The Indian Ocean tsunami devastated thousands of miles of coastline across an entire continent and triggered one of biggest-ever international aid operations. U.N. agencies, governments, Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, local relief charities, global NGOs – all sprang into action as the donor dollars rolled in.

How does a relief effort of such size and scope fit together? Who coordinates the different actors and channels the different flows of money?

Let’s take a deep breath and start with the United Nations, which is playing a leading role in bringing all the strands together. But which bit of the U.N. does that mean?

Good question. The main U.N. body for coordination in this kind of situation is the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). OCHA collects and channels funding from donor countries by issuing a list of funding needs for U.N. agencies. This appeal sets out what each affected country needs, divided into categories like food, shelter, water and sanitation, health, education, and agriculture. The appeal only covers immediate, life-saving needs during the first six months after a natural disaster.

So it’s like an online wedding list, and donors click on whether they want to give water purification tablets to Indonesia or fund demining in Sri Lanka?

It’s a bit like that. The idea is to try to spread out donor pledges and identify gaps, so they don’t just all fund food, which is viewed as more attractive than spending on medical needs. But donors operate in complicated ways. Some tend to give their money to a specific agency, such as UNICEF -- the Children’s Fund – while others prefer funding specific projects. These are called “earmarked” donations. Some offer funds without specifying where they should go, for OCHA to distribute as it sees fit. And a lot of them do a combination of these.

Where do NGOs come into the picture?

The U.N. agencies often contract NGOs to work for them. For example, if an NGO has a presence on the ground, it might distribute food from the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP). So some of the money from the U.N. appeal ends up getting channelled through NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement.

But some governments also give money directly to governments or to NGOs, don’t they?

Yes. This might include the loan of army equipment or military personnel. Some governments are also part of groups that give money, such as the European Union. And they also tend to give funding directly to NGOs based in their own countries.

Responsible NGOs won’t take more money than they need, and many try to avoid taking earmarked money that they might not be able to spend. Sometimes they turn down inappropriate donations – like an airplane too small to deliver aid, for example – or pass them on to someone with more use for the offer. Sometimes they try to persuade donors to fund less publicised emergencies instead of high-profile disasters.

Do governments offer the money, or do NGOs go begging for it?

It’s a combination. Governments make it known that they have money available for emergency response, and invite NGOs to bid for it. And NGOs go to governments and make requests. As Oxfam’s emergencies funding manager, Orla Quinlan, told AlertNet: “It’s not a linear process.”

And what about all the money that the public donates?

Most of that goes to NGOs and Red Cross societies. Even though the public has responded with unprecedented generosity to the tsunami, money collected from private individuals is still a fairly small part of the total aid sloshing around the system. For most NGOs, donations from individuals are less significant than funding from governments. There are some notable exceptions to this, like Médecins Sans Frontières, which refuses to take money from governments.

How do NGOs and U.N. agencies coordinate with the governments of disaster-struck countries?

Most governments have national disaster coordination committees, and if they don’t already, they set them up when a sudden disaster hits. In this case, the countries worst affected all have strong central governments.

I see the U.N. appeal is for Indonesia, Maldives, Seychelles, Somalia and Sri Lanka. Why doesn’t it include India and Thailand?

India and Thailand have not requested international assistance. India – prone to a whole variety of natural hazards -- has a well-developed structure for disaster response, has sent aid to Indonesia, Maldives and Sri Lanka.

Although the Indian government has refused aid agencies access to some tsunami-hit areas, it has agreed to work with UNICEF on a campaign against childhood measles and blindness in the battered Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Sri Lanka and Indonesia found their national coordination systems were more overstretched. In this case, the U.N. backs up national committees with its own specialist staff.

Who’s in charge of the U.N. operation?

There’s a U.N. country team in each country. Before the tsunami, these people would have mostly been working on development issues or post-war rehabilitation, so the U.N. sends extra staff with experience of emergencies. The resident humanitarian coordinator in each country will be the top person there. Usually it’s the head of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

Since we’re talking about so many countries, is there a tsunami tsar above them?

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he’s going to appoint a special envoy for this. Up until now, it has been the deputy under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Margareta Wahlstrom. She’s the deputy to Jan Egeland, who is the head of OCHA. She was in Jakarta from the start of the emergency response, but is now based in New York.

Which U.N. agencies are involved in the tsunami response?

It’s an alphabet spaghetti of U.N. organisations. There’s the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UNDP, the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), UNHCR and the U.N. Human Settlements Programme (Habitat).

I sense there’s something else you’re not telling me. I expect you’re scared to tell me too many acronyms at once.

There are a few other important U.N. coordination bodies. The U.N. Joint Logistics Centre coordinates the logistics of work that combines different U.N. agencies. It’s housed in the WFP, which is the U.N. agency with biggest need to shift items around the world. U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams do the main assessment work. And then the Inter-Agency Standing Committee includes representatives of the U.N. agencies as well as the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement and big NGOs, and usually has input into meetings with donors.

So UNJLC coordinates logistics, and OCHA coordinates the funding and the organisations?

More or less.

With all these aid agencies involved, how do they coordinate?

A lead agency is designated for each sector in each country, usually chosen for having a speciality in a certain department. It could be a U.N. agency or an NGO, or a Red Cross society. So the WFP will probably be the lead agency on food, but it might be a big NGO like CARE or Catholic Relief Services or Oxfam. UNICEF is usually the lead agency for water and sanitation, but often it will be Oxfam, which specialises in this field. The lead agency on health might be the World Health Organisation or UNICEF or a medical NGO. For mine action it might be a specialist NGO or the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) or the U.N. Mine Action Service.

What happens when a whole lot of agencies are working on the same site?

Lead agencies will also often be designated for specific camps, or sometimes for whole districts. Again, this could be a U.N. agency like the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), or it might be an NGO. Sometimes, of course, it will be the local or national government.

Do NGOs stick to the same priorities as the U.N.?

They might well have different angles and emphases, but the theory is that they are working towards the same goals.

It seems logical for OCHA to coordinate everything, but I understand that’s not something that can be taken for granted.

Sometimes the U.N. coordination system comes under pressure from donors, like the U.S. or the European Union, who try to take control. In this case, the United States initially set up a rival coordination group with Australia, India and Japan, but it soon dropped this idea and acknowledged it was a job for the United Nations.

Sometimes, it’s more logical or politically appropriate for another agency to take the lead. For example, when an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Bam in late 2003, the Iranian Red Crescent coordinated the international response.

Quinlan of Oxfam told AlertNet: “It’s not like you can have a blueprint. It’s unpredictable. It depends on the nature of the disaster, who has been affected, who has the mandate to deal with the situation and if the host government has requested a response from the international community.”

OCHA says coordination in the tsunami response is actually working better than a lot of other disasters, and is fairly close to what they see as an ideal pattern. Another new factor is that there are countries getting involved as donors who haven’t in the past, like Brazil and Qatar.

It’s easier to deal with a natural disaster than a conflict, because the political implications of aid are less polarised.

Definitely.

Aren’t you going to end with a feelgood quote?

Jamie McGoldrick of OCHA told AlertNet: “I’ve never seen a better sense of how important it is to respond to thie immediate crisis, and that if we go about misdirecting aid, people will suffer. I’ve never seen a better collegiate response.”