We feel that disaster relief may not be the ideal cause for people seeking to accomplish as much good as possible with their donations (more below). However, we feel it is an important cause because it is so emotionally compelling and because donors often have so little to go on in making a decision.

Disaster responses

• East Africa/Somalia famine, mid-2011
• Japan earthquake/tsunami, March 2011
• Haiti earthquake, January 2010

Our ratings of disaster relief charities below are based on our assessment of their response to the Haiti earthquake. We have examined the major nonprofits involved in the Haiti relief effort, as well as information about the effort in general, and here we summarize which organizations seem most promising to us. For each new disaster, we consider the particular circumstances of that situation as well as the below ratings in making our recommendations for donors.

How do charities help?

In the short term, the relief effort in Haiti has focused on:1

• Medical assistance, including psychosocial assistance.
• Shelter: providing tarps and/or tents to quickly help those who have lost their homes, building higher-quality transitional shelters for the medium term, and managing conditions in camps.
• Providing clean water and helping with sanitation and hygiene.
• Food and nutrition.
• Cash-for-work programs and other programs aiming to raise people's incomes, standards of living, and education options.
• Logistics, including clearing rubble.

From what we've seen, longer-term recovery efforts involve many of the same goals, challenges, and approaches as everyday international aid.

What are the challenges in deciding which disaster relief organization to support?

Spending money well can be difficult in a disaster situation

As of January 2011, it appeared that less than half of the several billion dollars in aid money for Haiti had been spent - despite apparently urgent problems including a cholera outbreak, poor conditions in camps and the continued presence of large amounts of rubble.2 We have seen many reasons to think that addressing these problems well requires much more than money. Obstacles to effective relief include:3

• The difficulty of coordinating hundreds of organizations' efforts, not all of which bring strong experience or knowledge of disaster relief.
• The logistical challenges of traveling and communicating in a setting with damaged and unreliable infrastructure (including roads), compounded by coordination problems (above point).
• Confusion over property rights and a shortage of clearly usable land.

There is little substantive information available for donors

We've conducted extensive searches for relevant information on the relief effort and the agencies participating in it.4

• We have found no information allowing us to attribute particular good or bad outcomes to particular disaster relief organizations, and no method we consider reliable for assessing the quality of their work in general.
• We have found very little information even giving a sense of what different organizations have done, i.e., how they have spent their money to aid in the relief effort.

The first point is not surprising, given the likely difficulties of collecting reliable information in the aftermath of a disaster. However, answers to the question "How has the money been spent and what has been done?" are well below what we consider a reasonable standard of clarity.

Where should you give?

We intend to do more work in this area, but with the information we've collected so far we feel that Doctors Without Borders, Partners In Health, and Direct Relief International stand out from the rest of the organizations we've reviewed, in that they have discussed their activities with unusual clarity (even if not what we consider strong clarity).

We feel that more transparent organizations are more accountable than others for their decisions, if at a later date more and better information becomes available about the relief effort. We also feel that by donating to more transparent organizations, donors can contribute to incentives for more transparency and clarity in general.

Below is a summary of all charities we've reviewed in this cause. We reviewed charities that we consider to be major solicitors and receivers of donations for Haiti relief (details of how we created this list at our process page for this cause). The table below links to an in-depth report for each charity, summarizing the clearest and most detailed information on their spending and activities we could find. The table also gives financial figures for each charity, and summarizes the quality of charities' information on:

• Haiti relief activities specifically.
• Everyday activities. We've argued before that donations intended for disaster relief may effectively fund charities' everyday operations instead (even if they are formally earmarked for and allocated to disaster relief). Therefore, we think the quality of (and transparency around) a charity's everyday work ought to carry a heavy weight in donors' decisions.

Details of how we define transparency are available at process page for this cause.

We also reviewed the following organizations, but excluded them from the above table - and from our transparency ratings - because they appear to primarily regrant funds to other organizations (more on these organizations at our process page for this cause).

Sources

• Associated Press. Haiti gives conflicting counts for quake deaths. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35334751/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/ (accessed January 11, 2011). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5vfoM0dng
• Chronicle of Philanthropy. Donations to Aid Haiti Exceed $210-Million, Chronicle Tally Finds. http://philanthropy.com/article/Donations-to-Aid-Haiti-Exceed/63628/ (accessed January 11, 2011). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5vfoLrlfU
• United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Haiti: One year later.http://ochaonline.un.org/OCHAHome/WhereWeWork/Haiti/HaitiEarthquakeRespo... (accessed January 11, 2011). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5vfDnYdk2.
  (accessed January 11, 2011).

• 1.
  See, for example,
  • United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "Haiti: One year later."
  • Our analysis of the relief effort in aggregate.
• 2.

  See our writeup on the situation in Haiti as of January 2011.

• 3.

  See our writeup on the situation in Haiti as of January 2011.

• 4.

  See our process page for this cause.

• 5. Converted from EUR to USD on 1/11/2011 using Google.
• 6. Converted from EUR to USD on 1/11/2011 using Google.
• 7. Converted from CHF to USD on 1/11/2011 using Google.
• 8. Converted from CHF to USD on 1/11/2011 using Google.