.

Early this year, the United Nations proposed a “Grand Bargain” to overhaul the international aid system by moving away from delivering physical aid and, instead, distributing cash. By doing so, the U.N. argued, donors could stimulate economic growth that would pay off long after aid groups had moved on. Of course, in underdeveloped countries like Haiti, the need to import physical supplies is more pressing, and economic development will not happen overnight, even under the best of circumstances.

Until then, Rettig argues, aid organizations need to rethink the way they operate. “The worldwide response community is currently strained and at a breaking point,” he said. “There simply isn’t enough funding to address all the man-made, natural, slow burn and rapid on-set disasters that occur annually. Lack of interoperability and competition between NGOs must be addressed and diffused for the greater good of the people affected by crisis.”

The Airlink, LIFT and ALAN cooperative effort on this early-November trip to Haiti represented a real-world solution to this discontinuity. Steve Smith, Airlink’s executive director, explained that, “we leverage our partnerships with aviation companies and airlines to not only consolidate cargo and achieve economies of scale and efficiencies, but also to achieve better or donated pricing in order to send the aircraft. A lot of NGOs would end up paying through the nose, and those dollars go much further if we can work together.”

For this trip, Airlink and its partners combined shipments from seven NGOs, filling an entire MD-11 freighter with donations from across the U.S., and delivered it to destinations in Haiti using their extensive connections in the transport business. Aid-focused NGOs are unable to carry out this level of consolidation, so the less money they spend on transport, the more cash they can distribute on the ground, Smith says.