As people around the world celebrate and look forward to the New Year, I am quietly pondering the last four.
For me, they have been four highly challenging years helping the people of Aceh recover from the tsunami of 26 December 2004 and the people of Nias recover from the earthquake that struck their island the following March.
These were immense natural disasters, the greatest in contemporary history at the time.
They killed people by the hundreds of thousands, displaced half a million more, destroyed swathes of public and private property along 800 kilometers of coastline not counting the many affected islands and upended the livelihoods upon which whole communities depended.
The challenge of recovery in such circumstances is anything but easy. But, as we have shown over the past four years, it is possible.
With the enormous financial generosity and technical support of the international community, including Norway, we have built back – and done so to a better standard than before the tsunami and earthquake.
The raw figures are impressive: 118,000 new houses, almost 3,000km newly-laid roads, over 100,000 hectares of reclaimed agricultural land, over 900 new health facilities and more. All in less than four years.
The success story goes even further. Women are now empowered as property holders. Property ownership has been extended to renters and squatters. Rehabilitated rice fields are producing more than before the tsunami. Improved roads and ports have combined with peace to produce higher coffee exports. Fishing communities are hauling in record catches. And access to primary health care is now the best in Indonesia.
Not a bad effort in just four short years. But how have we done it? That is the question I am asked most frequently as my agency nears to the end of its mandate on 15 April this year. It is also a question I ask myself.
Creating a single government agency – my own: BRR – to coordinate the overall reconstruction program was certainly a stroke of genius. It enabled us to dramatically speed up the reconstruction process by cutting through an awful lot of bureaucratic clutter.
But that is only the start of the story. The money we received also helped – all US$7 billion of it!
We would not have got very far had the world community not been so generous with its enormous financial support provided through the UN and its various agencies including ADB and the World Bank, through bilateral contributions including those pooled through the Multi Donor Fund and through the many great international NGOs all working tirelessly to deliver outstanding results.
It is no easy task to coordinate many thousands of projects contributed by around 50 bilateral partners, numerous multilateral agencies and well over 600 NGOs. Norway’s contribution was typical of the help we received that made it all possible.
Norway was a founding member of the Multi Donor Fund. This pooling facility consolidated over $700 million in donor contributions that funded program enablers like the WFP Shipping Service and major technical assistance to my agency that helped lift the standard of the overall reconstruction program. It also provided a strategic platform for engaging in serious program discussions with a core group of bilateral partners, among them Norway.
Less obvious but in some respects even more important was Norway’s direct financial support for the Office of the UN Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and Nias (UNORC).
Norway has been a global leader in UN systems coherence – the “One UN” concept for short. It has long promoted the development of a more integrated approach to the delivery of UN programs.
In our case, it did so by providing $2.5 million to keep UNORC going at a time when it was threatened with closure due to a lack of funds. The importance of this and of UNORC itself should not be underestimated.
UNORC was created at my request and with my mandate to help us coordinate not just the inputs of around 30 UN agencies, programs and funds but also the field operations of our many delivery partners. It also proved itself an excellent interlocutor between my agency and local governments in Aceh and Nias.
One of UNORC’s many contributions is its creation of and support for the Kabupaten and Kota Recovery Forums (KRFs). These fill a significant gap by helping local governments engage with and coordinate the inputs and activities of the many stakeholders in their districts. The KRFs would not exist without Norway’s financial support.
It is one thing to talk about coordination – many do – but it is entirely another to fund it. Norway has done so and, in the process, demonstrated that actions do indeed speak louder than words.
That is why our reconstruction program been so successful. At its heart, the program has been a team effort. Working together through many partnerships in many different areas at many levels we have shown the world that real recovery in a short time after a natural disaster is possible.
This is our collective gift not just to the people of Aceh and Nias. As we move forward into the New Year of 2009, it is also our gift to the world – a gift of optimism and hope that by working together we can turn any great tragedy to an equally great triumph.
Dr Kuntoro Mangkusubroto
Director, Aceh-Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Executing Agency
Jakarta, 1 January 2009