Tsunami response has changed lives for good, says agency
The tsunami on Boxing Day ten years ago was unprecedented. It hit 14 countries and affected 5 million people, killing an estimated 230,000 people and making 1.7 million homeless.
An estimated $13.5 billion (£8.6bn) was raised by the international community. Up to 40 per cent was donated by individuals, trusts, foundations and business, making it the highest ever privately funded emergency.
Globally, Oxfam received $294 million (£187m), with over 90 per cent coming from private donors. Most of this (54 per cent) was raised in the UK. Even now, the Disasters Emergency Committee’s tsunami appeal, of which Oxfam is a member, remains the highest total ever raised. Up to 80 per cent of UK households are thought to have contributed to the £392 million donated.
The generous funding meant that Oxfam was able to respond in seven countries – Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Thailand and Somalia, making it Oxfam’s biggest emergency response ever. The international agency provided emergency water, food and shelter, and then had enough to improve livelihoods over a five-year period.
Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB’s Chief Executive, said: “The British public should be left in no doubt that they were part of an extraordinary life-saving and life-changing effort. Their generosity meant that people who had lost so much in a matter of minutes were able to recover, piece back their lives and today be in a stronger position than hardly anyone dared imagine ten years ago.”
Oxfam and its partners helped an estimated 2.5 million people between 2004 and 2009. In the immediate term, the international agency provided shelter for more than 40,000 people, provided blankets and trucked in clean water. Over the next three years, Oxfam continued to truck more than 300 million litres to Aceh, Indonesia, which was among the hardest hit.
Work from Oxfam and partners included improving or building more than 10,800 wells, 90 boreholes and 55 gravity flow water systems. In Aceh, a municipal system to supply 10,000 people was built and training provided for local communities to maintain it. A return trip to the communities in Aceh earlier this year confirmed that water systems are still running under the eye of local volunteers and that Oxfam’s wider response made a difference to people’s lives.
Oxfam also reached a further 960,000 people to help improve their incomes, either by recruiting people to help with clean-up projects or by restoring livelihoods such as replacing fishing boats, constructing docks in Indonesia and Somalia, improving agricultural practices and replacing livestock. Other work included constructing or repairing 100 schools in Indonesia and Myanmar.
Oxfam was part of a wider humanitarian effort, which succeeded in getting children back to school in all affected countries within the first six months. In that time, about half a million people had been temporarily housed in Aceh, and the fishing industry in Sri Lanka was rapidly rebuilt, with more than 80 per cent of damaged boats, equipment and markets restored and 70 per cent of households back on a steady income. Tourists had also begun returning to Thailand and the Maldives.
The humanitarian sector’s focus to ‘build back better’ means that new infrastructures are more able to withstand natural disasters and the communities can better cope by having access to healthcare and resources. One of the biggest lessons from the tsunami was the need to invest far more in reducing the risk of future disasters. The absence of an early warning system, which could have saved many lives further from the epicentre, has been addressed. The system was put to the test in 2012 following an earthquake in roughly the same location.
The scale of the disaster was not without its challenges and Oxfam and the wider humanitarian sector has learnt a lot from the experience. Different organisations, for example, are now responsible for different aspects of humanitarian responses - such as water and sanitation, logistics and shelter - so that they are more co-ordinated. Oxfam has also looked at streamlining work between different teams and on what it delivers in emergencies: providing safe water and sanitation, public health and livelihoods.
In its report The Indian Ocean Tsunami, 10 Years On, Oxfam outlines how the tsunami response shows what is possible if the funds are made available and assesses why some disasters receive such generous levels of donations compared to others.
It shows that the high level of private funding to the tsunami was due to several factors including it being a sudden, natural disaster as opposed to a man-made one, empathy for those affected, a sense that donations would make a difference, and extensive media coverage. The timing and scale is also thought to have been important.
The tsunami attracted more media coverage in two months than the world’s top 10 ‘forgotten’ emergencies throughout the previous year and was one of the first disasters to be captured as it happened extensively on mobile phones. A study of the relationship between media and donations to US charities for the tsunami response reveals that, on average, during the 100 days following the tsunami, every additional minute of television news coverage from three main broadcast networks increased online donations by 13 per cent on the same day.
The speed of donations for the tsunami response was unique: 80 per cent of Oxfam’s total donations were made in just one month. Oxfam set up a special fund to help manage the funds during the response.
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