Children Excluded From Relief Planning After Tsunami

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

World Vision photo of children living in the Nam Khem camp for people displaced by the tsunami shortly after the disaster.

Bangkok (AFP) Dec 13, 2005
Children were excluded from relief and reconstruction planning after last year's tsunami, leading aid agencies to waste much-needed resources, the global children's charity Plan said Tuesday.

While children in tsunami-ravaged countries were fed and schooled, the reconstruction was less effective than it would have been had children been asked to help, Plan's Asia regional director Michael Diamond told reporters.

"Time after time, in the countries in the tsunami (zone) and now still in (earthquake-hit) Pakistan, we still have to learn the lesson that they have to be included," he said, as he announced the findings of his group's report.

"When we ignore children, we're ignoring a large percentage of those who survived," Diamond said.

"When we do include them in the process, it is clear they have opinions, they know best what is best for themselves, oftentimes they are more enthusiastic and have clearer ideas... than their parents and the elders in their communities."

Plan report contributor Ming Viado said interviews with about 340 children in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand and officials from at least 100 government agencies and other aid groups revealed numerous shortcomings.

On Thailand's resort isle of Phuket, children had already started making lists of the missing before aid agencies arrived on the scene, she said.

"But what happened is that when the non-governmental organisations or relief agencies arrived, they started the listing afresh ... without even asking the community and the children what they had been doing."

Myrna Evora, Plan's Sri Lanka director, said her agency and others failed to coordinate and thus wasted resources by not asking children what they needed at the start of the relief effort.

Plan donated 150,000 schoolbags filled with supplies, but as only tsunami-affected Sri Lankan children received the bags, it created envy among those not affected by the disaster, Evora said.

One 10-year-old student from Ampara, Sri Lanka, said adults gave out numerous pairs of shoes to children, some receiving up to six pairs each, Evora said.

When Plan returned to the schools, students told them "you gave us all these things, they went to waste, but you did not ask whether we needed socks for the shoes and underwear for the school uniform," especially for girls, Evora said.

Source: Agence France-Presse

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

Three Times As Many Women As Men Died In Tsunami: Report

San Francisco (AFP) Dec 13, 2005
Three times as many women as men died in the vast tsunami that struck about a dozen Asian countries just after Christmas last year, a report by the Global Fund for Women said Tuesday.

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