As the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, former US President Bill Clinton cited the Donor Assistance Database in a recent “Lessons Learned” speech to the UN:
“Now let me say, I am quite excited and this is something I urge you all to check on yourselves to see if my excitement is justified, but we set up a Global Consortium mechanism to establish a simple common tracking system for the funds. It is now in place for the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It’s anchored in the UN’s Donor Assistance Database model. And we have just made a presentation of it to Mr. Kuntoro in Indonesia and I think they will be participating.
This is a great system. You can get on the system now and [when] we get it all set up and published and you can find out, you can go to any country, to any part of the country, to any topic area that needs to be addressed and you can see what the plan is, how much it costs, what the timeline is and whether someone has pledged funds for this particular project or not. It is a very good common way for us to be able to monitor what is happening in tsunami relief and I hope it will work as a model for what can [be] used in similar projects in the future.”
