The most important set of actors are NGOs, which appear to be well placed to play a significant role in this area. In fact, with donors and United Nations now relying heavily on NGOs as implementing partners, NGO "capacity" has become crucial to the functioning of the international relief system.

The NGO sector’s popularity with government and official aid agencies is also a response to recent developments in economic and political thinking; termed "New Policy Agenda". It looks at the market and private sector as the most efficient mechanisms of achieving economic growth and providing services.

Within this context, NGOs seem to be in the best position, strategically and financially, to be involved in "development programs". But, it is often argued that their involvement in natural disaster mitigation programs has made very restrictive contributions, probably because of the many obstructing issues in the system.
 

Man-induced vs Natural disasters

A generic review suggests that one of the most important issues faced by the NGOs is the domination by complex political emergencies, often resulting in limited fund availability for natural disaster mitigation activities.

This lack of funds results in other issues like limited staff hiring capacity of local NGOs. The over-burdened staff leads to poor documentation and report writing. This in turn gets reflected in the low level of institutional learning and results in limited information and knowledge sharing between organizations. There are obviously many other factors playing the part, but in effect, many problems seem to have common originating issues.

One of the often cited reasons for lack of focus on natural Disaster Mitigation is that, with complex political emergencies dominating the humanitarian concerns and development agencies preoccupied with broader issues arising from post world war era, natural disasters have always been marginalized within NGOs aid agendas.

This domination of complex emergencies may be because most of the largest NGOs of the North (developed countries) grew out of wars and emergencies. For example, Save the Children was a product of World War I; Plan International grew out of the Spanish civil war; OXFAM and CARE were products of World War II., etc.

This dominance is also evident in the global codes and standards developed under international initiatives for NGOs to improve practices during complex emergency situations and disaster relief work.

These humanitarian agencies’ initiatives, too, noticeably focus particularly on emergency relief, with very little regard to disaster mitigation activities. Indeed, there have been a few major international initiatives like the recent International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and its successor International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) to promote disaster mitigation, but the success of their impact is very debatable.

By the end of mid term review in 1994, the international community was admitting to the "meager results of an extra ordinary opportunity given to the United Nations and its member states".

This trend of domination of complex emergencies is evident in the work of UK based NGOs/charities, academic/research bodies, consultancies and individual consultants as they mark complex emergencies as their single most important area of current work.

The emphasis of NGO response, currently, is clearly on large scale relief efforts in the areas of drought and complex emergencies, and even though it is widely recognized that raising public awareness of disaster protection is surely a prerequisite of promoting disaster mitigation and affecting changes in policies, NGOs still attach relatively little importance to it.

Although agencies’ policy statements may suggest a wide spread concern about risk reduction, the real test of the international community’s commitment is surely the amount of aid funding committed by it.

A few, notably the European Union and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have established dedicated mitigation and preparedness budget lines under their broader disaster management programmes. But, their overall expenditure is very limited. For example, the European Community’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO) set up a separate disaster preparedness budget in 1994 (which later became the DIPECHO programme).

While DIPECHO spent 8 million euros (US$ 7 million) last year, it represented only 1.5 per cent of the total ECHO budget for humanitarian aid! Having said that, it is also recognized that organizations working in emergency relief are facing the dilemma of protecting long term projects like disaster prevention and mitigation in the face of rapid onset large-scale emergency response needs.

British Red Cross is now developing a portfolio of longer term programmes, bringing development philosophy into the emergency work.

The above point is mentioned with an understanding that even with the real difference between the two approaches of development work and emergency relief, disaster mitigation and preparedness activities fall in between the two and suffer by being adopted and are funded by very few.

Availability of funds is not the only issue. Another important criterion is accountability for the funds provided. Some southern NGOs, particularly those that rely on institutional donors, have been ‘shaped’ by the funding environment of the last two decades.

In some cases there has been a tendency to be more accountable to donors than to partners and beneficiaries. Furthermore, N-NGOs / donors have often set parameters for development work, including setting timeframes and defining what constitutes success based on their emergency work experience.

One of the main questions for NGOs is how to maintain integrity and independence while securing funding for their work. There are no easy answers, but NGOs are diversifying their funding base and exploring new funding partnerships.