Emergency Relief Archive: look back at the Asian Tsunami

Looking back on the Asian Tsunami

Just after midnight GMT on Boxing Day 2004 an earthquake (known as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake) hit in the ocean off the coast of Sumatra. The result was a tsunami (sometimes called a tidal wave) which killed in total around 225,000 people across 11 countries. The hardest hit countries were all ones where SOS Children has been established for decades: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

The exact picture of devastation and the response of the Western world to it unfolded over the months and years which followed. It was one of the worst natural disasters in history in terms of deaths but generated one of the largest amounts of humanitarian aid ever (over $7 billion in total).  Some aid agencies collected more money than they were able to spend, the wisest stopped collecting and after the event significant negative coverage for NGOs occurred. With hindsight although there were many things which some NGOs should have done much better, the event was outside collective experience; in particular donations of over $1000 per victim dwarfed the $5 per victim typically received by NGOs for humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world (especially Africa). The worse criticism was concerning the time between donations being made and the victims being helped (although local planning laws certainly did not help with this either).

The fact that the tsunami was a new experience for NGOs makes learning from it especially important so we have decided to put the various field reports we received in the four countries SOS Children worked in together into this archive.

UN Review of post-tsunami NGO work

School rebuilt post tsunami Faced with all the criticism of NGOs, in the first quarter of 2006 the UN (via the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-Habitat) commissioned Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, to carry out a study of the reconstruction of villages in the regions of Indonesia that had been destroyed by the tsunami. The study looked at 74 Aid locations where a total of 35  NGOs had worked on rebuilding housing for victims.

Some of the deciding criteria for the study were the evaluation of the progress seen in the reconstruction work, the handing over of houses and the choice of building materials. 12 of the 35 charities were awarded top marks by UN-Habitat for this difficult challenge and we are proud that SOS Children was one ot them. 

We were also one of the first aid organisations to hand over new houses to families on the island of Sumatra who had been affected by the tsunami. SOS Children had construction projects in Gampong Cot, Suak Raya and Lambada Lhok is due to finish shortly.

Local people and other non-governmental organisations have praised SOS Children for its quick action following the tsunami and for working closely with people from the communities concerned as part of the reconstruction work. In total we built  2,261 family houses (1,014 in Sri Lanka, 521 in Indonesia, 78 in Thailand and 648 in India, 150 of which are being built in partnership with SOS Chatnath Homes) for around 11,200 people. We also built 15 community centres, seven SOS Children's Villages which permenantly house more than 600 children orphaned by the tsunami ( and include nursery schools, youth shelters and vocational training centres) and six SOS Social Centres (which are used to run family strengthening programs helps families which are struggling to stay together.

 

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