It can help, but you have to remember not all the charity watchdog groups use the same criteria to evaluate the organizations.

ard mhacha, I don't know if there are UK & EU organizations like the ones I mention or not. The orgs I linked to have only just begun to start gathering this sort of information for the US and US affiliated orgs (like Int'l Red Cross). Sorry I can't be of more help in that regard.

However, the information on the "on the ground" realities of relief work apply universally. The development and relief industries are now a behemoth of a global industry, worth a LOT of money, and carrying a lot of political economic clout in many places. Because of the strings attached to aid, some countries choose not to accept aid. India, in fact, announced today that it would NOT be accepting aid from donor governments and international agencies like the IMF, for good reason. Whether that decision turns out to have been the right decision for India won't be known for quite some time. But that country does now have the ability to run it's own relief operations, and certainly wants to militarily control this very volatile part of their country (there are Tamil rebels in India as well as Sri Lanka, for instance), rather than have USAID crawling all over the place.