Last month, I encouraged you all to donate to Doctors Without Borders to help with the massive needs in Haiti, after an earthquake pretty much destroyed the impoverished nation’s capital city and killed an estimated 230,000 people, as many deaths as in the massive Asian tsunami in 2004.

I chose DWB because of long-standing reasons to avoid donating to the American Red Cross (ARC), but most specifically because in the days after the earthquake, DWB (or technically, MSF, Médicins Sans Frontières in their native French

was pledging to use donations from the linked page specifically in Haiti for relief efforts. The ARC's much-ballyhooed donation page specifically said you were donating to their general "international relief fund," not to Haiti relief, so they might spend the money in Haiti, or elsewhere, or not at all. Within a week, the situation had reversed, and I noted as much. I've removed the donation graphic from the left-hand side of the blog today because the DWB/MSF linked page no longer says anything about Haiti at all—it's just for general donations to the (quite worthy) organization.

A month has passed, and ARC has issued a "One-Month Progress Report for the American Red Cross Response." This is already more transparency than you could expect from ARC just eight years ago, but as some people are beginning to notice, there's a slight discrepancy in the numbers:

The American Red Cross has received approximately $255 million (as of February 10, 2010) for the Haiti relief and recovery efforts.

[…] To date, the American Red Cross has already spent or committed $80 million to meet the most urgent needs of earthquake survivors in Haiti. Aimed at immediate relief, approximately 69 percent of the funds committed thus far have been for food and water; 20 percent have been allocated for shelter; and the rest have been dedicated for health and family services. As the response progresses and recovery begins, the Red Cross will continue to support these priority areas and longer-term assistance initiatives.

In other words, the ARC has received $255 million for Haiti relief and recovery, but has only spent or committed to spend $80 million of that. That leaves a whopping $175 million that the ARC has received for Haiti relief that has not even been committed to projects in the country yet. That’s a metric shit-ton of money that will do a lot of good in Haiti if actually spent on recovery. As transportation infrastructure improves, it will become cheaper to get food and water into Haiti, so I’d guess $175 million is enough to provide basic food and water to tens of thousands of people for most of a year.

The $175 million question: why has ARC not “committed” this money to Haiti relief? Is it just because it’s not committed to specific projects? How long will it take to develop and fund these projects? Is this typical for other charities? Given ARC’s consistent past habits of collecting disaster relief money and spending a third or less of that money on relief for victims of that disaster, you have to wonder—and if the ARC truly is reformed and more transparent, they should answer them pre-emptively.

One more interesting note:

More than $32 million has been pledged through a record-breaking mobile giving effort in which people text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10. Thank you for enabling the American Red Cross to respond immediately and effectively as the needs on the ground evolve.

Note the verb changed: the money is not “received,” but “pledged.” That dovetails with news stories from last month noting that ARC won’t actually get the $10 from your text message until you have paid the cellphone bill for the period in which that message was billed, so anywhere from 30 to 90 days after you sent the text message. It’s possible that ARC was able to use those pledges to get no-cost credit for immediate relief efforts, or just deplete an existing fund with the assurance it would be rebuilt over a 90-day period, but it’s worth noting that ARC does not describe it as money they have. Still, 3.2 million people sending a $10 text message for help is an awesome thing that could very well change the way people around the world can individually respond to future disasters. It would be nice if the mobile carriers and credit card companies could work together to build a mechanism that would do this with much faster payment for just such emergencies. If it works out well, it could even become part of everyday commerce, provided it was secure enough.

That’s far afield from the point of people acting quickly and unselfishly to help disaster survivors, but let’s try to learn any lesson from this that we can, shall we?