At a recent roundtable discussion on the response of relief and humanitarian organizations to the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, nonprofit leaders agreed that while the response by aid groups was better than in other disasters, the overall effort has been plagued by a lack of coordination and duplication of services, the Washington Post reports.

Participants in the discussion, which was sponsored by the Washington, D.C.-based Aspen Institute, agreed that coordination among relief groups has been much better than in previous international disasters. But they also expressed a belief that competition among nonprofits and the large number of groups working in devastated areas had led, at times, to tensions and duplication of services. "There is no reason for fifty [aid groups to be] in a country if ten or fifteen are already there," said World Bank senior human development specialist Stephen Commins.

Concern was also expressed about the increased level of scrutiny generated by the record amount of contributions raised from governments and individuals around the world. According to Kathryn Bushkin, executive vice president for the United Nations Foundation, donors want and are expecting to see that their money has made a difference, that "it's not just a drop in the bucket."

Some participants called for tighter controls on aid and humanitarian groups as a way to reduce the duplication of services, with some even suggesting a credential system that would authorize groups to perform certain functions in a disaster situation. According to UN humanitarian relief official Jan Egeland, the UN has begun to play a bigger role in coordinating relief among groups in a disaster area — in part, by directing aid groups to sites where assistance is most needed and providing them with information on what is needed. "It's not perfect," said Egeland, "but it's the best system we've had — ever."