Donor fatigue leaves a million homeless

Four months after Super Typhoon Yolanda devastated parts of the Philippines a million people still have no more than the temporary shelters provided them by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in the first few days following the disaster.

In Tacloban City, one of the worst hit areas, the blue UNHCR tents and tarpaulins are everywhere. The UN believes that all is being done given the circumstances, but the situation is still critical.

Around $300 million has been raised for the reconstruction, but it is estimated that close to $800 million is needed if work this year is to proceed at maximum pace. As it stands, all that will be achieved are band-aid measures where the worst off are moved into more durable temporary shelters that will probably have to be demolished all over again when – and if – more money is found.

In addition to shelter there is an urgent need to get people back to work – 33 million coconut trees were either destroyed or severely damaged, once productive farm land is covered in layers of salty sludge and 30,000 fishing vessels were either swept away or wrecked. The UN believes that some of the available money must go towards remediation work in these areas if people are not to lose hope.

Here, as in many other cases, the problem is donor fatigue. There are other pressing demands on the funds of those countries in a position to give – Syria, The Democratic Republic of Congo, volcanic eruptions in Indonesia, strife in sub-Saharan Africa.

And now the richer countries have their own problems. North America faced its worst winter in decades, Northern Europe was beset by floods and Australia battled its bushfires. As extreme weather events mount alongside the miseries created by mankind, there just doesn’t seem enough money, enough compassion, to go round.

There are no easy answers to many of these problems, but in the case of the Philippines, aid is not a matter of pouring money into a bottomless pit. Despite the natural disasters, the brain drain caused by some of its best people being among the 10 million Filipinos choosing to work overseas, a continuing insurgency in the southern island of Mindanao that has cost 120,000 lives, and a quarter of its 98 million people still living below the poverty line, the country’s economy is healthy and growing.

The Philippines Central Bank recently announced that foreign direct investments rose by 20 per cent in 2013 and said the country was now considered among the top investment destinations in the South-East Asian region.

At the time of its independence in 1946, the Philippines was considered to be the Asian economy most likely to succeed. Two decades of the Marcos dictatorship put paid to that and bureaucratic corruption remains a running sore on the body politic, yet in the face of all these setbacks there is a solid determination to face down the problems and succeed.

As one young history student told me in Manila. “The Philippines lies between two worlds, east and west. We don’t properly belong to either, but both want a bit of us.

“The only way forward is for us to assert our own nationality and say to the world ‘we will be friends with all of you as long as it is in our interests to do so’; we have to refuse to be pawns in anyone’s game.”

Brave words, but it remains to be seen whether long-suffering Filipinos have the resolution to back them with actions and – perhaps most importantly – who will help them to do it.