Best Practices: A CEO SWAT Team for Disaster Aid?

Two tweets this morning out of Haiti -- more than a week after the earthquake hit there -- underscored, again, the need to establish best practices (or better, more coordinated ones) in the way the world responds to disasters. "We are giving and those poor people are still DYING" dosomething.org tweeted to the #whosincharge #haiti hashtag group. Meanwhile, Haiti-based citizen journalist #troylivesay, who has been covering the disaster since the earthquake hit on January 12, said: "Supplies are not getting to the ppl who need them PLS RT!"

But the troubles in Haiti aren't merely distribution problems. In many of the world's natural disasters this decade, there often is nobody in charge of what types of supplies are needed in the first place, and little regard to quality control over what is sent. A full year after Katrina, for example, 79 percent of the $13 billion raised to help victims hadn't been spent. Separately, after the Indian Ocean quake in 2004, most of the in-kind drug contributions sent to tsunami victims arrived useless because they were old and expired -- or worse, their labels had not been translated into the local language for safe and easy use by local doctors.

Further, much of the aid that has gotten distributed to disaster victims isn't appropriate for the local populations, relief experts agree. During the massive 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan, social entrepreneur and author Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) told me in a recent interview, "Americans sent over tons of clothing but most of the women burned it for heating fuel. I saw $200 tweed jackets from Manhattan being burned." And now in Haiti, some of the same problems are playing out again. According to the BBC yesterday, "people are getting bits of food but what they are not getting is international food relief in any big quantities. The food is coming into Haiti but it's not getting to the people who need it."

Is it time, then, to form a formal SWAT team among leading global business CEOs and NGOs to coordinate all public and private-sector responses to all future natural disasters? The idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. It first surfaced after Hurricane Katrina and is again being replayed, now that Haiti relief operations are still struggling to deliver. Members of the Manhattan-based Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, a New York-based group of executives focused on improving the size and scope of corporate philanthropy, say they are floating the idea.

"Business groups should develop rapid deployment logistics teams and they should be formal and shold be housed somewhere," CECP board member Alan Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro, Inc., said in an interview. "And these teams should be made up of people who are able to interconnect on a global basis -- knowing, first of all, that there most certainly are going to be more natural disasters somewhere in the next six months or in the next year. We live in a world now where there is going to be another disaster somewhere, ongoing, so let's mobilize now." Added Jean-Paul Garnier, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline: "Businesses should be considering forming more coalitions. Instead of GSK doing one thing and Prudential (Insurance) doing something else, for example, there could be some very important opportunities here for collaboration. This isn't being done now, and I think that's the next chapter of effective philanthropy."

What do you think? Is there a need for businesses to coordinate aid to nations in the wake of natural disasters around the globe? Might business be more effective than, say, USAID or the United Nations in aggregating better responses to global disasters? Is there a need for business and aid groups to share best practices around emergency response?

For more on the cry for better coordination in the global response to natural disasters, see a recent post by fellow Justmeans blogger Ano Lobb, and another by fellow Justmeans blogger Sara Wolcott today.

Let us hear what you think business could do to ease logistical challenges tied to disaster aid now and in the future.