Volunteers, businesses, and disaster response

It’s exactly a year since a devastating series of earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria. Whole streets were flattened, after shocks drove terrified people, already homeless, back out into the streets time and time again.

In this week’s Inside Geneva podcast we take a look at earthquake response: how do emergency workers even begin, when the destruction, as it was last year, is so great? When whole towns are flattened? How do international teams work with local emergency services?

When the earthquake first struck on February 6 last year, Filip Kirazov was at home in the United Kingdom. But an emergency notification app he has with him at all times let him know what had happened. That’s because Kirazov, an engineer, is also a member of SARAID, a search and rescue group certified by the United Nations to deploy to disasters such as earthquakes. SARAID’s team, all unpaid volunteers, includes engineers like Kirazov, paramedics, and specialists in things such as water or rope rescue, and in hazardous materials.

Just a day after their apps bleeped, Kirazov and his colleagues were on their way to Turkey. Once there, Kirazov, who has worked in many disaster zones, saw a “scale of destruction…different to anything I’d seen…neighbourhoods totally destroyed.”

How, I asked him, do international rescue workers know where to start, arriving in an unfamiliar city where building after multistorey building is, as Kirazov put it “pancaked” into the ground?

“A good question,” he told Inside Geneva. “Coordination and organisation” are vital. Arriving rescue teams have a system to follow, starting with a wide area assessment, then moving onto identifying where people could remain alive under the rubble, and carefully assessing those sites, and how long it will take to get the people out.

All of this, as we find out on Inside Geneva, depends on working closely with the local affected communities, who know the terrain, the buildings, and the people who lived in them. “Our goal is to be effective,” says Kirazov. The knowledge of local communities is “essential” he adds, pointing out that “our primary role is to assist, not to lead.”

Painstaking rescue

So coordination and organisation are key to an effect disaster response, but rescue teams can have the best laid plans, and still find they have to change them. When SARAID arrived in Turkey, with a mandate to coordinate the overall search and rescue effort, they were immediately called to take over a live rescue, where a German team had been working non-stop to extricate a woman and her son from a collapsed building.

Rescue teams typically work 12-hour shifts, the German team had already exceeded that, and were “exhausted”, remembers Kirazov. SARAID stepped in, and, another six hours later, mother and child were brought out alive. “It can take a very long time,” Kirazov said. “But we train for that. If we know there is a live person in there, we are not going to stop”. SARAID recently got a letter from the rescued family, saying they are, one year on, doing well.

Capitalising on business skills

In every disaster response, local knowledge is, as Kirazov said, “essential”. International teams arriving for the first time in a country in the midst of an emergency can’t possibly be effective unless they listen to, and work with, local communities. That is something the UN recognises: in the past, too many humanitarian efforts have been less efficient than they might have been, because international teams fly in and try to hit the ground running, without taking time to assess their surroundings, and talk to local people about what is needed, where.

But in 2016, the UN created its “Connecting Business Initiative” or CBI. It’s run jointly by the UN’s office for humanitarian affairs, OCHA, and the UN development programme, UNDP. The aim: to engage the private sector strategically before, during and after emergencies, and, by doing so, increase the scale and effectiveness of emergency response and recovery.

It sounds logical: who knows a local community better? Who might have trucks available? Who knows where the power lines are? Who has local IT skills? The answer, of course, is local people, and local businesses. But does it work? Humanitarians and business entrepreneurs are not necessarily cut from the same cloth, their goals and motivations can be very different.

On Inside Geneva we hear from the CBI team who were in Turkey when the earthquake struck. Rhiza Nery, of UNDP, points out that in a disaster of such magnitude “no one actor can do it alone.” Getting business involved “makes logical sense”, but, she adds, what local businesses have to offer is “often overlooked”.

But in Turkey the CBI was in place, and immediately began working with its partner Turkonfed, the Turkish Business and Enterprise confederation. Its deputy secretary general Erhan Arslan told Inside Geneva that the organisation had been preparing for an earthquake. “We were calculating the number of people that were going to lose their lives, and the number of economic losses. The role of businesses there was to be prepared before, and to help the economic recovery afterwards.”

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake Turkonfed contacted the hotel sector to organise accommodation for arriving rescue and humanitarian teams, and provided trucks to deliver aid.

Profit motive

But despite the undoubted skills and experience business can bring to an emergency, Inside Geneva’s analyst Daniel Warner was skeptical. Business, he pointed out, is motivated primarily by profit, and he questioned whether that motivation is right for disaster response.

“When I hear about private public partnerships, I always say, in terms of the private ‘what’s in it for them?’ And the question of a private company being totally neutral or altruistic, I still have my doubts”.

Rhiza Nery agreed that sometimes the different aims and thought processes of business versus humanitarians can be challenging. “We often times see the challenges that come from the differences, between the business community, the private sector, and humanitarian organisations, not just the UN.”

But, as Erhan Arslan pointed out, business cannot survive and thrive in an economy shattered by a natural disaster, so playing an active role in responding to the earthquake makes good business sense.

Of course, neither Turkey, let alone Syria, have recovered from the devastation of last year. Many thousands are still in temporary accommodation. In Syria, where help had great difficulties even getting in last year, UN aid agencies appealed this week for continued support. In Turkey, there are fears that the new homes being built may, like their collapsed predecessors, be substandard.

The CBI remains a relatively new initiative, less than eight years old. But Nery points to “inspiring” teams around the world, and insists the concept can work. “Working with the private sector can work. It can lead to better communities, and resilient societies.”

Edited by Virginie Mangin