Aid burst lifts people out of extreme poverty

Giving some of the world’s poorest people a two-year aid package—including cash, food, health-care services, skills training and advice—improves their livelihoods for at least a year after the support is cut off, according to the results of an experiment involving more than 10,000 households in six countries.

“We finally have truly credible evidence that a program for the poorest of the poor can really help them meaningfully reduce their poverty,” says Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the study, reported today in Science.

Outside experts are more cautious, but still impressed, particularly because the work was done as a randomized control trial—in which people were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. Most poverty interventions have failed to show sustainable benefits in such trials, so the effectiveness of the program justifies countries considering the strategy, says Jonathan Morduch of New York University, who studies microfinance and poverty.

The idea of assessing poverty inventions in randomized control trials, in the same way as drugs and vaccines are tested, was developed over the past decade by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (see ‘International aid projects come under the microscope’), and by Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization founded by Karlan that coordinated the latest study.

“Effects often fade over time, so seeing results persist for a year is already quite impressive,” says Morduch. It shows that a coordinated short-term intervention can put very poor people on the first rung of the ladder of escape from extreme poverty.

[Scientific American]

Rescue work to find the victims and survivors of 2nd Nepali earthquake

At least 65 people died in Tuesday’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Nepal and nearly 2,000 were hurt in quake, with fears the figures could rise. At least 17 died in India.

Aid agencies have appealed for funding, saying Tuesday’s tremor has badly hit efforts to help those already affected by the 7.8-magnitude quake on 25 April. Richard Ragan of the World Food Programme said the latest quake had set back the relief effort and many UN agencies were now “desperately short of funds”.

Thousands of Nepalis – many of whom have not returned to their homes since the first quake, which killed over 8,000 people – spent another night in the open.

The Red Cross said it had been told of many casualties in the town of Chautara in Sindhupalchowk, where it has a hospital and which has become a hub for humanitarian aid.

Even before Tuesday’s earthquake, aid workers worried that wealthy nations seemed unwilling to fund the relief effort in Nepal, having pledged only about 15 percent of the initial appeal for $423 million, said Jamie McGoldrick, the resident coordinator for the United Nations in Nepal. “The international community seems quite reluctant to provide material,” he said.

[BBC; New York Times]

NASA technology located four trapped Nepal earthquake victims by detecting their heartbeats

A technology developed by NASA and the US Department of Homeland Security designed to save people trapped by debris in natural disasters has been used in the field for the first time. FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response) lived up to its name, locating and saving four people trapped under rubble for days after the 7.8 earthquake in Nepal killed more than 7,000 people and injured countless others.

FINDER is a radar machine that sends a continuous microwave signal through the rubble, and can detect a human’s breathing or heartbeat (and distinguish it from the movement of an animal). It can locate people hidden behind 20 feet of solid concrete or buried beneath 30 feet of rubble, and the person doesn’t need to be conscious to be detected.

The technology is based on remote radar sensing that NASA originally developed to detect life on other planets. It was deployed with search and rescue teams to Nepal on April 29, four days after the earthquake struck. It had been tested many times before, but had yet to be implemented in a real-life emergency.

NASA is working to commercialize the FINDER technology in order to get it into the hands of more first responders. No doubt more earthquake victims could have been saved if FINDER was deployed with more search and rescue teams.

[QZ]

International aid finally reaches remote areas of quake-hit Nepal

It has been difficult to gauge the extent of the quake’s damage, let alone deliver aid to Nepal’s more far-flung districts.

Ten days after Nepal was struck by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, international relief workers have finally gained access to areas cut off by the disaster and international aid has reached some of the nation’s more remote areas, FRANCE 24 reports.

Click to watch FRANCE 24’s special report 

As hopes fade, Nepal requests foreign rescuers to leave

The government of Nepal is asking foreign search-and-rescue teams to leave now that the likelihood of finding survivors buried by last month’s earthquake has largely passed. The official death toll now exceeds 7,300.

Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, a Home Ministry spokesman, said on Monday roughly half the 4,000 rescuers had already left. “I think all the rescuers will go to their respective countries by Friday.”

There seems almost no chance that anyone alive is still trapped amid the rubble from the quake, which struck just before noon on April 25. On Sunday, though, three survivors were found in the Sindhupalchok district, an especially hard hit and largely rural area north of Kathmandu.

Dr. Ian Norton, head of the World Health Organization’s program of foreign medical teams, said that the thousands of rescuers, who often work as firefighters in their home countries, had saved a total of 16 people in the aftermath of the quake, and that about 50 foreign medical teams comprising nearly 10,000 people had saved hundreds of lives and even more limbs.

[The New York Times]

Obstacles to Nepal earthquake relief

There’s a lot of aid headed toward Nepal, but it’s not getting there as fast as people would like. The reason: There aren’t enough runways.

The country’s only international airport is Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. It’s tiny. It has just one runway. So it can’t accommodate all the planes flying in.

The single runway has been closed several times for earthquake repairs. Also, there are limited places for planes to park. On many days, pilots circled for hours waiting for another plane to take off because there’s no room to land.

This bottleneck has slowed the recovery effort. A terminal duty officer, who wouldn’t give his name because he’s not allowed to talk to the media, says the situation is bad: “It is a mess here. ”

That’s not the only obstacle to relief work. Some groups show up and don’t know what to do or where to go. Or how to get there.

“Even where there was no disaster here, it was just really difficult to get around,” says Lisa Rudolph, an American Red Cross worker who arrived from Washington, D.C. “Even within Kathmandu itself it can take an hour to get from one point to another. And so now with roads blocked [due to earthquake damage and] the airport congested, it’s going to be really difficult.”

[NPR]

Amongst the challenges of aid workers

Unni Krishnan spent hours on the tarmac in Delhi Sunday afternoon before he learned his flight would be cancelled because of a massive aftershock in Kathmandu. While the 49-year-old Canadian aid worker managed to catch a different flight to the earthquake-shattered capital of Nepal the following morning, several of his colleagues remain stranded at airports, waiting for a seat on a flight they hoped would be able to land.

One colleague’s plane touched down twice in Kathmandu before taking off again. “They need to find a balancing act between materials and people, because both are needed for the circumstances,” said Mr. Krishnan, who is Plan International’s head of disaster response and preparedness.

That backlog at the airport is one of many challenges for aid workers who are struggling to reach those most in need of help after a devastating earthquake shook the South Asian country on Saturday, killing more than 5,000 people. People in Nepal described chaotic scenes on Monday as thousands fled the capital and officials struggled to move supplies from the country’s main airport to those left homeless by the earthquake.

Ottawa has promised $5-million in aid to Nepal and says it will match donations from individual Canadians over a one-month period. The federal government also sent an assessment group from the military’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, along with a search-and-rescue team and medical personnel. And Canadian aid agencies are moving into action, sending humanitarian workers and supplies to the damaged country of 31 million.

Francois Audet, a professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal who has studied the international response to humanitarian disasters, said co-ordination among agencies and with local officials is always a challenge after a major event such as an earthquake. Those challenges can be amplified, he said, if aid organizations begin competing for donations and facing pressures to demonstrate that they are achieving results.

Stephen Cornish, executive director for Médecins sans frontières Canada (MSF), said some of the biggest challenges in co-ordinating aid typically arise in the weeks after a disaster occurs. That’s because the organizations that arrive first – and those already working in a country – are more experienced at working with others and tend to have better local contacts.

Several Canadian aid agencies said the situation has improved since the introduction of the “cluster” system after the 2004 tsunamis. That system groups aid organizations into specific “clusters” of humanitarian aid – such as shelter and health – to ensure that the assistance being provided is reaching those who need it, and different groups’ efforts aren’t overlapping.

[The Globe and Mail]