THE UNITED STATES WITH HAITI AFTER THE PASSAGE OF SANDY
(Haiti Libre) -
The U.S. Government is working in support of the efforts of the Haitian government after the passage of Sandy. "The U.S. Government is doing everything possible to support the Government of Haiti in its efforts to serve the Haitian people. Today, October 31st, I requested additional funds from Washington. We anticipate providing assistance for agriculture, the sector hardest hit by Sandy in Southern Haiti," declared U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Pamela White.
Through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. relief supplies are being distributed to families in some of the areas most affected by Sandy. To date, USAID has distributed plastic sheeting to help approximately 10,000 people, family hygiene kits to help nearly 12,500 people, and an estimated 6,400 blankets. USAID has also provided items such as wheelbarrows and tools helpful for clean-up to displacement camps most affected by Sandy. These relief and clean-up supplies were pre-positioned prior to hurricane season in key locations across Haiti, allowing for rapid distribution when needed.
To help address serious food insecurity concerns, USAID is providing 50 metric tons of food to 9,250 people for a 15-day immediate emergency food provision to the South Department, and continues to discuss additional ways to assist with food insecurity with the Government of Haiti.
Because increased cases of cholera remain a concern, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided 2,500 pints of Lactated Ringer’s solution, an intravenous solution for treating cholera, to Haiti’s Ministry of Public Health and Population.
The United States will continue to support Haiti’s relief and recovery efforts in the weeks and months to come.
Showing posts with label Article - International Aid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Article - International Aid. Show all posts
Thursday, November 1, 2012
ARTICLE - THE NGO REPUBLIC OF HAITI
THE NGO REPUBLIC OF HAITI
(The Nation) - By Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman
Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.
The wire fence that surrounds Haiti’s National Palace in the heart of the country’s capital has been covered, recently, with a green mesh. Inside, the multi-domed structure has been reduced to rubble, finally knocked down after it was all but destroyed by the country’s deadly 7.0-magnitude earthquake on January 12, 2010. The worst national disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the temblor killed an estimated 200,000 people in just thirty-five seconds.
A lone blue-and-red Haitian flag waves from the gigantic pile of rubble. Along the western edge of the palace grounds, lots that once housed government ministries and the Palace of Justice continue to lie vacant. More than 16,000 civil service employees died in the quake. Now their offices are occupied by new employees in temporary buildings or even tents. Some still lack standard operating equipment such as telephones and computers, along with a backup electrical system to deal with blackouts, a routine occurrence here.
Several miles northwest of downtown sits the Logistical Base, or Log Base, the headquarters for the United Nations and its recovery efforts. Here, it’s a different world. Within the massive blue-and-white compound are revamped trailers, golf carts and more glistening public toilets than any other place in Haiti. (Log Base is germ—and cholera!—free.) Flowers line the walkways, and machines blow a cool mist into an outdoor restaurant whose menu, on one random day, included sushi, jasmine rice, German potatoes, Brazilian cheese bread, halal shawarma and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The American dollar, not the Haitian gourde, is the currency of choice.
Shortly after the earthquake, Log Base became the nerve center of the international recovery effort, the place where aid organizations could coordinate reconstruction strategies. At the peak, there were more than seventy coordinating meetings each week among aid agencies and other interested parties— though not all interested parties. Few Haitians can cross from one side of the compound’s walls to the other. To do so requires identification documents and an invitation from someone on the inside, two things very few Haitians have. And when they do, they find that most meetings are held in English, not Creole or even French. When a steering committee for NGO coordination was elected in July 2010 at Log Base, sixty international organizations cast their votes, but since there were no local NGOs present, Haitians were not represented.
Welcome to the NGO Republic of Haiti, the fragile island-state born, in part, out of the country’s painfully lopsided earthquake recovery. On one side are the thousands of aid organizations that came to Haiti with the entire international aid budget in their bank accounts (several billion dollars among them) and built a powerful parallel state accountable to no one but their boards and donors. On the other are the many representatives of the Haitian people—elected officials, civil society leaders, businesspeople—who remain broke and undermined by the very NGOs that swooped in to help. And in between? The Haitian people themselves: impoverished, unemployed, homeless and trapped in a recovery effort that has all too often failed to meet their needs.
This was not how the recovery was supposed to unfold. sorts of sensitive donor-speak about respecting the needs and input of the Haitian people. At the International Donors Conference “Towards a New Future for Haiti,” held on March 31, 2010, eleven weeks after the quake, donors pledged $5.3 billion for Haiti’s recovery, to be disbursed over two years. They also agreed to work in partnership with the Haitian government to adhere to “the principles of aid effectiveness and good humanitarian donorship and to build on lessons learned.” They created the Interim Haitian Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), also known as the Clinton Commission after the man who was its public face, to help them do just that.
But as the money flowed in, this dream of a happy partnership failed to materialize. From the very beginning, NGOs followed their own agendas and set their own priorities, largely excluding the Haitian government and civil society. In the first rush of aid after the earthquake, just 1 percent of all donor funds available for emergency assistance was channeled to the government, while just 1.8 percent of reconstruction funds donated by other countries was spent on budget support for it. Haiti’s NGOs fared even worse, receiving just 0.4 percent of the international aid. Almost two-thirds of the rest of the money raised—in the billions—remains in the bank accounts of the aid money managers that were there before the quake: international NGOs, the World Bank, the UN, the Inter-American Development Bank and mostly Western building and consultancy firms.
Meanwhile, the money that did reach Haiti has often failed to seed projects that truly respond to Haitians’ needs. The problem is not exactly that funds were wasted or even stolen , though that has sometimes been the case. Rather, much of the relief wasn’t spent on what was most needed.
Consider the cholera epidemic, which erupted in October 2010 and infected nearly half a million Haitians within the first year. Clean water has always been a scarce resource in the country, and its scarcity is one of the reasons the disease ripped so quickly through the population. Yet out of $175 million requested by the United Nations to help stanch the tide of the epidemic in late 2010, less than half came through. Meanwhile, a number of NGOs (including but hardly limited to UNICEF, the William J. Clinton Foundation and the British Red Cross) responded to the epidemic by launching a large-scale awareness campaign to combat cholera, stressing the importance of good hygiene—and then relocated displaced Haitians to areas lacking shower facilities and hand-washing stations. By August 2011, almost a year after cholera was introduced, only 12 percent of the tent camps equipped by NGOs had hand-washing stations, 8 percent less than the slim March 2011 figures. And only 7 percent of the camps surveyed by the UN had access to clean water, compared with 48 percent in March that year. Of 12,000 latrines needed, only 4,579—38 percent—were functional.
Because the destruction wreaked by the earthquake was so severe, no one expected a perfect recovery. Some 1.5 million people had been left homeless or displaced, while roughly 300,000 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. And Haiti’s government, already weak and plagued by inefficiency, had been decimated. By his own admission, Rene Préval, president at the time of the quake, was “paralyzed” in the months after the disaster. His successor, Michel Joseph Martelly, was elected more on his popularity as a carnivalesque singer and pop star (with deep connections to the infamous Duvalier dictatorship crowd) than for his reconstruction plan.
Even so, the recovery effort has been so poorly managed as to leave the country even weaker than before. “The billions of dollars in earthquake aid have further marginalized the Haitian state, Haitian social organizations and Haitian businesses,” said Camille Chalmers, a Haitian economist. “They did not benefit and were not involved in how the money was spent. The government of Haiti received only 1 percent of the emergency funds,” barely more than the government of the Dominican Republic, which hardly even felt the quake.
* * *
To see the dynamics of the NGO Republic at work, one need go no farther than Léogâne, a port town of 134,000 residents just twelve miles southeast of the earthquake’s epicenter and fifteen miles west of the capital. Léogâne was flattened by the quake—tens of thousands of its residents died—and it quickly became a hub of NGO activity.
“In the Republic of NGOs, Léogâne is the City of NGOs,” said Joseph Philippe, 33, technical coordinator of the Municipal Civil Protection Committee of Léogâne.
The relief workers who flooded Léogâne, clogging the streets with their SUVs, were often young and idealistic, eager to join the effort to “build back better,” as Bill Clinton phrased it. But how these NGOs wanted to build Haiti back was often driven more by donor objectives than by the needs of the “beneficiaries,” as they are called in NGO-speak. What the people of Léogâne needed when their city was destroyed was new, safe housing on dry land. What they got instead were square boxes in the middle of a flood plain.
Léogâne sits at the intersection of three rivers. Yet not a single NGO was willing to work on shoring up the river bank and creating a sustainable drainage system, according to Philippe. It wasn’t part of their plan; it wasn’t what they’d been fundraising for. Philippe said that only the Canadian Center for International Studies and Cooperation helped reinforce the river banks with rocks, reducing the flood risk by 15 percent. Good, but hardly enough.
“The irony,” said Philippe, “is that all the projects that the NGOs did put money into will get washed away in the floods that will come. The NGOs will continue to finance projects in underdeveloped countries in an underdeveloped way.”
Housing is perhaps the most serious example of this “underdeveloped” approach to recovery. The earthquake destroyed 80 to 90 percent of buildings in Léogâne, leaving tens of thousands homeless. In response, several dozen NGOs involved in the city’s reconstruction—including large ones such as CARE, Habitat for Humanity and the Spanish Red Cross—pledged collectively to build 28,560 transitional shelters. But these “T-shelters,” as the name suggests, are temporary structures meant to last two to three years—just long enough to bridge the gap between emergency tarps and more permanent replacement housing.
“The expression ‘T-shelter’ is, in my opinion, a way to skirt the question. What is it…temporary housing? Not good practice. Transitional shelter? No. Temporary shelter? Not really. Let’s call it ‘T-shelter,’” says Priscilla Phelps, one of the chief authors of Safer Homes, Stronger Communities: A Handbook for Reconstructing After Natural Disasters, which was compiled by the World Bank just before the earthquake.
Most of the T-shelters are slapdash and shoddy, and so they quickly deteriorate; they’re also meant for rural rather than urban settings. As Phelps explains: “That means they are too large for the plots, made of material that isn’t easy to recycle or upgrade, not suitable to the already unsafe living conditions of the country, too expensive”—she estimates the real cost for each is $6,000 to $10,000, not $2,000 to $3,000 as the NGOs claim—“and have been built in places where occupants had no land tenure security.” This last flaw, she adds quickly, “is purely the government’s fault.”
T-shelters come in a variety of shapes and materials. The best are wooden boxes with a window—and from there, the standard drops appreciably. In the case of Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical organization led by the Rev. Franklin Graham that brought Sarah Palin to Haiti in December 2010 to showcase its work, the signature blue-tarp structures are sweltering and flimsy, better suited to drying clothes than accommodating a family of five. On a recent visit, two women coddling an overheated baby were killing time in front of their Samaritan’s Purse– provided shelter because they said it was too hot inside. Holes in the plastic had been patched with pieces of corrugated iron.
CHF International, which receives a large percentage of its budget from the US Agency for International Development, is another of the NGOs that raced to build T-shelters—in CHF’s case, tentlike structures made of steel or wooden frames lined with rice-sack siding. It built 1,700 in Léogâne alone. But these allegedly hurricane- and earthquake-proof T-shelters are transparent and deteriorating.
When asked about the inferior quality of the materials, a CHF spokesman said he was “genuinely sorry to hear that the plastic has not always lasted as well as it is meant to.” For subsequent projects with a longer-term focus, CHF is now using other types of material. These projects, however, are not in Haiti.
According to a report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, shelter provision was based more on supply than demand. The report noted that agencies decided to build T-shelters rather than repair homes or provide rental support in large part “based on their previous know-how, supposed ease of implementation, outcome control, liability concerns and/or visibility.” Visibility to donors was a particularly influential factor.
* * *
Sitting in his office, which could be mistaken for an empty storage room, Philippe said the gap between the aid providers and the needs of the recipients was infuriating and humiliating. “Our priorities are not the same as theirs, but theirs are executed. In theory, NGOs come with something, but not with what the population needs.” He said it without malice, but his resignation was obvious. “We have no choice but to accept what they bring us. But then, when it doesn’t work and it’s not what we need, the state is blamed, not the NGOs.” When asked what the NGOs did leave behind, he laughed. “Visibly, not very much. You are journalists—go look for yourself.”
In fact, an example was just outside, where an unfinished steel frame for an office building stood. According to one of the town’s general directors, a Dutch company had the building contract, but then the money ran out and the company left. As of this fall, the mayor was still trying to find out who was responsible for the mess.
The story of Haiti is at once a narrative of one country’s post-disaster travails and a case study of a more widespread global phenomenon—a cautionary tale that can be applied to dozens of the forty-eight nations classified by the UN as Least Developed Countries (LDCs). These countries account for more than 880 million people (about 12 percent of the world population) and include places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda and Yemen. Many rely on foreign aid as their major source of income. Without it, their governments can’t survive.
Critics have taken to calling these LDCs “NGO Republics”— countries where nongovernmental organizations and wealthy donor entities have created parallel states endlessly richer and, at the end of the day, more powerful than the national governments themselves. Ultimately, it’s the NGOs that decide how these governments will spend the funds and run their countries, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
In Haiti, as with many NGO Republics, the level of aid has varied over the years, but it almost always exceeds the government’s own national budget. Between 2005 and 2009, aid in Haiti ranged from approximately 113 to 130 percent of the total revenue available to the government. After the earthquake, the flow of relief and recovery aid significantly exceeded—by more than a factor of four—the government’s internal revenue.
The Haitian government doesn’t even know how many NGOs are operating within its borders. No one does. According to Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti, the country has the second-highest number of NGOs per capita in the world (India has the highest). He cited the World Bank figure of 10,000 NGOs in Haiti in 2009, at about the same time that Jean-Max Bellerive, then the Haitian minister of planning, estimated that there were 3,000. The Haitian government currently reports 560, though it admits the number operating there is higher.
The earthquake unleashed the NGO hordes on Haiti, but the truth is that NGOs have been a major presence for more than two decades, since before the turmoil in the country that followed the end of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. The US government, which had been a key benefactor of the twenty-nine-year Duvalier regime, later encouraged Haiti to lower import tariffs on American rice from 35 percent to just 3 percent. American rice flooded the Haitian market; a similar demise for Haiti’s sugar and coffee industries soon followed.
By the mid-1990s, the Haitian agricultural sector—in which 60 to 70 percent of the Haitian population made a living—lay in ruins. NGOs then swooped in to “rescue” the population, largely sidestepping the various Haitian governments, which they deemed too weak and corrupt to consider working with directly. A World Bank study from the mid-’90s captured the reasoning: “Most donors…are reluctant to [let funds flow through the Government of Haiti], for fear of decreased implementation efficiency and effectiveness.”
These concerns were not entirely unfounded. Haiti’s governments do have a history of weakness and corruption—a legacy, in large part, of the country’s colonial past and neoliberal present. Since 1986, there have been more than a dozen heads of state, a handful of coups and military regimes, and a US-led military intervention. Governments seem to lose power almost as quickly as they gain it (particularly if they thwart the will of their neighbor to the north). In 2011, Haiti ranked 175 out of 183 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
And yet, faced with a government that many felt had been too badly decimated to lead a successful recovery effort, the international community certainly had other choices than to ignore it completely. At the very least, it could have found ways to engage the Haitian people in decisions about the country’s future.
“NGOs should have integrated Haitians from the very beginning in the relief efforts so that the recovery had more Haitian ownership when it kicked in,” said Haitian policy analyst Jocelyn McCalla. “What you ended up with is a nation more deeply dependent on international charity, saddled with leaders whose first reflex is to beg, even while they claim otherwise.”
* * *
There’s an old Haitian proverb, Sak vide pa kanpe—an empty sack cannot stand up. And that is precisely the predicament of Haiti’s government today. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are here delivering aid, but they are doing functions that should be done by the Haitians,” said Nigel Fisher, the deputy special representative for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. His office, in one of Log Base’s air-conditioned prefab trailers, is furnished with blue leather chairs and coffee tables spread with brochures. “You cannot complain about failures of the Haitian state if you don’t support it to grow stronger. For decades, we have not invested in that very much.”
Haitians have not been silent in the face of this exclusion, and a growing number have begun thinking of aid workers as thieves at best, colonizers at worst. In December 2010, some of this anger erupted in a protest letter written by the Haitian members of the IHRC to commission chairs Bill Clinton and then–Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. In the letter, they complained of being “completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC,” as well as having “time neither to read, nor analyze, nor understand—and much less to respond intelligently—to projects submitted.” Their complaints went largely unheeded.
A spokesman for one of the largest UN organizations in the country offered a stunningly blunt portrait of this dynamic. Asked whether the government of Haiti has ever told him what to spend donor money on, the spokesman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, said: “Never. They are not in the position, because they are financially dependent. Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say.” He chuckled, then added: “Very sad, really.”
As for the aid community’s claim that it has been playing a supporting role and letting the Haitian government lead the reconstruction effort, he said, “It’s a lie. It’s tragic, but it’s a lie.”
* * *
For all the disappointments of the recovery process, there have been some successes, instances of NGOs working closely with Haitians to meet their needs as well as possible. One example of this kind of effort is the hospital being built by Partners in Health (PIH), an organization that strives to be just that: a partner with Haiti’s government. Located in the town of Mirebalais, some thirty miles from the capital, the hospital is Haiti’s biggest reconstruction project in the health sector and was designed specifically with the people’s needs in mind. When it’s completed, it will have seven buildings, 320 beds, a high-tech operating theater, even a koi pond. It will train nursing staff and doctors. And it is a public hospital, one of the very few in the country.
“If we had made this a private hospital, like other NGOs do, we would be creating a parallel system. But public healthcare is in our ideology,” said David Walton, a 32-year-old doctor from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who divides his time between there and Haiti. “The officials we are dealing with are clever, cooperative and motivated,” he said as he surveyed the progress last spring. “And they have ideas. But nobody listens to them. Few NGOs even try working with the government. It is much simpler to work around them. No one looks over your shoulder, into your accounts, or asks questions. My work could also be so much easier this way—but who am I accountable to?”
Walton acknowledged that even though the Haitian government owns the hospital, it can’t run it. “The officials we’re dealing with are passionate about caring and want to do the best they can. But they can’t just now. They are void of the human and financial resources to do their job.” PIH will run the hospital for them, logistically and financially. “At the end of ten years, let’s see where we are.”
PIH recognizes that none of this will be easy. Though it has enough money to hire doctors and nurses, it has not yet hired many of them—not for a lack of applications (there have been more than 6,000) but of qualified professionals. And it worries about being able to extricate itself from financial responsibility in ten years. Still, it has a plan and a commitment to building Haitian institutions and power, as opposed to so many other NGOs, which these days are busier scaling down their projects than figuring out ways to improve them.
One of the final insults experienced by almost any NGO Republic is that its donors decide not only where and how the money will be spent but also when it is no longer needed— which is what is happening in Haiti now. Aid is drying up. Though the international community has delivered just a bit more than half of the $5.3 billion originally pledged to Haiti—52.3 percent as of the end of September—there doesn’t seem to be any plan to make up the difference. Only 52 percent of the $300 million the UN and its partners requested to cover humanitarian aid in 2011 was funded. The figures for this year are worse.
As these dollars dwindle, aid groups have been focusing on trimming back their operations or simply getting out by whatever means necessary. NGOs have stopped virtually all water deliveries to the camps, and they no longer repair or clean portable toilets. Meanwhile, an aid listserv, created to share situation reports and humanitarian bulletins, is being used by some aid workers to unload their personal effects and post rental vacancies. A recent deal was in the leafy downtown neighborhood of Pacot: $1,850 a month for a four-bedroom home complete with three round-the-clock security guards. To put this in perspective, the NGOs employing these same workers are offering tent-camp dwellers a one-time relocation gift of $500, paid directly to the landlord for a year’s rent. In the absence of a widespread housing solution, this is what the international aid community has come up with.
“The emergency is over, as far as donors are concerned,” said Valerie Amos of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
In reality, however, the emergency is far from over. Nearly 400,000 people still live in tent camps, along with dogs, chickens, rats, garbage and overflowing toilets. Thousands more have retreated to earthquake-shattered houses or other makeshift structures forged out of bits of tarp and tent.
Haiti’s current prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, is calling for a new partnership with the NGOs that would “define a society in the image of what the Haitian people want.” He is also advocating new laws that would exert some control over what the NGOs do in the country and how.
But until that happens, hospitals, schools, roads and public institutions of all kinds will remain as broken and neglected as the National Palace had been. Tellingly, that symbol of the country’s sovereignty was torn down in the end not by the Haitian government, but by Sean Penn’s NGO.
(The Nation) - By Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman
Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.
The wire fence that surrounds Haiti’s National Palace in the heart of the country’s capital has been covered, recently, with a green mesh. Inside, the multi-domed structure has been reduced to rubble, finally knocked down after it was all but destroyed by the country’s deadly 7.0-magnitude earthquake on January 12, 2010. The worst national disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the temblor killed an estimated 200,000 people in just thirty-five seconds.
A lone blue-and-red Haitian flag waves from the gigantic pile of rubble. Along the western edge of the palace grounds, lots that once housed government ministries and the Palace of Justice continue to lie vacant. More than 16,000 civil service employees died in the quake. Now their offices are occupied by new employees in temporary buildings or even tents. Some still lack standard operating equipment such as telephones and computers, along with a backup electrical system to deal with blackouts, a routine occurrence here.
Several miles northwest of downtown sits the Logistical Base, or Log Base, the headquarters for the United Nations and its recovery efforts. Here, it’s a different world. Within the massive blue-and-white compound are revamped trailers, golf carts and more glistening public toilets than any other place in Haiti. (Log Base is germ—and cholera!—free.) Flowers line the walkways, and machines blow a cool mist into an outdoor restaurant whose menu, on one random day, included sushi, jasmine rice, German potatoes, Brazilian cheese bread, halal shawarma and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The American dollar, not the Haitian gourde, is the currency of choice.
Shortly after the earthquake, Log Base became the nerve center of the international recovery effort, the place where aid organizations could coordinate reconstruction strategies. At the peak, there were more than seventy coordinating meetings each week among aid agencies and other interested parties— though not all interested parties. Few Haitians can cross from one side of the compound’s walls to the other. To do so requires identification documents and an invitation from someone on the inside, two things very few Haitians have. And when they do, they find that most meetings are held in English, not Creole or even French. When a steering committee for NGO coordination was elected in July 2010 at Log Base, sixty international organizations cast their votes, but since there were no local NGOs present, Haitians were not represented.
Welcome to the NGO Republic of Haiti, the fragile island-state born, in part, out of the country’s painfully lopsided earthquake recovery. On one side are the thousands of aid organizations that came to Haiti with the entire international aid budget in their bank accounts (several billion dollars among them) and built a powerful parallel state accountable to no one but their boards and donors. On the other are the many representatives of the Haitian people—elected officials, civil society leaders, businesspeople—who remain broke and undermined by the very NGOs that swooped in to help. And in between? The Haitian people themselves: impoverished, unemployed, homeless and trapped in a recovery effort that has all too often failed to meet their needs.
This was not how the recovery was supposed to unfold. sorts of sensitive donor-speak about respecting the needs and input of the Haitian people. At the International Donors Conference “Towards a New Future for Haiti,” held on March 31, 2010, eleven weeks after the quake, donors pledged $5.3 billion for Haiti’s recovery, to be disbursed over two years. They also agreed to work in partnership with the Haitian government to adhere to “the principles of aid effectiveness and good humanitarian donorship and to build on lessons learned.” They created the Interim Haitian Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), also known as the Clinton Commission after the man who was its public face, to help them do just that.
But as the money flowed in, this dream of a happy partnership failed to materialize. From the very beginning, NGOs followed their own agendas and set their own priorities, largely excluding the Haitian government and civil society. In the first rush of aid after the earthquake, just 1 percent of all donor funds available for emergency assistance was channeled to the government, while just 1.8 percent of reconstruction funds donated by other countries was spent on budget support for it. Haiti’s NGOs fared even worse, receiving just 0.4 percent of the international aid. Almost two-thirds of the rest of the money raised—in the billions—remains in the bank accounts of the aid money managers that were there before the quake: international NGOs, the World Bank, the UN, the Inter-American Development Bank and mostly Western building and consultancy firms.
Meanwhile, the money that did reach Haiti has often failed to seed projects that truly respond to Haitians’ needs. The problem is not exactly that funds were wasted or even stolen , though that has sometimes been the case. Rather, much of the relief wasn’t spent on what was most needed.
Consider the cholera epidemic, which erupted in October 2010 and infected nearly half a million Haitians within the first year. Clean water has always been a scarce resource in the country, and its scarcity is one of the reasons the disease ripped so quickly through the population. Yet out of $175 million requested by the United Nations to help stanch the tide of the epidemic in late 2010, less than half came through. Meanwhile, a number of NGOs (including but hardly limited to UNICEF, the William J. Clinton Foundation and the British Red Cross) responded to the epidemic by launching a large-scale awareness campaign to combat cholera, stressing the importance of good hygiene—and then relocated displaced Haitians to areas lacking shower facilities and hand-washing stations. By August 2011, almost a year after cholera was introduced, only 12 percent of the tent camps equipped by NGOs had hand-washing stations, 8 percent less than the slim March 2011 figures. And only 7 percent of the camps surveyed by the UN had access to clean water, compared with 48 percent in March that year. Of 12,000 latrines needed, only 4,579—38 percent—were functional.
Because the destruction wreaked by the earthquake was so severe, no one expected a perfect recovery. Some 1.5 million people had been left homeless or displaced, while roughly 300,000 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. And Haiti’s government, already weak and plagued by inefficiency, had been decimated. By his own admission, Rene Préval, president at the time of the quake, was “paralyzed” in the months after the disaster. His successor, Michel Joseph Martelly, was elected more on his popularity as a carnivalesque singer and pop star (with deep connections to the infamous Duvalier dictatorship crowd) than for his reconstruction plan.
Even so, the recovery effort has been so poorly managed as to leave the country even weaker than before. “The billions of dollars in earthquake aid have further marginalized the Haitian state, Haitian social organizations and Haitian businesses,” said Camille Chalmers, a Haitian economist. “They did not benefit and were not involved in how the money was spent. The government of Haiti received only 1 percent of the emergency funds,” barely more than the government of the Dominican Republic, which hardly even felt the quake.
* * *
To see the dynamics of the NGO Republic at work, one need go no farther than Léogâne, a port town of 134,000 residents just twelve miles southeast of the earthquake’s epicenter and fifteen miles west of the capital. Léogâne was flattened by the quake—tens of thousands of its residents died—and it quickly became a hub of NGO activity.
“In the Republic of NGOs, Léogâne is the City of NGOs,” said Joseph Philippe, 33, technical coordinator of the Municipal Civil Protection Committee of Léogâne.
The relief workers who flooded Léogâne, clogging the streets with their SUVs, were often young and idealistic, eager to join the effort to “build back better,” as Bill Clinton phrased it. But how these NGOs wanted to build Haiti back was often driven more by donor objectives than by the needs of the “beneficiaries,” as they are called in NGO-speak. What the people of Léogâne needed when their city was destroyed was new, safe housing on dry land. What they got instead were square boxes in the middle of a flood plain.
Léogâne sits at the intersection of three rivers. Yet not a single NGO was willing to work on shoring up the river bank and creating a sustainable drainage system, according to Philippe. It wasn’t part of their plan; it wasn’t what they’d been fundraising for. Philippe said that only the Canadian Center for International Studies and Cooperation helped reinforce the river banks with rocks, reducing the flood risk by 15 percent. Good, but hardly enough.
“The irony,” said Philippe, “is that all the projects that the NGOs did put money into will get washed away in the floods that will come. The NGOs will continue to finance projects in underdeveloped countries in an underdeveloped way.”
Housing is perhaps the most serious example of this “underdeveloped” approach to recovery. The earthquake destroyed 80 to 90 percent of buildings in Léogâne, leaving tens of thousands homeless. In response, several dozen NGOs involved in the city’s reconstruction—including large ones such as CARE, Habitat for Humanity and the Spanish Red Cross—pledged collectively to build 28,560 transitional shelters. But these “T-shelters,” as the name suggests, are temporary structures meant to last two to three years—just long enough to bridge the gap between emergency tarps and more permanent replacement housing.
“The expression ‘T-shelter’ is, in my opinion, a way to skirt the question. What is it…temporary housing? Not good practice. Transitional shelter? No. Temporary shelter? Not really. Let’s call it ‘T-shelter,’” says Priscilla Phelps, one of the chief authors of Safer Homes, Stronger Communities: A Handbook for Reconstructing After Natural Disasters, which was compiled by the World Bank just before the earthquake.
Most of the T-shelters are slapdash and shoddy, and so they quickly deteriorate; they’re also meant for rural rather than urban settings. As Phelps explains: “That means they are too large for the plots, made of material that isn’t easy to recycle or upgrade, not suitable to the already unsafe living conditions of the country, too expensive”—she estimates the real cost for each is $6,000 to $10,000, not $2,000 to $3,000 as the NGOs claim—“and have been built in places where occupants had no land tenure security.” This last flaw, she adds quickly, “is purely the government’s fault.”
T-shelters come in a variety of shapes and materials. The best are wooden boxes with a window—and from there, the standard drops appreciably. In the case of Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical organization led by the Rev. Franklin Graham that brought Sarah Palin to Haiti in December 2010 to showcase its work, the signature blue-tarp structures are sweltering and flimsy, better suited to drying clothes than accommodating a family of five. On a recent visit, two women coddling an overheated baby were killing time in front of their Samaritan’s Purse– provided shelter because they said it was too hot inside. Holes in the plastic had been patched with pieces of corrugated iron.
CHF International, which receives a large percentage of its budget from the US Agency for International Development, is another of the NGOs that raced to build T-shelters—in CHF’s case, tentlike structures made of steel or wooden frames lined with rice-sack siding. It built 1,700 in Léogâne alone. But these allegedly hurricane- and earthquake-proof T-shelters are transparent and deteriorating.
When asked about the inferior quality of the materials, a CHF spokesman said he was “genuinely sorry to hear that the plastic has not always lasted as well as it is meant to.” For subsequent projects with a longer-term focus, CHF is now using other types of material. These projects, however, are not in Haiti.
According to a report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, shelter provision was based more on supply than demand. The report noted that agencies decided to build T-shelters rather than repair homes or provide rental support in large part “based on their previous know-how, supposed ease of implementation, outcome control, liability concerns and/or visibility.” Visibility to donors was a particularly influential factor.
* * *
Sitting in his office, which could be mistaken for an empty storage room, Philippe said the gap between the aid providers and the needs of the recipients was infuriating and humiliating. “Our priorities are not the same as theirs, but theirs are executed. In theory, NGOs come with something, but not with what the population needs.” He said it without malice, but his resignation was obvious. “We have no choice but to accept what they bring us. But then, when it doesn’t work and it’s not what we need, the state is blamed, not the NGOs.” When asked what the NGOs did leave behind, he laughed. “Visibly, not very much. You are journalists—go look for yourself.”
In fact, an example was just outside, where an unfinished steel frame for an office building stood. According to one of the town’s general directors, a Dutch company had the building contract, but then the money ran out and the company left. As of this fall, the mayor was still trying to find out who was responsible for the mess.
The story of Haiti is at once a narrative of one country’s post-disaster travails and a case study of a more widespread global phenomenon—a cautionary tale that can be applied to dozens of the forty-eight nations classified by the UN as Least Developed Countries (LDCs). These countries account for more than 880 million people (about 12 percent of the world population) and include places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda and Yemen. Many rely on foreign aid as their major source of income. Without it, their governments can’t survive.
Critics have taken to calling these LDCs “NGO Republics”— countries where nongovernmental organizations and wealthy donor entities have created parallel states endlessly richer and, at the end of the day, more powerful than the national governments themselves. Ultimately, it’s the NGOs that decide how these governments will spend the funds and run their countries, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
In Haiti, as with many NGO Republics, the level of aid has varied over the years, but it almost always exceeds the government’s own national budget. Between 2005 and 2009, aid in Haiti ranged from approximately 113 to 130 percent of the total revenue available to the government. After the earthquake, the flow of relief and recovery aid significantly exceeded—by more than a factor of four—the government’s internal revenue.
The Haitian government doesn’t even know how many NGOs are operating within its borders. No one does. According to Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti, the country has the second-highest number of NGOs per capita in the world (India has the highest). He cited the World Bank figure of 10,000 NGOs in Haiti in 2009, at about the same time that Jean-Max Bellerive, then the Haitian minister of planning, estimated that there were 3,000. The Haitian government currently reports 560, though it admits the number operating there is higher.
The earthquake unleashed the NGO hordes on Haiti, but the truth is that NGOs have been a major presence for more than two decades, since before the turmoil in the country that followed the end of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. The US government, which had been a key benefactor of the twenty-nine-year Duvalier regime, later encouraged Haiti to lower import tariffs on American rice from 35 percent to just 3 percent. American rice flooded the Haitian market; a similar demise for Haiti’s sugar and coffee industries soon followed.
By the mid-1990s, the Haitian agricultural sector—in which 60 to 70 percent of the Haitian population made a living—lay in ruins. NGOs then swooped in to “rescue” the population, largely sidestepping the various Haitian governments, which they deemed too weak and corrupt to consider working with directly. A World Bank study from the mid-’90s captured the reasoning: “Most donors…are reluctant to [let funds flow through the Government of Haiti], for fear of decreased implementation efficiency and effectiveness.”
These concerns were not entirely unfounded. Haiti’s governments do have a history of weakness and corruption—a legacy, in large part, of the country’s colonial past and neoliberal present. Since 1986, there have been more than a dozen heads of state, a handful of coups and military regimes, and a US-led military intervention. Governments seem to lose power almost as quickly as they gain it (particularly if they thwart the will of their neighbor to the north). In 2011, Haiti ranked 175 out of 183 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
And yet, faced with a government that many felt had been too badly decimated to lead a successful recovery effort, the international community certainly had other choices than to ignore it completely. At the very least, it could have found ways to engage the Haitian people in decisions about the country’s future.
“NGOs should have integrated Haitians from the very beginning in the relief efforts so that the recovery had more Haitian ownership when it kicked in,” said Haitian policy analyst Jocelyn McCalla. “What you ended up with is a nation more deeply dependent on international charity, saddled with leaders whose first reflex is to beg, even while they claim otherwise.”
* * *
There’s an old Haitian proverb, Sak vide pa kanpe—an empty sack cannot stand up. And that is precisely the predicament of Haiti’s government today. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are here delivering aid, but they are doing functions that should be done by the Haitians,” said Nigel Fisher, the deputy special representative for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. His office, in one of Log Base’s air-conditioned prefab trailers, is furnished with blue leather chairs and coffee tables spread with brochures. “You cannot complain about failures of the Haitian state if you don’t support it to grow stronger. For decades, we have not invested in that very much.”
Haitians have not been silent in the face of this exclusion, and a growing number have begun thinking of aid workers as thieves at best, colonizers at worst. In December 2010, some of this anger erupted in a protest letter written by the Haitian members of the IHRC to commission chairs Bill Clinton and then–Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. In the letter, they complained of being “completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC,” as well as having “time neither to read, nor analyze, nor understand—and much less to respond intelligently—to projects submitted.” Their complaints went largely unheeded.
A spokesman for one of the largest UN organizations in the country offered a stunningly blunt portrait of this dynamic. Asked whether the government of Haiti has ever told him what to spend donor money on, the spokesman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, said: “Never. They are not in the position, because they are financially dependent. Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say.” He chuckled, then added: “Very sad, really.”
As for the aid community’s claim that it has been playing a supporting role and letting the Haitian government lead the reconstruction effort, he said, “It’s a lie. It’s tragic, but it’s a lie.”
* * *
For all the disappointments of the recovery process, there have been some successes, instances of NGOs working closely with Haitians to meet their needs as well as possible. One example of this kind of effort is the hospital being built by Partners in Health (PIH), an organization that strives to be just that: a partner with Haiti’s government. Located in the town of Mirebalais, some thirty miles from the capital, the hospital is Haiti’s biggest reconstruction project in the health sector and was designed specifically with the people’s needs in mind. When it’s completed, it will have seven buildings, 320 beds, a high-tech operating theater, even a koi pond. It will train nursing staff and doctors. And it is a public hospital, one of the very few in the country.
“If we had made this a private hospital, like other NGOs do, we would be creating a parallel system. But public healthcare is in our ideology,” said David Walton, a 32-year-old doctor from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who divides his time between there and Haiti. “The officials we are dealing with are clever, cooperative and motivated,” he said as he surveyed the progress last spring. “And they have ideas. But nobody listens to them. Few NGOs even try working with the government. It is much simpler to work around them. No one looks over your shoulder, into your accounts, or asks questions. My work could also be so much easier this way—but who am I accountable to?”
Walton acknowledged that even though the Haitian government owns the hospital, it can’t run it. “The officials we’re dealing with are passionate about caring and want to do the best they can. But they can’t just now. They are void of the human and financial resources to do their job.” PIH will run the hospital for them, logistically and financially. “At the end of ten years, let’s see where we are.”
PIH recognizes that none of this will be easy. Though it has enough money to hire doctors and nurses, it has not yet hired many of them—not for a lack of applications (there have been more than 6,000) but of qualified professionals. And it worries about being able to extricate itself from financial responsibility in ten years. Still, it has a plan and a commitment to building Haitian institutions and power, as opposed to so many other NGOs, which these days are busier scaling down their projects than figuring out ways to improve them.
One of the final insults experienced by almost any NGO Republic is that its donors decide not only where and how the money will be spent but also when it is no longer needed— which is what is happening in Haiti now. Aid is drying up. Though the international community has delivered just a bit more than half of the $5.3 billion originally pledged to Haiti—52.3 percent as of the end of September—there doesn’t seem to be any plan to make up the difference. Only 52 percent of the $300 million the UN and its partners requested to cover humanitarian aid in 2011 was funded. The figures for this year are worse.
As these dollars dwindle, aid groups have been focusing on trimming back their operations or simply getting out by whatever means necessary. NGOs have stopped virtually all water deliveries to the camps, and they no longer repair or clean portable toilets. Meanwhile, an aid listserv, created to share situation reports and humanitarian bulletins, is being used by some aid workers to unload their personal effects and post rental vacancies. A recent deal was in the leafy downtown neighborhood of Pacot: $1,850 a month for a four-bedroom home complete with three round-the-clock security guards. To put this in perspective, the NGOs employing these same workers are offering tent-camp dwellers a one-time relocation gift of $500, paid directly to the landlord for a year’s rent. In the absence of a widespread housing solution, this is what the international aid community has come up with.
“The emergency is over, as far as donors are concerned,” said Valerie Amos of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
In reality, however, the emergency is far from over. Nearly 400,000 people still live in tent camps, along with dogs, chickens, rats, garbage and overflowing toilets. Thousands more have retreated to earthquake-shattered houses or other makeshift structures forged out of bits of tarp and tent.
Haiti’s current prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, is calling for a new partnership with the NGOs that would “define a society in the image of what the Haitian people want.” He is also advocating new laws that would exert some control over what the NGOs do in the country and how.
But until that happens, hospitals, schools, roads and public institutions of all kinds will remain as broken and neglected as the National Palace had been. Tellingly, that symbol of the country’s sovereignty was torn down in the end not by the Haitian government, but by Sean Penn’s NGO.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
ARTICLE - CUBA - RECONSTRUCTION IS A DEBT
HAITI'S RECONSTRUCTION IS AN OUTSTANDING DEBT, SAYS CUBA
(Prensa Latina) -
Geneva - The reconstruction of Haiti is a debt to those people who, after three centuries of colonialism, staged the first social revolution in the American continent, expressed the Cuban delegate Yumirka Fernandez here on Wednesday. During the interactive debate on the Human Rights Council with the independent expert on Haiti, Fernandez pointed out the responsibility of the international community on the situation faced by that country, which in 2010 was affected by a devastating earthquake.
Unfortunately the amounts of financial and material support involved have not been provided. The wishes of the Haitian government were not respected nor has paid attention to its priorities, she emphasized.
Fernandez recalled that Cuba, despite the U.S. blockade, provides solidarity with that nation, together with the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA).
Prioritazing the creation of a comprehensive health system that shows tangible results and whose essence lies in meeting the needs of the poorest populations.
Cuban cooperation in Haiti is also in the sectors of education, agriculture, iron and steel industry, culture and sports, she said.
Cuba has also received support from several Latin American countries and the world to implement tripartite programs and projects of great importance for the reconstruction of the Caribbean nation.
Unfortunately", she said, the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba has hindered on several occasions money transfers to accounts of the Greater Antilles, even in the case of humanitarian aid to Haiti.
The Cuban delegate stated that governments and international actors should honor the commitment made in 2010 for the recovery and reconstruction of that country.
Haiti does not need an occupying force, nor can it become a United Nations protectorate. The UN's role is to support the government and the Haitian people in strengthening its sovereignty and self-determination, expressed the Cuban representative.
(Prensa Latina) -
Geneva - The reconstruction of Haiti is a debt to those people who, after three centuries of colonialism, staged the first social revolution in the American continent, expressed the Cuban delegate Yumirka Fernandez here on Wednesday. During the interactive debate on the Human Rights Council with the independent expert on Haiti, Fernandez pointed out the responsibility of the international community on the situation faced by that country, which in 2010 was affected by a devastating earthquake.
Unfortunately the amounts of financial and material support involved have not been provided. The wishes of the Haitian government were not respected nor has paid attention to its priorities, she emphasized.
Fernandez recalled that Cuba, despite the U.S. blockade, provides solidarity with that nation, together with the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA).
Prioritazing the creation of a comprehensive health system that shows tangible results and whose essence lies in meeting the needs of the poorest populations.
Cuban cooperation in Haiti is also in the sectors of education, agriculture, iron and steel industry, culture and sports, she said.
Cuba has also received support from several Latin American countries and the world to implement tripartite programs and projects of great importance for the reconstruction of the Caribbean nation.
Unfortunately", she said, the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba has hindered on several occasions money transfers to accounts of the Greater Antilles, even in the case of humanitarian aid to Haiti.
The Cuban delegate stated that governments and international actors should honor the commitment made in 2010 for the recovery and reconstruction of that country.
Haiti does not need an occupying force, nor can it become a United Nations protectorate. The UN's role is to support the government and the Haitian people in strengthening its sovereignty and self-determination, expressed the Cuban representative.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
ARTICLE - CURACAO PM VISITS HAITI
CURACAO PRIME MINISTER VISITS HAITI FOR TALKS ON EDUCATION, GREEN ENERGY
(Caribbean Journal) -
Haiti recently hosted a three-day visit by Curacao Prime Minister Gerrit Schotte in the framework of a cooperation in renewable energy and basic education.
Schotte, who was in Haiti for three days last week, shared his country’s experience in both areas.
He is the leader of Curacao’s Movementu Futuro Korsou, and is the first Prime Minister in the history of Curacao, which became autonomous in 2010.
The Curacao leader and Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe agreed to establish a commission in charge of energy security to support teams of Haiti’s electricity company in the search for effective alternative fuels.
The committee, which is slated to include both international donors and local partners, will have 60 days to develop ways in which Haiti’s utility can improve the quality of its services, make proposals adapted to the context of the production, sale and transportation of electricity and establish a working agenda with various stakeholders in the sector.
Lamothe said he expected the commission’s report to expedite the implementation of his government’s energy policy.
The commission will also participate in an energy summit in Curacao on July 20.
The two sides additionally discussed Haiti’s government’s free and compulsory universal education initiative, which is similar to that offered in Curacao.
Lamothe and Schotte expressed “satisfaction” with the cooperation between the two countries, according to a statement from the National Palace.
(Caribbean Journal) -
Haiti recently hosted a three-day visit by Curacao Prime Minister Gerrit Schotte in the framework of a cooperation in renewable energy and basic education.
Schotte, who was in Haiti for three days last week, shared his country’s experience in both areas.
He is the leader of Curacao’s Movementu Futuro Korsou, and is the first Prime Minister in the history of Curacao, which became autonomous in 2010.
The Curacao leader and Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe agreed to establish a commission in charge of energy security to support teams of Haiti’s electricity company in the search for effective alternative fuels.
The committee, which is slated to include both international donors and local partners, will have 60 days to develop ways in which Haiti’s utility can improve the quality of its services, make proposals adapted to the context of the production, sale and transportation of electricity and establish a working agenda with various stakeholders in the sector.
Lamothe said he expected the commission’s report to expedite the implementation of his government’s energy policy.
The commission will also participate in an energy summit in Curacao on July 20.
The two sides additionally discussed Haiti’s government’s free and compulsory universal education initiative, which is similar to that offered in Curacao.
Lamothe and Schotte expressed “satisfaction” with the cooperation between the two countries, according to a statement from the National Palace.
Monday, July 2, 2012
ARTICLE - CANGE - MUNICIPAL WATER SYSTEM
FIRST CHLORINATED MUNICIPAL WATER SYSTEM, IN THE CENTRAL PLATEAU
(Haiti Libre) -
Members of Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries traveled to Haiti for the dedication of a water system in an area that has been plagued by cholera since the 2010 earthquake that leveled the country’s capital.
The six Clemson University students, their faculty adviser and an industry adviser went to the village of Cange to help dedicate the new turbine-driven water pumping and filtration system.
During the past year, the group’s interns performed field engineering and construction oversight for the water system, which serves the greater Cange area and a population of nearly 10,000. It is the first chlorinated municipal water system in the Central Plateau of Haiti.
"This week is going to be a myriad of ceremonies, dedicating things from cisterns to the pump house and all the different technologies that are supplying water to Cange," said Jennifer Ogle, an associate professor in Clemson’s Glenn Department of Civil Engineering and the group’s main faculty adviser. She was accompanied by students Michael Ladue of Simpsonville, Nathan Schneider of Clemson, and Joshua Mitchell of Elgin. Graduate students Robert Wood of Atlanta and Jeff Plumblee of Central, who founded the group, also were there.
The project was made possible by funding for materials from the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina and funding for students from Clemson University programs, including Creative Inquiry, the Michelin Career Center, the Service Learning Alliance, Clemson’s Glenn Department of Civil Engineering and a few private donations.
Representatives of Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries, the Episcopal Diocese, Haiti’s Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), the Church of Bon Saveur and the people of Cange gathered Monday to dedicate the newly commissioned system.
They toured the water facilities, which include 9 fountain/showers, 4 cisterns with a total capacity of 200,000 gallons and a pumping system that can deliver 144,000 gallons of water per day, up 1,100 feet through nearly 2 miles of four-inch galvanized pipe. The water is filtered, sterilized and chlorinated in an effort to improve public health in the midst of the cholera epidemic.
The event culminated at the water source in Bas Cange (lower Cange) where Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries and other organizations were recognized for their efforts. The residents of Cange commemorated the accomplishment with a plaque acknowledging the efforts of Clemson University to design and construct the system.
While the system is completed, Ogle said there still is work to do teaching Haitians how to maintain and operate the system. The Clemson group will continue to work in the region helping improve water quality, sanitation and waste management systems.
While in Haiti, Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries also participated in the dedication of the Centre de Formation Fritz Lafontant (CFFL) vocational school, where intern Michael Ladue teaches English to Haitian students. The group plans to offer technical courses at the school in the future.
Learn more about Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries:
Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries’ mission is to work with local communities in the Central Plateau of Haiti to develop sustainable solutions that improve quality of life through interdisciplinary student-led initiatives that embody our core values in partnership with Clemson University, non-profit organizations, and industry.
(Haiti Libre) -
Members of Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries traveled to Haiti for the dedication of a water system in an area that has been plagued by cholera since the 2010 earthquake that leveled the country’s capital.
The six Clemson University students, their faculty adviser and an industry adviser went to the village of Cange to help dedicate the new turbine-driven water pumping and filtration system.
During the past year, the group’s interns performed field engineering and construction oversight for the water system, which serves the greater Cange area and a population of nearly 10,000. It is the first chlorinated municipal water system in the Central Plateau of Haiti.
"This week is going to be a myriad of ceremonies, dedicating things from cisterns to the pump house and all the different technologies that are supplying water to Cange," said Jennifer Ogle, an associate professor in Clemson’s Glenn Department of Civil Engineering and the group’s main faculty adviser. She was accompanied by students Michael Ladue of Simpsonville, Nathan Schneider of Clemson, and Joshua Mitchell of Elgin. Graduate students Robert Wood of Atlanta and Jeff Plumblee of Central, who founded the group, also were there.
The project was made possible by funding for materials from the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina and funding for students from Clemson University programs, including Creative Inquiry, the Michelin Career Center, the Service Learning Alliance, Clemson’s Glenn Department of Civil Engineering and a few private donations.
Representatives of Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries, the Episcopal Diocese, Haiti’s Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), the Church of Bon Saveur and the people of Cange gathered Monday to dedicate the newly commissioned system.
They toured the water facilities, which include 9 fountain/showers, 4 cisterns with a total capacity of 200,000 gallons and a pumping system that can deliver 144,000 gallons of water per day, up 1,100 feet through nearly 2 miles of four-inch galvanized pipe. The water is filtered, sterilized and chlorinated in an effort to improve public health in the midst of the cholera epidemic.
The event culminated at the water source in Bas Cange (lower Cange) where Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries and other organizations were recognized for their efforts. The residents of Cange commemorated the accomplishment with a plaque acknowledging the efforts of Clemson University to design and construct the system.
While the system is completed, Ogle said there still is work to do teaching Haitians how to maintain and operate the system. The Clemson group will continue to work in the region helping improve water quality, sanitation and waste management systems.
While in Haiti, Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries also participated in the dedication of the Centre de Formation Fritz Lafontant (CFFL) vocational school, where intern Michael Ladue teaches English to Haitian students. The group plans to offer technical courses at the school in the future.
Learn more about Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries:
Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries’ mission is to work with local communities in the Central Plateau of Haiti to develop sustainable solutions that improve quality of life through interdisciplinary student-led initiatives that embody our core values in partnership with Clemson University, non-profit organizations, and industry.
ARTICLE - CANADA DAY!
CANADA, SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR HAITIANS
(Haiti Libre) -
This Thursday, at the Canadian Embassy in Port-au-Prince, on the occasion of the celebration of Canada Day [July 1], to which participated Laurent Lamothe, the Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Haiti, the Ambassador of Canada accredited to Haiti, Henri Paul Normandin, addressing the Prime Minister declared "[...] Canada is maintaining in Haiti, a long-standing relationship. This relationship was built first and foremost, on people; many Haitians and Canadians travel between our two countries, and thus contribute to forging close ties. These exchanges have particularly enriched the culture of our two countries, and lead to many cultural events and activities.
We also share a common language, in the great family of French-speaking peoples, and Haiti will be also well represented, particularly by young people during the World Forum on the French language, to be held in Quebec City next week.
We also have economic and commercial exchanges, that we want to intensify. Our political ties are very strong and extremely friendly. Our feelings of solidarity are particularly expressed by the spontaneous arrival and exceptionally generosity of Canadians, following the earthquake on January 12, 2010.
Mr. Prime Minister, we know full well that social and economic development must be an endogenous process, well anchored in international networks. Here in Canada the priority of the government is to broaden the economic outlook; but right here in Haiti, the Government also made of the economy one of its '5Es' and this, rightly; because the large-scale creation of income generating activities and of employment, will allow the population to improve their living conditions and permit the country to take off.
Mr. Prime Minister, Canadians are ready to accompany you on this path, particularly through trade and investment, as they are ready to support the country, in the achievement of all its objectives and aspirations..."
Speeking after the speech of the Canadian Ambassador, Laurent Lamothe declared, "[...] The participation of your country since its inception, Mr. Ambassador, everywhere where it is a question of showing the banner of freedom, peace and hope, has significantly contributed to give Canada a unique international stature, that of a paragon of tolerance, respect for differences, and the promotion of Rights, of all rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural.
Mr. Ambassador, this culture of tolerance, of dialogue, of the cordial understanding that characterizes the Canadian Nation is for us Haitians, a constant source of inspiration, and a model of a social relationship and partnership. The President of the Republic, His Excellency Michel Martelly now makes of that, his violin.
I would like to tell you how much we appreciate the excellence of our reports and the quality of our relations, which continue to strengthen, and grow in many fields every day..."
(Haiti Libre) -
This Thursday, at the Canadian Embassy in Port-au-Prince, on the occasion of the celebration of Canada Day [July 1], to which participated Laurent Lamothe, the Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Haiti, the Ambassador of Canada accredited to Haiti, Henri Paul Normandin, addressing the Prime Minister declared "[...] Canada is maintaining in Haiti, a long-standing relationship. This relationship was built first and foremost, on people; many Haitians and Canadians travel between our two countries, and thus contribute to forging close ties. These exchanges have particularly enriched the culture of our two countries, and lead to many cultural events and activities.
We also share a common language, in the great family of French-speaking peoples, and Haiti will be also well represented, particularly by young people during the World Forum on the French language, to be held in Quebec City next week.
We also have economic and commercial exchanges, that we want to intensify. Our political ties are very strong and extremely friendly. Our feelings of solidarity are particularly expressed by the spontaneous arrival and exceptionally generosity of Canadians, following the earthquake on January 12, 2010.
Mr. Prime Minister, we know full well that social and economic development must be an endogenous process, well anchored in international networks. Here in Canada the priority of the government is to broaden the economic outlook; but right here in Haiti, the Government also made of the economy one of its '5Es' and this, rightly; because the large-scale creation of income generating activities and of employment, will allow the population to improve their living conditions and permit the country to take off.
Mr. Prime Minister, Canadians are ready to accompany you on this path, particularly through trade and investment, as they are ready to support the country, in the achievement of all its objectives and aspirations..."
Speeking after the speech of the Canadian Ambassador, Laurent Lamothe declared, "[...] The participation of your country since its inception, Mr. Ambassador, everywhere where it is a question of showing the banner of freedom, peace and hope, has significantly contributed to give Canada a unique international stature, that of a paragon of tolerance, respect for differences, and the promotion of Rights, of all rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural.
Mr. Ambassador, this culture of tolerance, of dialogue, of the cordial understanding that characterizes the Canadian Nation is for us Haitians, a constant source of inspiration, and a model of a social relationship and partnership. The President of the Republic, His Excellency Michel Martelly now makes of that, his violin.
I would like to tell you how much we appreciate the excellence of our reports and the quality of our relations, which continue to strengthen, and grow in many fields every day..."
Saturday, June 30, 2012
ARTICLE - BRAZIL SUPPORTS SOPHIA
BRAZIL SUPPORTS THE EFFORTS OF SOPHIA MARTELLY - RIO+20
(Haiti Libre) -
At the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), Sophia Martelly, the First Lady of Haiti, accompanied by Jean Robert Brutus, the Executive Director of the National Unity of "Aba grangou" (UNAG), met Friday, June 22, in Rio de Janeiro Ms. Maya Takagi, the Brazilian national Secretary of the Program of Food Security and Nutrition and Mr. Milton Rondo Filho, Minister Coordinator General of International Affairs of Combat against Hunger, of Combat against Hunger, conducted in Haiti, in the fight against hunger and malnutrition through the program "Aba grangou", based on the program of the fight against hunger, "Fome Zero", established by the Brazilian government.
During this meeting, the First Lady highlighted the social living conditions of the Haitian family and the necessity of the implementation of strategies for this program, which not only wants to reduce by half the proportion of the Haitian population suffering from hunger by the end of 2016, but also to eradicate hunger and malnutrition by the horizon of 2020-2025.
Ms. Takagi, convinced of the Mission in which the First Lady of Haiti is committed, and convinced that the Brazilian experience is relevant in the fight against hunger, has pledged to Haiti, the strengthening of the Brazilian technical cooperation in this field. It was also agreed that a dozen Haitian technicians will take part at the end of August, in a training about the Brazilian experience in social development, and the fight against hunger.
In the late afternoon, the First Lady met with Mr. Graziano da Silva, Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and his Special Advisor, Mr. Carlos Den Hartog, about the organization of a round table (of concertation) "Aba Grangou-MARNDR-FAO-PAM", in order to define strategies and medium term programs, for the population for which they will be created.
Informed of the strategy of Aba Grangou, Mr. Graziano da Silva, who was also Director of Fome Zero, has decided to send soon to Haiti, a technical mission to assist the program of the First Lady, in the establishment of a Commission composed of members of civil society and the peasantry (especially local producers).
(Haiti Libre) -
At the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), Sophia Martelly, the First Lady of Haiti, accompanied by Jean Robert Brutus, the Executive Director of the National Unity of "Aba grangou" (UNAG), met Friday, June 22, in Rio de Janeiro Ms. Maya Takagi, the Brazilian national Secretary of the Program of Food Security and Nutrition and Mr. Milton Rondo Filho, Minister Coordinator General of International Affairs of Combat against Hunger, of Combat against Hunger, conducted in Haiti, in the fight against hunger and malnutrition through the program "Aba grangou", based on the program of the fight against hunger, "Fome Zero", established by the Brazilian government.
During this meeting, the First Lady highlighted the social living conditions of the Haitian family and the necessity of the implementation of strategies for this program, which not only wants to reduce by half the proportion of the Haitian population suffering from hunger by the end of 2016, but also to eradicate hunger and malnutrition by the horizon of 2020-2025.
Ms. Takagi, convinced of the Mission in which the First Lady of Haiti is committed, and convinced that the Brazilian experience is relevant in the fight against hunger, has pledged to Haiti, the strengthening of the Brazilian technical cooperation in this field. It was also agreed that a dozen Haitian technicians will take part at the end of August, in a training about the Brazilian experience in social development, and the fight against hunger.
In the late afternoon, the First Lady met with Mr. Graziano da Silva, Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and his Special Advisor, Mr. Carlos Den Hartog, about the organization of a round table (of concertation) "Aba Grangou-MARNDR-FAO-PAM", in order to define strategies and medium term programs, for the population for which they will be created.
Informed of the strategy of Aba Grangou, Mr. Graziano da Silva, who was also Director of Fome Zero, has decided to send soon to Haiti, a technical mission to assist the program of the First Lady, in the establishment of a Commission composed of members of civil society and the peasantry (especially local producers).
Friday, June 29, 2012
ARTICLE - BUILDING A ROAD TO RECOVERY
HAITI: BUILDING A ROAD TO RECOVERY
(Alaska Dispatch) - By Jacob Kushner
LES CAYES — For years, the road from here to the coastal city of Jérémie has been paved with good intentions, but never with asphalt.
Well-meaning international organizations and donors built schools in the villages that dot the roadside, purchased goats for children to raise and sell and donated supplies for home repair. But those projects came and went, barely making a dent in the region's gripping poverty. All the while, the road itself deteriorated into a 62-mile stretch of rocks and mud, making travel difficult and sometimes deadly.
Last week 40 passengers were killed when their bus overturned trying to cross the flooded Riviére Glace — Ice River —that dissects the passage, according to government figures from the incident.
Now, the passage known as National Route 7 is in the middle of a $142 million development project that in many ways is a model of the successful, long-term development Haiti desperately needs.
GlobalPost set out to find what insight this road can offer the myriad of small reconstruction projects underway here and throughout Haiti that are largely failing to bring about lasting change despite billions of dollars in post-earthquake reconstruction aid.
The journey begins with the history of the road and the lives of its travelers.
Five years ago, the trek through the mountains that separate Jérémie from the city of Les Cayes and Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince would take a rural farmer seven hours to travel by public truck — on a good day.
During the rainy season though, the truck might get stuck in deep mud multiple times along the way, or break down altogether. If that happened, your vegetables might spoil while you slept in the shade of the vehicle, waiting for a replacement part to slowly make its way up from Les Cayes.
If you were fortunate enough to make it to your destination — a market in Port-au-Prince — with some of your products intact, chances are you would have spent most of your earnings to pay the cost of transport, leaving little with which to feed your family or pay your children’s school fees.
Now, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Canadian government are rapidly changing all that. National Route 7 is only two-thirds complete and yet already it's cut the travel time between the two cities in half. The cost of traveling the road by bus or truck has gone down because more drivers are willing to make the journey, which requires far less fuel than it used to because the road is smoother.
Subsistence farmers who used to stack their yams, bananas and carrots along the road and wait for passing customers instead journey to weekly markets in nearby towns, which are becoming crowded with new vendors.
“I’ve been selling here forever,” said Jane Bazil, a 30-year-old vegetable grower and mother of eight who depends upon the market in the town of Duchity to sell her crops. “More people come now — come to sell, to buy. With the road today you can make it here in three hours. It used to take five.”
But this road isn’t being built with any of the $10.2 billion in aid pledged to by donor countries to help Haiti rebuild from the earthquake. The project started in 2008, two years before the disaster that killed tens of thousands of people and sent many fleeing cities back to rural areas like this one. The road’s impact may last far longer than the short-term aid projects that are sometimes riddled with corruption and waste — pitfalls on Haiti’s own road to recovery.
Wrong Turns
The are many such failures: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) recently spent $2 million US taxpayer dollars to build a temporary home for Haiti’s Parliament, but the agency failed to furnish the building, which required legislators to draw three-quarters of a million dollars from the nation’s small public treasury to finish the job.
And in the year following the earthquake, USAID spent $140 million on a food aid program that helps American farmers but has been blamed for undercutting Haitian producers who can’t compete with foreign food imports. The amount spent on that program is nearly identical to the $142 million road project that most Haitians say is helping, not hurting, Haiti’s rural population.
“Haitians think the NGOs are like the government — they absorb the money and there is no service,” said Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner who advised the government’s post-earthquake reconstruction plan. “There aren’t many NGOs involved in big infrastructure like roads or ports — nobody’s doing that.”
The comprehensive reconstruction plan that Voltaire worked on promoted a strategy of decentralization, moving people out of overcrowded urban centers like Port-au-Prince that became death traps when the earthquake hit. Instead, the plan asks donors to encourage development in smaller urban centers and rural areas.
“We invested a lot in infrastructure outside of Port-au-Prince,” said Ronald Baudin, finance minister under René Préval — Haiti’s president at the time of the quake.
Funding from international institutions like the IDB, Pan American Health Organization and the United Nations routinely goes to long-term and often rural projects like this one.
The IDB is currently implementing $245 million worth of transportation projects in Haiti, including National Route 7. The World Bank is funding approximately $30 million in transportation development including road re-paving in fiscal year 2012 alone, and the European Union is funding a $53 million road from Haiti’s second largest city, Cap Haitien, down to Port-au-Prince.
But Haiti's Interim Recovery Commission, charged with approving all publicly funded reconstruction projects, allocated only 20 percent of the $2.38 billion it received from donor nations exclusively toward improving Haiti's transportation infrastructure.
USAID allocated only $113 million (7.5 percent) of its total $1.5 billion in post-earthquake funding to rehabilitate roads and ports, among other development projects.
And unlike institutional aid, spending by NGOs and individual donors continues to focus on either short-term projects like debris removal, temporary services for people living in camps, or house construction. Little of that aid reaches Haiti’s southwestern peninsula where National Route 7 is being built.
Of a sample 343 reconstruction aid projects nationwide totaling more than $408 million, only 16 projects worth $1.5 million (0.3 percent) were being spent exclusively in the two regions through which the road passes, despite them being home to 15 percent of the Haiti’s population, according to data mapped by Interaction, a coalition of American NGOs.
Road Trip
A trip along the road reveals that even some of these projects are failing to achieve long-term progress. Slowly, a motorcycle makes its way along a dirt path leading to the village of Saut-Matherine, home to several hundred rural Haitians who live in simple mud and clay homes. Last year the American NGO Heifer International donated cement and sand to dozens of families in the village to repair or rebuild their houses that had been damaged in the earthquake. Heifer’s masons decided how much cement and sand each family would need, and the organization oversaw delivery of the specified amounts.
But today, many of those homes remain half-built and unlivable. They have no roofs and often the cement block walls reach only four or five feet from the dirt ground. That's because many families ran out of materials before the work was finished.
“They said it would be enough to build the structure of the house, but it wasn’t,” said Elirese Clirgé, a 50-year-old who now lives with her husband and 10 children in a single, 12-foot by 12-foot room constructed using Heifer’s materials. Outside a few cinder blocks mark the base of a second room Clirgé began to construct before she ran out of cement.
“I don’t have any money to finish this,” she said.
Her neighbor, 70-year-old Regulus Tilus, built the walls of his home two-thirds of the way up before he ran out of materials to complete them and build a roof.
“They said it was supposed to help. It did help me get started, but I wish they would help finish it,” he said.
Like most short-term reconstruction projects taking place in the communities along this rural road, this one too began with the best of intentions. Wilbert Georges, Heifer’s coordinator for the region, said the organization hoped to quickly invest money there so residents could rapidly repair their homes before the coming rainy and hurricane seasons.
But he said some residents ran out of construction materials because they chose to reconstruct their home using cinder block rather than the mud and cement mix that was the norm for most homes in the area.
“The idea was to rebuild their house in the same way. But many started to build a different sort of house,” he said. “If a person’s house fell, if one person wanted block, then they all wanted a house like that.”
The residents of Saut-Matherine question why Heifer only set out to help them build back their homes in the same, unstable fashion that caused them to collapse in the first place instead of investing in standard, cinderblock homes.
The half-finished houses seem an apt symbol of the failure of patch-up aid projects that contrast with the visible progress of the new road being constructed nearby.
To date, IDB has completed 14 miles of National Route 7 with asphalt paving, drainage ditches and other civil works like small bridges. Haiti has only about 2,100 miles of roads according to the IDB, compared with more than 12,000 in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
“IDB investment projects are by definition long-term undertakings and they always include money for capacity building,” said Peter Bate, an IDB spokesman. “The project is connecting a potentially very productive region of Haiti with the rest of the country.”
The Brazilian construction company that’s building the road, OAS, employed 745 people last year, 90 percent of them Haitians. Unskilled laborers earn only minimum wage — $5 per day — but workers say they’re appreciative of any wage at all in a region that desperately lacks jobs.
Rough Patches
The work hasn’t always gone smoothly. In April 2011, residents who say their vegetable gardens were ruined by debris from the construction process barricaded the road with rocks to stop company vehicles in protest of a delay in being compensated for the damage, which was the responsibility of the Haitian Ministry of Public Works.
Near one of these roadblocks, 70-year-old Elimene De Bois sat in the cargo space of a large truck, sweating in the mid-day heat.
“We left Monday, but the truck broke down,” said De Bois. It was Wednesday. “My money is all gone, and I’m hungry.”
De Bois says she paid the driver $12.50 for the trip to Port-au-Prince plus $4 for each bag of charcoal and grapefruit she brings — an expensive trip considering charcoal sells for only $15 to $20 per bag at market, according to the World Food Program.
“We had a flat tire because the road isn’t good,” said the truck’s driver. “The road is still dangerous. There are accidents.”
Sometimes, those accidents are deadly. The Rivière Glace, which all vehicles must traverse, becomes perilous when the water rises after heavy rains and has claimed dozens of lives over the years. Just last week, it engulfed a passenger bus, killing approximately 40 people according to Haiti's Ministry of Civil Protection, although the bus driver says only eight died.
In August 2008, 14 people died at the same spot when their bus overturned in high waters during a tropical storm.
The river isn't the only peril on the road. In March 2011, a bus full of people crashed into a roadblock, killing nine and injuring 24 more.
To those who have lived in the region their entire lives and remember such tragedies, National Route 7 is a long time coming. They hope the new road and new bridge over the Rivière Glace will at last allow them to travel without risking their lives.
“People have been born and died wanting this,” says 90-year-old Deubemi Bazile, who sits at a small wooden table along the road in the town of Duchity, picking green beans from their pods. She says she used to sell four pounds of the beans for just 30 gourde, less than one dollar. Now she charges the equivalent of four or five dollars because merchants can sell them at faraway urban markets where they draw a better price.
A 40-minute hike south into the mountains from where Bazile sits de-podding beans, Resnel Pierre Louis weeds in his 300 square-foot garden of green onions and cabbage, which he rents from a landowner for $25 per year.
“In Haiti, everything depends on transport. When the hurricanes come, we can’t get to our fields and the crops flood,” he said.
Beyond its effects on local agriculture, the road is also connecting residents to basic healthcare and Haiti’s justice system for the first time. A police station finally opened last year in the town of Duchity halfway between the two cities, and a judicial office down the road now handles personal property, land tenure and other legal cases so residents don’t have to truck — or sometimes, walk — the 20 miles to Les Cayes, also home to the nearest full-service hospital.
Pierre Louis Jean Jacques, who works for the Brazilian construction company directing traffic on the road, hopes the new road will attract more foreign aid projects here by making the area more easily accessible.
“There will be more people traveling,” he said. “We’ll have a lot of visitors, whites, NGOs.”
But to many Haitians, NGOs remain decidedly focused on projects that are either short-term in scope or focused around Port-au-Prince, far from Haiti’s rural southwest.
“Those (regions) have been isolated for 200 years,” said Voltaire. “It’s a big change in their lives. I think we need more roads, more infrastructure, more energy — that’s what they should prioritize.”
(Alaska Dispatch) - By Jacob Kushner
LES CAYES — For years, the road from here to the coastal city of Jérémie has been paved with good intentions, but never with asphalt.
Well-meaning international organizations and donors built schools in the villages that dot the roadside, purchased goats for children to raise and sell and donated supplies for home repair. But those projects came and went, barely making a dent in the region's gripping poverty. All the while, the road itself deteriorated into a 62-mile stretch of rocks and mud, making travel difficult and sometimes deadly.
Last week 40 passengers were killed when their bus overturned trying to cross the flooded Riviére Glace — Ice River —that dissects the passage, according to government figures from the incident.
Now, the passage known as National Route 7 is in the middle of a $142 million development project that in many ways is a model of the successful, long-term development Haiti desperately needs.
GlobalPost set out to find what insight this road can offer the myriad of small reconstruction projects underway here and throughout Haiti that are largely failing to bring about lasting change despite billions of dollars in post-earthquake reconstruction aid.
The journey begins with the history of the road and the lives of its travelers.
Five years ago, the trek through the mountains that separate Jérémie from the city of Les Cayes and Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince would take a rural farmer seven hours to travel by public truck — on a good day.
During the rainy season though, the truck might get stuck in deep mud multiple times along the way, or break down altogether. If that happened, your vegetables might spoil while you slept in the shade of the vehicle, waiting for a replacement part to slowly make its way up from Les Cayes.
If you were fortunate enough to make it to your destination — a market in Port-au-Prince — with some of your products intact, chances are you would have spent most of your earnings to pay the cost of transport, leaving little with which to feed your family or pay your children’s school fees.
Now, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Canadian government are rapidly changing all that. National Route 7 is only two-thirds complete and yet already it's cut the travel time between the two cities in half. The cost of traveling the road by bus or truck has gone down because more drivers are willing to make the journey, which requires far less fuel than it used to because the road is smoother.
Subsistence farmers who used to stack their yams, bananas and carrots along the road and wait for passing customers instead journey to weekly markets in nearby towns, which are becoming crowded with new vendors.
“I’ve been selling here forever,” said Jane Bazil, a 30-year-old vegetable grower and mother of eight who depends upon the market in the town of Duchity to sell her crops. “More people come now — come to sell, to buy. With the road today you can make it here in three hours. It used to take five.”
But this road isn’t being built with any of the $10.2 billion in aid pledged to by donor countries to help Haiti rebuild from the earthquake. The project started in 2008, two years before the disaster that killed tens of thousands of people and sent many fleeing cities back to rural areas like this one. The road’s impact may last far longer than the short-term aid projects that are sometimes riddled with corruption and waste — pitfalls on Haiti’s own road to recovery.
Wrong Turns
The are many such failures: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) recently spent $2 million US taxpayer dollars to build a temporary home for Haiti’s Parliament, but the agency failed to furnish the building, which required legislators to draw three-quarters of a million dollars from the nation’s small public treasury to finish the job.
And in the year following the earthquake, USAID spent $140 million on a food aid program that helps American farmers but has been blamed for undercutting Haitian producers who can’t compete with foreign food imports. The amount spent on that program is nearly identical to the $142 million road project that most Haitians say is helping, not hurting, Haiti’s rural population.
“Haitians think the NGOs are like the government — they absorb the money and there is no service,” said Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner who advised the government’s post-earthquake reconstruction plan. “There aren’t many NGOs involved in big infrastructure like roads or ports — nobody’s doing that.”
The comprehensive reconstruction plan that Voltaire worked on promoted a strategy of decentralization, moving people out of overcrowded urban centers like Port-au-Prince that became death traps when the earthquake hit. Instead, the plan asks donors to encourage development in smaller urban centers and rural areas.
“We invested a lot in infrastructure outside of Port-au-Prince,” said Ronald Baudin, finance minister under René Préval — Haiti’s president at the time of the quake.
Funding from international institutions like the IDB, Pan American Health Organization and the United Nations routinely goes to long-term and often rural projects like this one.
The IDB is currently implementing $245 million worth of transportation projects in Haiti, including National Route 7. The World Bank is funding approximately $30 million in transportation development including road re-paving in fiscal year 2012 alone, and the European Union is funding a $53 million road from Haiti’s second largest city, Cap Haitien, down to Port-au-Prince.
But Haiti's Interim Recovery Commission, charged with approving all publicly funded reconstruction projects, allocated only 20 percent of the $2.38 billion it received from donor nations exclusively toward improving Haiti's transportation infrastructure.
USAID allocated only $113 million (7.5 percent) of its total $1.5 billion in post-earthquake funding to rehabilitate roads and ports, among other development projects.
And unlike institutional aid, spending by NGOs and individual donors continues to focus on either short-term projects like debris removal, temporary services for people living in camps, or house construction. Little of that aid reaches Haiti’s southwestern peninsula where National Route 7 is being built.
Of a sample 343 reconstruction aid projects nationwide totaling more than $408 million, only 16 projects worth $1.5 million (0.3 percent) were being spent exclusively in the two regions through which the road passes, despite them being home to 15 percent of the Haiti’s population, according to data mapped by Interaction, a coalition of American NGOs.
Road Trip
A trip along the road reveals that even some of these projects are failing to achieve long-term progress. Slowly, a motorcycle makes its way along a dirt path leading to the village of Saut-Matherine, home to several hundred rural Haitians who live in simple mud and clay homes. Last year the American NGO Heifer International donated cement and sand to dozens of families in the village to repair or rebuild their houses that had been damaged in the earthquake. Heifer’s masons decided how much cement and sand each family would need, and the organization oversaw delivery of the specified amounts.
But today, many of those homes remain half-built and unlivable. They have no roofs and often the cement block walls reach only four or five feet from the dirt ground. That's because many families ran out of materials before the work was finished.
“They said it would be enough to build the structure of the house, but it wasn’t,” said Elirese Clirgé, a 50-year-old who now lives with her husband and 10 children in a single, 12-foot by 12-foot room constructed using Heifer’s materials. Outside a few cinder blocks mark the base of a second room Clirgé began to construct before she ran out of cement.
“I don’t have any money to finish this,” she said.
Her neighbor, 70-year-old Regulus Tilus, built the walls of his home two-thirds of the way up before he ran out of materials to complete them and build a roof.
“They said it was supposed to help. It did help me get started, but I wish they would help finish it,” he said.
Like most short-term reconstruction projects taking place in the communities along this rural road, this one too began with the best of intentions. Wilbert Georges, Heifer’s coordinator for the region, said the organization hoped to quickly invest money there so residents could rapidly repair their homes before the coming rainy and hurricane seasons.
But he said some residents ran out of construction materials because they chose to reconstruct their home using cinder block rather than the mud and cement mix that was the norm for most homes in the area.
“The idea was to rebuild their house in the same way. But many started to build a different sort of house,” he said. “If a person’s house fell, if one person wanted block, then they all wanted a house like that.”
The residents of Saut-Matherine question why Heifer only set out to help them build back their homes in the same, unstable fashion that caused them to collapse in the first place instead of investing in standard, cinderblock homes.
The half-finished houses seem an apt symbol of the failure of patch-up aid projects that contrast with the visible progress of the new road being constructed nearby.
To date, IDB has completed 14 miles of National Route 7 with asphalt paving, drainage ditches and other civil works like small bridges. Haiti has only about 2,100 miles of roads according to the IDB, compared with more than 12,000 in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
“IDB investment projects are by definition long-term undertakings and they always include money for capacity building,” said Peter Bate, an IDB spokesman. “The project is connecting a potentially very productive region of Haiti with the rest of the country.”
The Brazilian construction company that’s building the road, OAS, employed 745 people last year, 90 percent of them Haitians. Unskilled laborers earn only minimum wage — $5 per day — but workers say they’re appreciative of any wage at all in a region that desperately lacks jobs.
Rough Patches
The work hasn’t always gone smoothly. In April 2011, residents who say their vegetable gardens were ruined by debris from the construction process barricaded the road with rocks to stop company vehicles in protest of a delay in being compensated for the damage, which was the responsibility of the Haitian Ministry of Public Works.
Near one of these roadblocks, 70-year-old Elimene De Bois sat in the cargo space of a large truck, sweating in the mid-day heat.
“We left Monday, but the truck broke down,” said De Bois. It was Wednesday. “My money is all gone, and I’m hungry.”
De Bois says she paid the driver $12.50 for the trip to Port-au-Prince plus $4 for each bag of charcoal and grapefruit she brings — an expensive trip considering charcoal sells for only $15 to $20 per bag at market, according to the World Food Program.
“We had a flat tire because the road isn’t good,” said the truck’s driver. “The road is still dangerous. There are accidents.”
Sometimes, those accidents are deadly. The Rivière Glace, which all vehicles must traverse, becomes perilous when the water rises after heavy rains and has claimed dozens of lives over the years. Just last week, it engulfed a passenger bus, killing approximately 40 people according to Haiti's Ministry of Civil Protection, although the bus driver says only eight died.
In August 2008, 14 people died at the same spot when their bus overturned in high waters during a tropical storm.
The river isn't the only peril on the road. In March 2011, a bus full of people crashed into a roadblock, killing nine and injuring 24 more.
To those who have lived in the region their entire lives and remember such tragedies, National Route 7 is a long time coming. They hope the new road and new bridge over the Rivière Glace will at last allow them to travel without risking their lives.
“People have been born and died wanting this,” says 90-year-old Deubemi Bazile, who sits at a small wooden table along the road in the town of Duchity, picking green beans from their pods. She says she used to sell four pounds of the beans for just 30 gourde, less than one dollar. Now she charges the equivalent of four or five dollars because merchants can sell them at faraway urban markets where they draw a better price.
A 40-minute hike south into the mountains from where Bazile sits de-podding beans, Resnel Pierre Louis weeds in his 300 square-foot garden of green onions and cabbage, which he rents from a landowner for $25 per year.
“In Haiti, everything depends on transport. When the hurricanes come, we can’t get to our fields and the crops flood,” he said.
Beyond its effects on local agriculture, the road is also connecting residents to basic healthcare and Haiti’s justice system for the first time. A police station finally opened last year in the town of Duchity halfway between the two cities, and a judicial office down the road now handles personal property, land tenure and other legal cases so residents don’t have to truck — or sometimes, walk — the 20 miles to Les Cayes, also home to the nearest full-service hospital.
Pierre Louis Jean Jacques, who works for the Brazilian construction company directing traffic on the road, hopes the new road will attract more foreign aid projects here by making the area more easily accessible.
“There will be more people traveling,” he said. “We’ll have a lot of visitors, whites, NGOs.”
But to many Haitians, NGOs remain decidedly focused on projects that are either short-term in scope or focused around Port-au-Prince, far from Haiti’s rural southwest.
“Those (regions) have been isolated for 200 years,” said Voltaire. “It’s a big change in their lives. I think we need more roads, more infrastructure, more energy — that’s what they should prioritize.”
ARTICLE - BILL CLINTON ARRIVES IN HAITI
BILL CLINTON ARRIVES IN HAITI WITH GRANTS, LOANS FOR DEVELOPMENT
(Defend Haiti) -
NEW YORK - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in Haiti on Thursday to participate in meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton's organizations accumulated to bring a number of loans and a grant for development in Haiti.
Digicel CEO Denis O'Brien will also be in the country participating in the dialogue.
A communication from the New York, USA based Clinton Foundation said the former President would travel to Ile a Vache and will visit the Abaka Bay resort.
At the resort, representatives from the Kellogg Foundation and Habitat for Humanity will make a presentation.
On a visit to Jacmel, Clinton will meet with leaders of ISPAN.
On Friday, President Clinton will lead his delegation to the Sans Souci Palace, one of Haiti's historical landmarks and he will visit the airport under construction in Cap Haitien and end his tour in Labadee.
Clinton Bush Fund Puts $2.6 Million in Haiti
Clinton's visit comes ahead of an announcement that $2.6 million [US] would be put in Haiti for projects and loans.
In Jacmel, a hotel owned by SIMACT Tourism has received $350K for renovations. This hotel is reported to be looking to join Choice Hotels International.
A grant of $460K will go to Regis College nursing schools and $1 million in loans will be made available through the Haitian development bank. About a half million dollars will be loaned to a commercial construction firm.
(Defend Haiti) -
NEW YORK - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in Haiti on Thursday to participate in meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton's organizations accumulated to bring a number of loans and a grant for development in Haiti.
Digicel CEO Denis O'Brien will also be in the country participating in the dialogue.
A communication from the New York, USA based Clinton Foundation said the former President would travel to Ile a Vache and will visit the Abaka Bay resort.
At the resort, representatives from the Kellogg Foundation and Habitat for Humanity will make a presentation.
On a visit to Jacmel, Clinton will meet with leaders of ISPAN.
On Friday, President Clinton will lead his delegation to the Sans Souci Palace, one of Haiti's historical landmarks and he will visit the airport under construction in Cap Haitien and end his tour in Labadee.
Clinton Bush Fund Puts $2.6 Million in Haiti
Clinton's visit comes ahead of an announcement that $2.6 million [US] would be put in Haiti for projects and loans.
In Jacmel, a hotel owned by SIMACT Tourism has received $350K for renovations. This hotel is reported to be looking to join Choice Hotels International.
A grant of $460K will go to Regis College nursing schools and $1 million in loans will be made available through the Haitian development bank. About a half million dollars will be loaned to a commercial construction firm.
ARTICLE - 16 WORLD BANK PROJECTS
EVALUATION OF 16 PROJECTS FUNDED BY THE WORLD BANK
(Haiti Libre) -
The Government of Haiti, in collaboration with the World Bank, has proceeded from 27 to 28 June 2012 to the Joint Review of portfolios of 16 projects and programs financed by the World Bank in Haiti.
More than a hundred representatives of the World Bank, the Haitian government, and development partners attended the meeting. Present on the government's side were present the ministers ensuring the supervision of projects and representatives of project management units. On the World Bank's side were sector managers, and a dozen specialists, and project managers in Haiti. Representatives of technical and financial partners of Haiti also participated in the discussions.
After two days of discussions between executives of the public administration and project teams, an action plan has been proposed to improve aid effectiveness, and increase the real impacts on people's lives. This plan must periodically be verified by the Government and the World Bank. The workshop was held under the theme "work fast and efficiently, a mutual responsibility".
The portfolio review is a very important step for the Government and the World Bank in the analysis of the performance of ongoing operations and in preparation, as well as for the identification of constraints faced by the implementation teams. This workshop is an excellent opportunity to go further in the effectiveness of aid, declared Ms. Jean Marie, Minister of Economy and Finance at the opening ceremony. "It aims to capitalize on the positive results achieved in the implementation of various projects and programs, to identify problems in the proper execution of projects, and propose solutions." The Minister was accompanied by Ms. Gauthier, Minister of Planning and External Cooperation, and the Special Envoy of the World Bank, Mr. Abrantes.
The review focused on a portfolio of 14 projects financed by IDA and two major trust funds, totaling 518 million U.S. dollars. Current performance of the portfolio is considered as largely satisfactory, but could be improved to maximize the perspectives of success of its development objectives.
The main recommendations are :
Strengthen the culture of results
Strengthen the capacity of financial management and procurement in project management units
Improve communication between ministries, project coordinators and the Bank
Create platforms for sharing knowledge
The World Bank fully supports the approach based on the results of the Government in order to quickly produce tangible results for the people of Haiti. "We hope this joint portfolio review will help us to operationalize the Government's objectives and maximize what can be achieved through the special allocation of IDA to Haiti," concluded Mr. Abrantes. "Accelerating the implementation of projects to achieve these objectives is a mutual responsibility."
(Haiti Libre) -
The Government of Haiti, in collaboration with the World Bank, has proceeded from 27 to 28 June 2012 to the Joint Review of portfolios of 16 projects and programs financed by the World Bank in Haiti.
More than a hundred representatives of the World Bank, the Haitian government, and development partners attended the meeting. Present on the government's side were present the ministers ensuring the supervision of projects and representatives of project management units. On the World Bank's side were sector managers, and a dozen specialists, and project managers in Haiti. Representatives of technical and financial partners of Haiti also participated in the discussions.
After two days of discussions between executives of the public administration and project teams, an action plan has been proposed to improve aid effectiveness, and increase the real impacts on people's lives. This plan must periodically be verified by the Government and the World Bank. The workshop was held under the theme "work fast and efficiently, a mutual responsibility".
The portfolio review is a very important step for the Government and the World Bank in the analysis of the performance of ongoing operations and in preparation, as well as for the identification of constraints faced by the implementation teams. This workshop is an excellent opportunity to go further in the effectiveness of aid, declared Ms. Jean Marie, Minister of Economy and Finance at the opening ceremony. "It aims to capitalize on the positive results achieved in the implementation of various projects and programs, to identify problems in the proper execution of projects, and propose solutions." The Minister was accompanied by Ms. Gauthier, Minister of Planning and External Cooperation, and the Special Envoy of the World Bank, Mr. Abrantes.
The review focused on a portfolio of 14 projects financed by IDA and two major trust funds, totaling 518 million U.S. dollars. Current performance of the portfolio is considered as largely satisfactory, but could be improved to maximize the perspectives of success of its development objectives.
The main recommendations are :
Strengthen the culture of results
Strengthen the capacity of financial management and procurement in project management units
Improve communication between ministries, project coordinators and the Bank
Create platforms for sharing knowledge
The World Bank fully supports the approach based on the results of the Government in order to quickly produce tangible results for the people of Haiti. "We hope this joint portfolio review will help us to operationalize the Government's objectives and maximize what can be achieved through the special allocation of IDA to Haiti," concluded Mr. Abrantes. "Accelerating the implementation of projects to achieve these objectives is a mutual responsibility."
ARTICLE - OAS ISSUES 5 MILLION ID CARDS
OAS ISSUES 5 MILLION ID CARDS IN HAITI CIVIL REGISTRY PROJECT
(Defend Haiti) -
PORT-AU-PRINCE - The Organization of American States which oversaw the past elections in Haiti has ended a stage of its Civil Registry Project having registered 5,054,214 Haitians with national identification cards. These cards, include innovations in data acquisition and are required to participate in upcoming elections and obtain public services.
With funding from Canada and implementation by the United States, the OAS also updated the technologies of the Office of National Identification (ONI) offices in Haiti.
The cards feature security measures such as biometric features, a unique identification number, which is required to exercise voting, perform various administrative activities, and to receive benefits from public programs.
The project sought to support the construction of a functional ONI, by training more than 2,000 employees and providing equipment and technology to its 141 offices across the country.
The ONI is a key player for the realization of elections in Haiti. Since 2006, and during the last five electoral processes, the institution has given, from the national registry identification, the information needed to the Electoral Council (CEP) for making the electoral list.
In anticipation of parliamentary, municipal and local elections, the ONI, with the support of the project, acquired the required equipment for the production of 450,000 new national identification cards.
Furthermore, the ability of this system to make automatic fingerprint identification will double to 10 million records, an essential step to prepare for the future.
Modernization of a system of birth registration that offers services, and proximity to thepopulation is a critical component in reforming civil society in Haiti.
The project, in partnership with the Department of Justice and Public Safety (MJSP), has launched an awareness campaign, and two registration offices in civil and public hospitals in Port-au-Prince. Over a period of nine months, the registration rate has doubled and 14,198 infants received a birth certificate, thereby granting a civil identity.
Challenges Remain
However, factors remain: legal, procedural and economic effects of depriving, even today, many Haitians to obtain a civil identity.
Following consultations with civil society and with technical support from the National School of Quebec for Public Administration (ENAP), the project was submitted to two MJSP legislation projects to make the registration system of vital statistics more accessible, efficient, transparent and nondiscriminatory.
At National Archives of Haiti, the project built a database of vital statistics which will reduce the waiting time for receipt of documents, while preventing identity fraud. The national database will eventually provide the data necessary for the development of public programs.
16,270,884 acts of Birth, death, marriage, divorce and adoption have been digitized so far, but data entry must be completed. National institutions have continued the important efforts undertaken, despite the conclusion of the project.
The project was made possible by a generous contribution of 15.6 million Canadian dollars from Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) from 2008 to 2012.
The Assistant Secretary General of the OAS and Chair of the Group of Friends of Haiti, Ambassador Albert Ramdin said the OAS remains committed to Haiti's development, and recognizes the importance of CIDA's contribution to this project.
"This is a concrete example of cooperation and support in the interest of a State member," said Ramdin.
(Defend Haiti) -
PORT-AU-PRINCE - The Organization of American States which oversaw the past elections in Haiti has ended a stage of its Civil Registry Project having registered 5,054,214 Haitians with national identification cards. These cards, include innovations in data acquisition and are required to participate in upcoming elections and obtain public services.
With funding from Canada and implementation by the United States, the OAS also updated the technologies of the Office of National Identification (ONI) offices in Haiti.
The cards feature security measures such as biometric features, a unique identification number, which is required to exercise voting, perform various administrative activities, and to receive benefits from public programs.
The project sought to support the construction of a functional ONI, by training more than 2,000 employees and providing equipment and technology to its 141 offices across the country.
The ONI is a key player for the realization of elections in Haiti. Since 2006, and during the last five electoral processes, the institution has given, from the national registry identification, the information needed to the Electoral Council (CEP) for making the electoral list.
In anticipation of parliamentary, municipal and local elections, the ONI, with the support of the project, acquired the required equipment for the production of 450,000 new national identification cards.
Furthermore, the ability of this system to make automatic fingerprint identification will double to 10 million records, an essential step to prepare for the future.
Modernization of a system of birth registration that offers services, and proximity to thepopulation is a critical component in reforming civil society in Haiti.
The project, in partnership with the Department of Justice and Public Safety (MJSP), has launched an awareness campaign, and two registration offices in civil and public hospitals in Port-au-Prince. Over a period of nine months, the registration rate has doubled and 14,198 infants received a birth certificate, thereby granting a civil identity.
Challenges Remain
However, factors remain: legal, procedural and economic effects of depriving, even today, many Haitians to obtain a civil identity.
Following consultations with civil society and with technical support from the National School of Quebec for Public Administration (ENAP), the project was submitted to two MJSP legislation projects to make the registration system of vital statistics more accessible, efficient, transparent and nondiscriminatory.
At National Archives of Haiti, the project built a database of vital statistics which will reduce the waiting time for receipt of documents, while preventing identity fraud. The national database will eventually provide the data necessary for the development of public programs.
16,270,884 acts of Birth, death, marriage, divorce and adoption have been digitized so far, but data entry must be completed. National institutions have continued the important efforts undertaken, despite the conclusion of the project.
The project was made possible by a generous contribution of 15.6 million Canadian dollars from Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) from 2008 to 2012.
The Assistant Secretary General of the OAS and Chair of the Group of Friends of Haiti, Ambassador Albert Ramdin said the OAS remains committed to Haiti's development, and recognizes the importance of CIDA's contribution to this project.
"This is a concrete example of cooperation and support in the interest of a State member," said Ramdin.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
ARTICLE - CBHF - LONG-TERM PROGRESS
CLINTON BUSH HAITI FUND INVESTMENTS ENCOURAGE LONG-TERM PROGRESS IN HAITI
(EON) - By Clinton Bush Haiti Fund
The Fund announces $2.59M in grants and loans to business and workforce training programs
WASHINGTON - The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund today announced $2.59M in grants and loans to four businesses and workforce development programs, including Regis College, Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel, CLYF Quincallerie, and SOFIHDES. These investments highlight the importance of viable enterprises and a skilled workforce as Haiti continues to build a stable, healthy economy.
Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel
As part of its continued effort to revitalize the tourism sector in Haiti, the Fund made a $349K loan to upgrade the Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel in Jacmel. The hotel is owned by SIMACT Tourism Inc., a US company held by Haitian and diaspora investors dedicated to helping develop their country. The loan will enable physical renovations including updates to furniture and equipment, as well as an updated reservation system and training for hotel management. The seaside facility, which sits on a cliff overlooking the bay in the historic town of Jacmel, hopes to join the Comfort Inn brand of Choice Hotels International.
“Jacmel is a vibrant town, and Haiti’s tourism sector is ready to grow here,” Clinton Bush Haiti Fund CEO Gary Edson said. “Smart investments in the hotel industry translate into successes for local restaurateurs, artisans, small enterprises, and the Haitian economy as a whole.”
Regis College
The Fund made a $463K grant to Regis College to educate faculty at six Haitian nursing schools. The grant will help provide 24 Haitian nurse educators with a master’s degree in nursing. These teachers are expected to pass that education along to 3,300 students over the period of the grant. This program will benefit Haiti for years to come by sustaining nursing jobs, raising healthcare standards, and transforming the health sector, all while filling a need for skilled Haitian health workers.
“Haiti is in dire need of indigenous health workers who are committed to their local communities. Long-term health and economic results can only be achieved by partnering with Haitians to build the health training and service programs that they own, operate in, and use,” said Clinton Bush Haiti Fund board member, Senator William H. Frist. Senator Frist is also a thoracic surgeon.
SOFIHDES
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund also made a second investment in SOFIHDES, bringing its total support to the long-established Haitian development bank to $2.25M. With a new $1M loan, SOFIHDES will continue to provide loans to Haitian small and growing businesses. An additional $250K grant will provide technical assistance for capacity-building, helping update SOFIHDES’ loan management system and reporting capacity, as well as reinforcing its credit process.
SOFIHDES on-lent the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s first $1M loan to a variety of companies, reaching sectors from agriculture to communications.
CLYF Quincallerie S.A.
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund also made a $525K investment in a Haitian for-profit commercial construction materials company, CYLF Quincallerie. The grant and loan will help CLYF provide access to reliable, quality hardware materials from a local Haitian source, building back better and promoting job creation.
The $525K investment is comprised of a grant and a loan. The $375K loan will allow Port-au-Prince-based CLYF to purchase machinery to produce light-gauge steel metal studs. The $150K grant will support training for use of the equipment, creating at least 25 new jobs.
About the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund:
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded after Haiti’s January 12, 2010 earthquake, when President Barack Obama asked former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to lead a major fundraising effort to assist the Haitian people to “build back better.” The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund initially responded to the catastrophe with millions in humanitarian relief. By the time the Fund was officially formed in May 2010, it transitioned to primarily serving its longer-term mission of sustainable reconstruction efforts designed to promote jobs and economic opportunity, empowering Haiti to chart its own successful future.
(EON) - By Clinton Bush Haiti Fund
The Fund announces $2.59M in grants and loans to business and workforce training programs
WASHINGTON - The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund today announced $2.59M in grants and loans to four businesses and workforce development programs, including Regis College, Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel, CLYF Quincallerie, and SOFIHDES. These investments highlight the importance of viable enterprises and a skilled workforce as Haiti continues to build a stable, healthy economy.
Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel
As part of its continued effort to revitalize the tourism sector in Haiti, the Fund made a $349K loan to upgrade the Cap Lamandou Waterview Hotel in Jacmel. The hotel is owned by SIMACT Tourism Inc., a US company held by Haitian and diaspora investors dedicated to helping develop their country. The loan will enable physical renovations including updates to furniture and equipment, as well as an updated reservation system and training for hotel management. The seaside facility, which sits on a cliff overlooking the bay in the historic town of Jacmel, hopes to join the Comfort Inn brand of Choice Hotels International.
“Jacmel is a vibrant town, and Haiti’s tourism sector is ready to grow here,” Clinton Bush Haiti Fund CEO Gary Edson said. “Smart investments in the hotel industry translate into successes for local restaurateurs, artisans, small enterprises, and the Haitian economy as a whole.”
Regis College
The Fund made a $463K grant to Regis College to educate faculty at six Haitian nursing schools. The grant will help provide 24 Haitian nurse educators with a master’s degree in nursing. These teachers are expected to pass that education along to 3,300 students over the period of the grant. This program will benefit Haiti for years to come by sustaining nursing jobs, raising healthcare standards, and transforming the health sector, all while filling a need for skilled Haitian health workers.
“Haiti is in dire need of indigenous health workers who are committed to their local communities. Long-term health and economic results can only be achieved by partnering with Haitians to build the health training and service programs that they own, operate in, and use,” said Clinton Bush Haiti Fund board member, Senator William H. Frist. Senator Frist is also a thoracic surgeon.
SOFIHDES
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund also made a second investment in SOFIHDES, bringing its total support to the long-established Haitian development bank to $2.25M. With a new $1M loan, SOFIHDES will continue to provide loans to Haitian small and growing businesses. An additional $250K grant will provide technical assistance for capacity-building, helping update SOFIHDES’ loan management system and reporting capacity, as well as reinforcing its credit process.
SOFIHDES on-lent the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s first $1M loan to a variety of companies, reaching sectors from agriculture to communications.
CLYF Quincallerie S.A.
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund also made a $525K investment in a Haitian for-profit commercial construction materials company, CYLF Quincallerie. The grant and loan will help CLYF provide access to reliable, quality hardware materials from a local Haitian source, building back better and promoting job creation.
The $525K investment is comprised of a grant and a loan. The $375K loan will allow Port-au-Prince-based CLYF to purchase machinery to produce light-gauge steel metal studs. The $150K grant will support training for use of the equipment, creating at least 25 new jobs.
About the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund:
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded after Haiti’s January 12, 2010 earthquake, when President Barack Obama asked former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to lead a major fundraising effort to assist the Haitian people to “build back better.” The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund initially responded to the catastrophe with millions in humanitarian relief. By the time the Fund was officially formed in May 2010, it transitioned to primarily serving its longer-term mission of sustainable reconstruction efforts designed to promote jobs and economic opportunity, empowering Haiti to chart its own successful future.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
ARTICLE - PARTNERSHIP FRAMEWORK
SIGNATURE OF A PARTNERSHIP FRAMEWORK BETWEEN THE U.S. AND THE HAITIAN GOVERNMENT
(Haiti Libre) -
On Tuesday, June 26, 2012, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten signed into effect a Partnership Framework to support Haiti’s Health Strategy.
Through the Global Health Initiative, the US Government is pursuing a comprehensive whole-government approach for global health. The Initiative promotes a new business model to deliver its dual objectives of achieving significant health improvements and creating an effective, efficient and country-led platform for the sustainable delivery of essential health care and public health programs. The signing of this Partnership Framework is an important milestone that demonstrates the political will of the country to begin to take responsibility for the reconstruction and reform of its health system. The agreement illustrates how the USG has established a new way of working with the Government of Haiti on health issues, as the Haitian government begins to take greater ownership of the health program.
The purpose of this Partnership Framework is to refocus the cooperation between the USG and G.O.H. and their respective partners on supporting Haiti’s efforts to improve its health system and to reach the Millennium Development Goals, including promoting maternal and child health and reinforcing the fight against HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. This will be achieved through technical assistance, support for service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial investments.
More specifically, this agreement aims to advance the G.O.H.’s ownership and oversight of an adaptable and self-correcting public health system in Haiti, and to reduce its dependence on donor support over time.
At the end of the five-year period, it is expected that results in maternal and child health, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, other infectious diseases and care for disabilities will improve, and that the G.O.H. will have made significant strides toward assuming primary responsibility for the management and performance monitoring of the overall health system, as well as increasing its financial support.
"By signing this partnership agreement, we want to meet the expectation of the Haitian people by offering a new way of working together that puts the government in the 'driver's seat' We want to reaffirm our commitment to provide resources to support the reconstruction of the Haitian health system" declared Ambassador Merten.
For his part, Prime Minster Laurent Lamothe said, "My government will play its part to ensure that the objectives of this Partnership Framework are met and respected".
The ceremony was also attended by Ambassador Eric Goosby, OGAC Coordinator (Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator); Ms. Lois Quam, Executive Director of Global Health Initiative (GHI); Dr. Florence Guillaume, Minister of Public Health and Population; and Mrs. Charlotte Eddis, Pillar Health Coordinator for the U.S. Government in Haiti.
(Haiti Libre) -
On Tuesday, June 26, 2012, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten signed into effect a Partnership Framework to support Haiti’s Health Strategy.
Through the Global Health Initiative, the US Government is pursuing a comprehensive whole-government approach for global health. The Initiative promotes a new business model to deliver its dual objectives of achieving significant health improvements and creating an effective, efficient and country-led platform for the sustainable delivery of essential health care and public health programs. The signing of this Partnership Framework is an important milestone that demonstrates the political will of the country to begin to take responsibility for the reconstruction and reform of its health system. The agreement illustrates how the USG has established a new way of working with the Government of Haiti on health issues, as the Haitian government begins to take greater ownership of the health program.
The purpose of this Partnership Framework is to refocus the cooperation between the USG and G.O.H. and their respective partners on supporting Haiti’s efforts to improve its health system and to reach the Millennium Development Goals, including promoting maternal and child health and reinforcing the fight against HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. This will be achieved through technical assistance, support for service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial investments.
More specifically, this agreement aims to advance the G.O.H.’s ownership and oversight of an adaptable and self-correcting public health system in Haiti, and to reduce its dependence on donor support over time.
At the end of the five-year period, it is expected that results in maternal and child health, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, other infectious diseases and care for disabilities will improve, and that the G.O.H. will have made significant strides toward assuming primary responsibility for the management and performance monitoring of the overall health system, as well as increasing its financial support.
"By signing this partnership agreement, we want to meet the expectation of the Haitian people by offering a new way of working together that puts the government in the 'driver's seat' We want to reaffirm our commitment to provide resources to support the reconstruction of the Haitian health system" declared Ambassador Merten.
For his part, Prime Minster Laurent Lamothe said, "My government will play its part to ensure that the objectives of this Partnership Framework are met and respected".
The ceremony was also attended by Ambassador Eric Goosby, OGAC Coordinator (Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator); Ms. Lois Quam, Executive Director of Global Health Initiative (GHI); Dr. Florence Guillaume, Minister of Public Health and Population; and Mrs. Charlotte Eddis, Pillar Health Coordinator for the U.S. Government in Haiti.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
ARTICLE - D.R. CONTRACT QUESTIONS
QUESTIONS ON HAITI-DR RECONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS ENTER DOMINICAN ELECTIONS
(Defend Haiti) -
SANTO DOMINGO - The campaign director for the Revolucionario Dominicano Republic (PRD) Party on Wednesday, asked the candidate of the Dominicana Liberation (PLD), Party, Danilo Medina, to make clear his position on accusations of corruption, hanging over Senator Felix Bautista, a close associate of Dominican President Leonel Fernandez.
In a letter released by the Campaign Director of the PRD, Emmanuel Esquea Guerrero, Listin Diario reported, the Senator from San Juan de la Maguana, Bautista, is associated with at least 17 cases of corruption.
The paper included a contract for $130 million and another for $293 million that would have resulted in questionable agreements made during the transition of Haitian President Rene Preval and Michel Martelly.
"Mr. Medina, the country is waiting for your clear answer on these corruption cases of Felix Bautista, your companion to the political committee of the PLD, the main contributor of your campaign and confidant of the President of the Réoublique", the document says that if there is a refusal to fix his position on these corruption cases, the candidate would become an accomplice of Medina, and that the country could continue to be ruled by people indifferent to corruption.
The name of Senator Bautista is also cited as part of a payment of $ 1,200,000.00 [US] to President Alejandro Toledo of Peru for his campaign, according to the document of the PRD.
The Dominican Senate on Tuesday expressed its support to the representative of San Juan de la Maguana, who said that the construction of three thousand homes is his business in Haiti, and is being conducted honestly.
The Engineer, Felix Bautista said he had won tenders under the presidency of René Préval and, subsequently, President Michel Martelly and the former co-chair of the IHRC (Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti ) Bill Clinton.
He claimed to have legal documents that could substantiate his claims and he was ready to show them in due course. He also attacked those who, he says, are trying to discredit his business, believing that he had won through fraudulent bidding procedures, after the earthquake of January 2010.
Bautista also shoots arrows against members of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), which, he says, are panicked that "we will win the elections in the first round" (in May).
(Defend Haiti) -
SANTO DOMINGO - The campaign director for the Revolucionario Dominicano Republic (PRD) Party on Wednesday, asked the candidate of the Dominicana Liberation (PLD), Party, Danilo Medina, to make clear his position on accusations of corruption, hanging over Senator Felix Bautista, a close associate of Dominican President Leonel Fernandez.
In a letter released by the Campaign Director of the PRD, Emmanuel Esquea Guerrero, Listin Diario reported, the Senator from San Juan de la Maguana, Bautista, is associated with at least 17 cases of corruption.
The paper included a contract for $130 million and another for $293 million that would have resulted in questionable agreements made during the transition of Haitian President Rene Preval and Michel Martelly.
"Mr. Medina, the country is waiting for your clear answer on these corruption cases of Felix Bautista, your companion to the political committee of the PLD, the main contributor of your campaign and confidant of the President of the Réoublique", the document says that if there is a refusal to fix his position on these corruption cases, the candidate would become an accomplice of Medina, and that the country could continue to be ruled by people indifferent to corruption.
The name of Senator Bautista is also cited as part of a payment of $ 1,200,000.00 [US] to President Alejandro Toledo of Peru for his campaign, according to the document of the PRD.
The Dominican Senate on Tuesday expressed its support to the representative of San Juan de la Maguana, who said that the construction of three thousand homes is his business in Haiti, and is being conducted honestly.
The Engineer, Felix Bautista said he had won tenders under the presidency of René Préval and, subsequently, President Michel Martelly and the former co-chair of the IHRC (Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti ) Bill Clinton.
He claimed to have legal documents that could substantiate his claims and he was ready to show them in due course. He also attacked those who, he says, are trying to discredit his business, believing that he had won through fraudulent bidding procedures, after the earthquake of January 2010.
Bautista also shoots arrows against members of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), which, he says, are panicked that "we will win the elections in the first round" (in May).
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
ARTICLE - NEW INVESTMENT FUND
NEW INVESTMENT FUND SEEKS TO SPUR JOBS, GROWTH IN HAITI
(Bellingham Herald) - By Jacqueline Charles
MIAMI - The World Bank's private sector arm is investing up to $10 million in Haiti in hopes of spurring jobs and economic growth in the quake-recovering nation.
The investment by the International Finance Corporation is being made into Leopard Capital's Haiti Fund, a new group that plans to invest in small and medium-size businesses after similar success in Cambodia. This is the first time the IFC is making a private equity investment in Haiti.
"Private sector investment is vital to building a strong and stable Haiti, and this transaction can help put the country on the path to economic stability - by supporting local businesses and showcasing Haiti's potential," IFC Executive Vice President and CEO Lars Thunell said. "This fund will work with companies that are critical to job creation, economic growth and the country's continuing recovery from the 2010 earthquake."
Lawrence Mackhoul, an associate with Leopard Capital, said the fund's goal is to raise $75 million - $20 million of which it hopes to raise in the next three months. In addition to the IFC, two other development banks have expressed an interest in investing in the fund, he said. The money will then be invested in four main sectors in Haiti's southern corridor: renewable energy, low- and medium-income housing, agribusiness and hospitality. There is already a team on the ground in Haiti, reviewing possible investments, he said.
Leopard Capital was founded by Douglas Clayton an American, who had lived in Thailand for 25 years. Five years ago, in the middle of the recession, he successfully raised $34 million and created an initial portfolio of 12 investments in privately-held companies in Cambodia. Both Clayton and Mackhoul first visited Haiti last March around the run-off elections where they immediately saw opportunities, Mackhoul said.
(Bellingham Herald) - By Jacqueline Charles
MIAMI - The World Bank's private sector arm is investing up to $10 million in Haiti in hopes of spurring jobs and economic growth in the quake-recovering nation.
The investment by the International Finance Corporation is being made into Leopard Capital's Haiti Fund, a new group that plans to invest in small and medium-size businesses after similar success in Cambodia. This is the first time the IFC is making a private equity investment in Haiti.
"Private sector investment is vital to building a strong and stable Haiti, and this transaction can help put the country on the path to economic stability - by supporting local businesses and showcasing Haiti's potential," IFC Executive Vice President and CEO Lars Thunell said. "This fund will work with companies that are critical to job creation, economic growth and the country's continuing recovery from the 2010 earthquake."
Lawrence Mackhoul, an associate with Leopard Capital, said the fund's goal is to raise $75 million - $20 million of which it hopes to raise in the next three months. In addition to the IFC, two other development banks have expressed an interest in investing in the fund, he said. The money will then be invested in four main sectors in Haiti's southern corridor: renewable energy, low- and medium-income housing, agribusiness and hospitality. There is already a team on the ground in Haiti, reviewing possible investments, he said.
Leopard Capital was founded by Douglas Clayton an American, who had lived in Thailand for 25 years. Five years ago, in the middle of the recession, he successfully raised $34 million and created an initial portfolio of 12 investments in privately-held companies in Cambodia. Both Clayton and Mackhoul first visited Haiti last March around the run-off elections where they immediately saw opportunities, Mackhoul said.
ARTICLE - FRANCE - HAITI DELEGATES
FRENCH MINISTRY TO BRING HAITIAN DELEGATES TO FRANCE
(Sacramento Bee) - By Ministry of the Interior of Haiti
Learning and sharing with French counterparts the goal of Haitian visits, planned to begin in April
PORT-AU-PRINCE - Following a series of meetings between Haiti's Minister of the Interior, Thierry Mayard-Paul and Jean Dussourd, Prefet Referent on Haiti to the French Ministry of the Interior, Mr. Dussourd will be organizing visits to France by Haitian delegations as a way to increase collaboration and information exchange.
"The proposal to bring Haitian delegates to France for learning and best practice, sharing accelerates our strategic goals for evaluating what is working in other countries," said Minister Mayard-Paul. "In this way, we can develop Haitian-branded programs based on the lessons from our counterparts, as we work towards decentralization and job creation."
Decentralization, a top priority for the Martelly administration, recently received a substantial boost based on customizing program models from other developing regions, including Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. "We developed a proprietary Haitian model for community-based decentralization, Katye Pam Poze, after evaluating successful experiences in numerous countries where development has proven elusive," said the minister.
Katye Pam Poze, which launched this month in the city of Jacmel, forms the cornerstone of President Martelly's National Decentralization Agenda. The program received enthusiastic support from all stakeholders, including local and central governments.
According to Minister Mayard-Paul who developed the program and is responsible for its implementation throughout Haiti, the Martelly administration is totally committed to the program and to decentralization as an accelerator for sustainable development and job generation. He adds that Katye Pam Poze has as its basis, the orderly transfer of government services and responsibilities to the local level and the promotion of strong community involvement.
"Decentralization is one of the most promising ways to improve the delivery of government services and to foster development and job creation at the local level," said Mr. Mayard-Paul. "It is also one of the most effective ways to insure that local governments as well as central government are held accountable to the citizens of Haiti. Ultimately, our administration seeks to bring decision-making closer to Haitian citizens."
Citing the five principles of decentralization, Mr. Mayard-Paul said he will work directly with community-based organizations, and that local elected authorities and the leadership of community-based organizations will be responsible for designing and planning the subprojects in an open and participatory manner. "The transfer of resources to the community for the implementation of subprojects is an imperative," he said. "Our expectation is that the community will be directly involved --and personally committed-- in the implementation of each subproject, and they must also become involved in the monitoring and the periodic evaluation of subprojects."
Both Minister Mayard-Paul and Prefet Dussourd are working to strengthen collaborative ties between Haiti and France through continued missions. As expressed by Mr. Mayard-Paul and Mr. Dussourd, both countries can learn from each other. "This is an opportunity to further strengthen municipalities," said Mr. Dussourd. "Working together, we can glean valuable insights from shared, participatory experiences, delegate to delegate, that will benefit the Haitian people and communities throughout the country."
(Sacramento Bee) - By Ministry of the Interior of Haiti
Learning and sharing with French counterparts the goal of Haitian visits, planned to begin in April
PORT-AU-PRINCE - Following a series of meetings between Haiti's Minister of the Interior, Thierry Mayard-Paul and Jean Dussourd, Prefet Referent on Haiti to the French Ministry of the Interior, Mr. Dussourd will be organizing visits to France by Haitian delegations as a way to increase collaboration and information exchange.
"The proposal to bring Haitian delegates to France for learning and best practice, sharing accelerates our strategic goals for evaluating what is working in other countries," said Minister Mayard-Paul. "In this way, we can develop Haitian-branded programs based on the lessons from our counterparts, as we work towards decentralization and job creation."
Decentralization, a top priority for the Martelly administration, recently received a substantial boost based on customizing program models from other developing regions, including Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. "We developed a proprietary Haitian model for community-based decentralization, Katye Pam Poze, after evaluating successful experiences in numerous countries where development has proven elusive," said the minister.
Katye Pam Poze, which launched this month in the city of Jacmel, forms the cornerstone of President Martelly's National Decentralization Agenda. The program received enthusiastic support from all stakeholders, including local and central governments.
According to Minister Mayard-Paul who developed the program and is responsible for its implementation throughout Haiti, the Martelly administration is totally committed to the program and to decentralization as an accelerator for sustainable development and job generation. He adds that Katye Pam Poze has as its basis, the orderly transfer of government services and responsibilities to the local level and the promotion of strong community involvement.
"Decentralization is one of the most promising ways to improve the delivery of government services and to foster development and job creation at the local level," said Mr. Mayard-Paul. "It is also one of the most effective ways to insure that local governments as well as central government are held accountable to the citizens of Haiti. Ultimately, our administration seeks to bring decision-making closer to Haitian citizens."
Citing the five principles of decentralization, Mr. Mayard-Paul said he will work directly with community-based organizations, and that local elected authorities and the leadership of community-based organizations will be responsible for designing and planning the subprojects in an open and participatory manner. "The transfer of resources to the community for the implementation of subprojects is an imperative," he said. "Our expectation is that the community will be directly involved --and personally committed-- in the implementation of each subproject, and they must also become involved in the monitoring and the periodic evaluation of subprojects."
Both Minister Mayard-Paul and Prefet Dussourd are working to strengthen collaborative ties between Haiti and France through continued missions. As expressed by Mr. Mayard-Paul and Mr. Dussourd, both countries can learn from each other. "This is an opportunity to further strengthen municipalities," said Mr. Dussourd. "Working together, we can glean valuable insights from shared, participatory experiences, delegate to delegate, that will benefit the Haitian people and communities throughout the country."
ARTICLE - UN - $1M EMERGENCY AID
$1M OF EMERGENCY AID, FOR ACCESS TO WATER, SANITATION AND HYGIENE
(Haiti Libre)-
The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has awarded a grant of one million dollars from its reserve for "under-funded emergency interventions" to projects of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). This exceptional assistance will help cope with a shortage of funding this year, for projects of access to water, sanitation and hygiene that target the victims of the earthquake of January 2010 the most vulnerable of Haiti.
Nearly 500,000 Haitians still live in camps for over two years in conditions of dire public health and the beginning of the rainy season begins in April, is accompanied by an increase in waterborne diseases including cholera.
This new funding will allow IOM to provide basic public health services to the 60,000 vulnerable displaced people in some 60 camps in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs. A minimum service will be maintained on the Champ de Mars in front of the National Palace, where IOM supports the relocation strategy of the Haitian government for displaced families.
The funds will finance committees responsible for carry water in the camps, to ensure the availability of drinking water and the distribution of oral rehydration solution in case of an outbreak of cholera. They will also be used to finance the maintenance and repair of latrines, to prevent contamination of water sources.
Haitian staff who previously worked for the IOM voluntarily, will be trained and again deployed in camps that have had cases of cholera, to work within the "community action groups", to identify and combat any occurrence of new cases, and encourage a change of hygiene habits.
(Haiti Libre)-
The UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has awarded a grant of one million dollars from its reserve for "under-funded emergency interventions" to projects of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). This exceptional assistance will help cope with a shortage of funding this year, for projects of access to water, sanitation and hygiene that target the victims of the earthquake of January 2010 the most vulnerable of Haiti.
Nearly 500,000 Haitians still live in camps for over two years in conditions of dire public health and the beginning of the rainy season begins in April, is accompanied by an increase in waterborne diseases including cholera.
This new funding will allow IOM to provide basic public health services to the 60,000 vulnerable displaced people in some 60 camps in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs. A minimum service will be maintained on the Champ de Mars in front of the National Palace, where IOM supports the relocation strategy of the Haitian government for displaced families.
The funds will finance committees responsible for carry water in the camps, to ensure the availability of drinking water and the distribution of oral rehydration solution in case of an outbreak of cholera. They will also be used to finance the maintenance and repair of latrines, to prevent contamination of water sources.
Haitian staff who previously worked for the IOM voluntarily, will be trained and again deployed in camps that have had cases of cholera, to work within the "community action groups", to identify and combat any occurrence of new cases, and encourage a change of hygiene habits.
ARTICLE - HAITI, UN MAKE URGENT APPEAL
HAITI, UN MAKE URGENT APPEAL FOR AID AS RAINY SEASON NEARS
(Miami Herald) - By Jacqueline Charles
The United Nations and Haitian government make an urgent appeal for $60 million in aid as a lack of funding hampers efforts rebuilding efforts at the onset of the rainy season.
Efforts to help almost a half-million Haitians living in sprawling tent cities more than two years after a devastating earthquake and the country’s ability to prepare for future disasters are being hampered by dwindling aid dollars, Haiti’s humanitarian community said.
United Nations humanitarian agencies and the Haitian government launched an urgent appeal Tuesday for roughly $60 million in funding to provide services from April to June to camp dwellers, and to help Haiti cope with an ongoing cholera epidemic that is expected to surge with the onset of the rainy season. The appeal comes as a lack of funding continues to force aid organizations to pack up and leave, and as at least one group — the International Red Cross — considers building a hotel and conference center with its remaining funds as part of its exit strategy.
“Haitians are still living in deteriorating shelters and tents literally falling apart while donors sit on cash intended to help them,” said Elise Young, senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, an antipoverty agency working in several camps for victims of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. “A very tangible indication of the lack of donation disbursements is the decline in cholera prevention and response.’’
Philippe Verstraeten, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, said the lack of financial resources at the disposal of the humanitarian community is curtailing its ability to help Haiti’s most vulnerable population affected by a series of shocks, including the earthquake, food insecurity and the cholera epidemic.
The waterborne disease has already claimed more than 7,000 lives and infected 500,000 Haitians, and is expected to spike as the rains intensify. The rainy season has already caused considerable damage to at least five tent cities and up to 65,000 quake victims living in deteriorating shelters face flood risks, said OCHA.
Meanwhile, of the $231 million Haiti’s humanitarian community is seeking for 2012, only 8.5 percent has been funded, the UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator Nigel Fisher said Tuesday. A $382 million humanitarian request made in 2011 only received 55 percent funding.
“Underfunding threatens to stunt growing relocation initiatives to safe housing that already benefited hundreds of thousands,” Fisher said. “It threatens to reverse gains achieved in the fight against cholera through the promotion of sanitary and hygiene practices. It threatens the very existence of hundreds of thousands of [internally displaced persons] still living in camps.
Fisher said the $53.9 million urgent appeal launched Tuesday is needed for the next three months to provide among other things: potable water and hygiene services in camps; flood protection; and cholera response. Funds also will go toward protecting vulnerable camp populations from sexual abuse and violence.
More than two years after the devastation, Haiti, in partnership with Canada, the United States and the International Organization for Migration, has successfully relocated thousands of families out of camps, including the Champ de Mars, a sprawling public plaza in front of the presidential palace. Still, nearly a half million continue to live in potential public health hazard zones as potable water, latrines and waste management services disappear with scarcity of dollars.
The international community’s failure to live up to its pledges after the earthquake also have slowed the recovery, aid officials say. Of the $4.5 billion pledged for the first five years, only 52.88 percent has been disbursed, according to the UN Office of the Special Envoy.
“When there is a disaster, the public responds with tremendous generosity, and those private dollars flow into organizations that are trying to make a difference on the ground,” said Sam Worthington, who heads InterAction, an umbrella group of major international aid groups. “When the public turns its attention elsewhere, what is critical is to come through on the pledges that were made in March right after the earthquake happened. Now is the time for those pledges to come through or otherwise we are in essence forgetting the Haitian people.”
But foreign governments also need confidence in Haiti, which has struggled to provide a stable government. A month after the resignation of Prime Minister Garry Conille over tensions with President Michel Martelly, Haiti remains without a functioning government. A senate commission is expected to present a report Thursday on Martelly’s nominee, Foreign Minister Laurent Lamothe. But observers say things remain unclear as Lamothe faces questions about whether he meets the constitutional requirement to be considered for the job.
“We have seen glimmers of progress in Haiti as governments are partnering with grassroots networks to increase aid oversight and accountability,” Young said. “The international community must step up to its commitments, and partner with the Haitian people, first and foremost to assure that Haitians currently living in [Internally Displaced People] camps and precarious situations have access to decent, sustainable housing and that they are a part of the reconstruction process.”
(Miami Herald) - By Jacqueline Charles
The United Nations and Haitian government make an urgent appeal for $60 million in aid as a lack of funding hampers efforts rebuilding efforts at the onset of the rainy season.
Efforts to help almost a half-million Haitians living in sprawling tent cities more than two years after a devastating earthquake and the country’s ability to prepare for future disasters are being hampered by dwindling aid dollars, Haiti’s humanitarian community said.
United Nations humanitarian agencies and the Haitian government launched an urgent appeal Tuesday for roughly $60 million in funding to provide services from April to June to camp dwellers, and to help Haiti cope with an ongoing cholera epidemic that is expected to surge with the onset of the rainy season. The appeal comes as a lack of funding continues to force aid organizations to pack up and leave, and as at least one group — the International Red Cross — considers building a hotel and conference center with its remaining funds as part of its exit strategy.
“Haitians are still living in deteriorating shelters and tents literally falling apart while donors sit on cash intended to help them,” said Elise Young, senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, an antipoverty agency working in several camps for victims of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. “A very tangible indication of the lack of donation disbursements is the decline in cholera prevention and response.’’
Philippe Verstraeten, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti, said the lack of financial resources at the disposal of the humanitarian community is curtailing its ability to help Haiti’s most vulnerable population affected by a series of shocks, including the earthquake, food insecurity and the cholera epidemic.
The waterborne disease has already claimed more than 7,000 lives and infected 500,000 Haitians, and is expected to spike as the rains intensify. The rainy season has already caused considerable damage to at least five tent cities and up to 65,000 quake victims living in deteriorating shelters face flood risks, said OCHA.
Meanwhile, of the $231 million Haiti’s humanitarian community is seeking for 2012, only 8.5 percent has been funded, the UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator Nigel Fisher said Tuesday. A $382 million humanitarian request made in 2011 only received 55 percent funding.
“Underfunding threatens to stunt growing relocation initiatives to safe housing that already benefited hundreds of thousands,” Fisher said. “It threatens to reverse gains achieved in the fight against cholera through the promotion of sanitary and hygiene practices. It threatens the very existence of hundreds of thousands of [internally displaced persons] still living in camps.
Fisher said the $53.9 million urgent appeal launched Tuesday is needed for the next three months to provide among other things: potable water and hygiene services in camps; flood protection; and cholera response. Funds also will go toward protecting vulnerable camp populations from sexual abuse and violence.
More than two years after the devastation, Haiti, in partnership with Canada, the United States and the International Organization for Migration, has successfully relocated thousands of families out of camps, including the Champ de Mars, a sprawling public plaza in front of the presidential palace. Still, nearly a half million continue to live in potential public health hazard zones as potable water, latrines and waste management services disappear with scarcity of dollars.
The international community’s failure to live up to its pledges after the earthquake also have slowed the recovery, aid officials say. Of the $4.5 billion pledged for the first five years, only 52.88 percent has been disbursed, according to the UN Office of the Special Envoy.
“When there is a disaster, the public responds with tremendous generosity, and those private dollars flow into organizations that are trying to make a difference on the ground,” said Sam Worthington, who heads InterAction, an umbrella group of major international aid groups. “When the public turns its attention elsewhere, what is critical is to come through on the pledges that were made in March right after the earthquake happened. Now is the time for those pledges to come through or otherwise we are in essence forgetting the Haitian people.”
But foreign governments also need confidence in Haiti, which has struggled to provide a stable government. A month after the resignation of Prime Minister Garry Conille over tensions with President Michel Martelly, Haiti remains without a functioning government. A senate commission is expected to present a report Thursday on Martelly’s nominee, Foreign Minister Laurent Lamothe. But observers say things remain unclear as Lamothe faces questions about whether he meets the constitutional requirement to be considered for the job.
“We have seen glimmers of progress in Haiti as governments are partnering with grassroots networks to increase aid oversight and accountability,” Young said. “The international community must step up to its commitments, and partner with the Haitian people, first and foremost to assure that Haitians currently living in [Internally Displaced People] camps and precarious situations have access to decent, sustainable housing and that they are a part of the reconstruction process.”
ARTICLE - D.R. SENATOR - CONTRACTS
PRESSURE MOUNTS ON SENATOR WITH US$385.0 M DEALS IN HAITI
(Dominican Today) -
SANTO DOMINGO – Pressure is mounting on ruling party PLD senator Felix Bautista, when on Tuesday, his party and congressional colleague urged him to clearly explain his contracts reportedly worth US$385.0 million with the Haitian Government for the construction of major works, and the Justice Minister warned that he would proceed if provided with evidence.
Senator Luis René Canaán said Bautista, senator for San Juan de la Maguana province, should provide proof of his innocence in this “transparent” manner, on the contracts in Haiti. “I feel that senator Felix Bautista has always been a transparent man.”
Justice minister Radhamés Jiménez said the lawmaker, one of president Leonel Fernandez’s closest collaborators, must explain to the country how he obtained the contracts, and warned that if there was graft, the Justice Ministry will proceed, because it cannot react to speculations or rumors.
The official added that no formal accusation has been lodged against Bautista thus far. “If there are concrete facts against a person, the Justice Ministry acts with objectivity, but not on a simple rumor.”
(Dominican Today) -
SANTO DOMINGO – Pressure is mounting on ruling party PLD senator Felix Bautista, when on Tuesday, his party and congressional colleague urged him to clearly explain his contracts reportedly worth US$385.0 million with the Haitian Government for the construction of major works, and the Justice Minister warned that he would proceed if provided with evidence.
Senator Luis René Canaán said Bautista, senator for San Juan de la Maguana province, should provide proof of his innocence in this “transparent” manner, on the contracts in Haiti. “I feel that senator Felix Bautista has always been a transparent man.”
Justice minister Radhamés Jiménez said the lawmaker, one of president Leonel Fernandez’s closest collaborators, must explain to the country how he obtained the contracts, and warned that if there was graft, the Justice Ministry will proceed, because it cannot react to speculations or rumors.
The official added that no formal accusation has been lodged against Bautista thus far. “If there are concrete facts against a person, the Justice Ministry acts with objectivity, but not on a simple rumor.”
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
ARTICLE - D.R. - INFRASTRUCTURE
FERNANDEZ ANNOUNCES DONATIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HAITI
(Dominican Today) -
Santo Domingo - President Fernandez, on Monday announced the delivery of 2.0 million stoves, and the same number of medium size propane gas tanks free of charge for poor homes in Haiti, aimed at substituting the use of charcoal with cooking gas.
The donation forms part of the agreements signed by Haiti president Michel Martelly and Fernandez and through the recently created Bolivarian Fund.
That Fund will also finance the construction of a 138 kilowatt link to Haiti’s and the Dominican Republic’s national electrical grids, aimed at making the neighboring country’s energy system more efficient.
Fernandez said among the projects in Haiti are: the repair of the Artibonito dam, the construction of eight hospitals in border towns; four in Jimani, Dajabon, Elias Piña and Pedernales, and four others in Malpasse, Belladere, Anse-a-Pitre and Ouanaminthe.
(Dominican Today) -
Santo Domingo - President Fernandez, on Monday announced the delivery of 2.0 million stoves, and the same number of medium size propane gas tanks free of charge for poor homes in Haiti, aimed at substituting the use of charcoal with cooking gas.
The donation forms part of the agreements signed by Haiti president Michel Martelly and Fernandez and through the recently created Bolivarian Fund.
That Fund will also finance the construction of a 138 kilowatt link to Haiti’s and the Dominican Republic’s national electrical grids, aimed at making the neighboring country’s energy system more efficient.
Fernandez said among the projects in Haiti are: the repair of the Artibonito dam, the construction of eight hospitals in border towns; four in Jimani, Dajabon, Elias Piña and Pedernales, and four others in Malpasse, Belladere, Anse-a-Pitre and Ouanaminthe.
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