Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance

The Money Trail – Following the Funds To understand what happened to the Haiti's cell phone program, we need to follow the money, tracing the complex paths from congressional appropriation to intended beneficiaries in hurricane-affected communities.

The $10.6 million program was funded through USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance as part of a larger $37.5 million hurricane relief package for Haiti.

The telecommunications portion was divided into two main allocations, $7.2 million for infrastructure support and $3.4 million specifically for the mobile phone distribution.

Dr. Robert Martinez, former USAID contracting officer, This wasn't a direct government-to-recipient program.

The funding from President's Challenge would allow us to move into animal testing and field testing in austere environments, the final two steps before manufacturing and sales begins.

Our initial market will be divided into three customer segments, the U.S. military's Special Operations Surgical Teams, the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and disaster relief NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders.

We already have customers in the U.S. military and NGO spaces who are waiting on our manufacturing to begin so that they can begin purchasing hundreds of these products.

As a former military medical logistician, I worked on the equipment standards for surgical teams and can attest that this is exactly what is needed to increase capability while decreasing costs.

So it was fresh in their minds.

We had an organization within USAID called the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, OFTA.

And it was followed up by DART.

It was a disaster assistance response team.

Don't forget that word, sand power.

We had heroes at high places.

And the OFDA, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance folks, they were so instrumental in that.

60s and 70s and 80s is when we started to become one big bureaucracy.