Aug
26
Sustainable Haiti Coalition: Progress Report August 2010
Download PDF Version: ProgressReportontheCoalition29AugFinal
The Coalition was founded in March 2010 at the Sustainable Haiti conference in Miami. Over the recent months, we have been actively engaged establishing in growing the Coalition and creating the conditions to build its infrastructure and ensure success. This report speaks to current members, individuals and organizations who’ve signed up to be informed of the work of the SHC and is further addressed to the nearly 60 attendees at our UN Global Compact Leaders Summit Haiti Side Event in June, and to many of the attendees at the Kylti Cultural Economy Forum at the Haitian Embassy in Washington on August 20-21. And finally, it is addressed to the Haitian, American, and Haitian-American communities at large.
The Coalition is a vehicle to promote a suite of sustainable solutions — in housing, agriculture, industry and tourism, and higher education; and to support the professionalizing of the business, health care, public service and social services sectors. The Coalition exists to express the views of its members, but also to go beyond this and propose solutions that are only made possible through broad collaboration with a cross-section of social institutions.
To make this possible, we are proposing a participatory structure that will provide the Coalition with the resources and structural mechanisms needed to engage Haiti’s challenges and opportunities, and address these in sustainable ways. By inviting individuals and organizations to join our Founders’ Circle, our Leadership Council, populate committees or serve on one of our advisory groups, we are creating opportunities for members to make meaningful investments in Haiti’s long term future.
Our areas of engagement are in:
- Information-sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and coordination in the interests of sustainable development
- Planning and design—for homes, communities, coops, and businesses
- Restoring higher education
- Mobilizing the private sector—investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation—and providing a conduit for sustainable sourcing, CSR reporting, and sustainable business facilitation
- Professionalizing staff, management development and leadership capacity throughout the country
- Fostering ecologically-oriented work-study programs
Like many others observing the reconstruction “from the outside,” we are disturbed by the slow pace of efforts to bring immediate relief to the nearly 1.5 million who remain in tent cities, to restore public services, and to begin to make significant public and private investment. Of the $6.5 billion promised by international donors, only about 10% has materialized, and little of this is truly available for sustainable projects. Port-au-Prince remains in ruins, with less than 5% of the rubble removed; the government has very limited capacities, and the international organizations are still “trying to get organized” to take effective action.
Meanwhile, some of our members, along with many others, are already engaged in meaningful action on the ground, and need support to expand their efforts and tie them into a longer-term sustainable vision. Those closest to the scene and charged with assessing needs and developing master plans have issued meaningful reports and proposals (listed under Resources -> Key Documents).
- The broad outlines of the official response, through the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, have been laid out. The challenge is now one of implementing these large visions, and setting Haiti on course to meeting its needs, leveraging its resources, and initiating the “economic miracle” that Robert Greenhill, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum in Davos and former head of CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency), fully believes is possible.
- The WEF recently released a remarkable report entitled “Innovations in Corporate Global Citizenship: Responding to the Haiti Earthquake,” that calls on the private sector to play a greater role and demonstrates some of the work already being done through a series of case studies. We plan to study this in detail and provide more information about it to our members.
- CIDA has also recently released a statement affirming its commitment to Haiti, and reporting on what it has already contributed and accomplished, spending more than $150 million to date. (See however this assessment, which questions the veracity of Canada’s and other countries’ claims: Canada’s Aid to Haiti.)
Part of our role, as we have seen it, is to make contact with the “major players” in Haiti’s future, while never losing sight of the reality that what matters are the outcomes on the ground. In addition to the UN Global Compact Side Event (the report of which is here: ReportontheHaitiSideEvent24Jun10), which we organized in collaboration with UNA-Haiti, BCUN, and others, we have also met with the Clinton Foundation, CGI-U, the Soros Economic Development Fund, and spoken with BSR, USAID-HED, and several others, while maintaining close contact with a number of smaller NGOs, philanthropies, and design professionals.
What we’ve learned is that much is happening that is going largely unreported—from the Haitian Government’s “Request for Proposals” on transitional shelters and communities, organized by the British design firm, which closed on July 19, to BET founder Robert L. Johnson’s pledge to build a factory for earthquake- and hurricane-resistant building panels in Cap-Haitien, to the remarkable accomplishments of Enersa, which manufactured many of the solar street lamps that survived the quake, and received a $15,000 loan from the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) to rebuild its damaged factory—and that there is a huge need for real-time information for businesses and nonprofits alike.
We hope to be part of meeting this need, by helping to build better software that will capture and map activities in multiple dimensions, and provide the kinds of CSR reports that companies such as those that are members of the Global Compact and of Business for Social Responsibility need to do more sourcing in Haiti.
In fact, we’ve done some visual mapping of our activities and connections:
—which is also available in a list form which serves as something of a road map for our own activities: SustainableHaitiCoalitionMindmap. Needless to say, a work in progress. (We’ve also recently added a “ClustrMap” to our site, which will track where the visits to our site are coming from.)
In addition, we’ve started work in earnest on several proposals:
- Developing the Coalition into a powerful mechanism for influencing policy, planning, and action on the ground reflecting the broad principles of sustainable development and the immediate needs of Haitian communities
- Developing a network of sustainable business incubators in Haiti, and supporting the mobilization of private sector investment and engagement
- Supporting capacity building in the Government of Haiti and in civil society organizations
- Working with institutions of higher education on student exchange programs, reconstruction, and the development of new research programs
- And collaborating with several other organizations, including Haiti Onward, Terreform + Michael Sorkin Studio, Solh Design Workshop, and others on proposals in a wide range of sectors.
These proposals will form the basis for supporting our work both here and in Haiti. A lot of work is needed here as well as on the ground: marshaling resources, obtaining funding, and monitoring the international response.
In fact, some would argue that what’s needed in Haiti is more of what’s already being generated there: communities self-organizing, including in the camps; microloans and micro-entrepreneurs; and NGO-driven basic community development, around such things as clean water and composting toilets. The money donated (or promised) by the international community is not “Haiti’s money.” Whether we like it or not, it will be spent by the donors for their own purposes. Given that this is the case, it’s more important to influence how it is spent than to carp about it from the sidelines; and doing this takes concerted attention. The only way we can continue to focus on these issues is by receiving some level of financial support to do so.
Consequently we’re inviting people and organizations to join us as contributors, and put in both time and money to make this work an ongoing effort, uniting the principles of sustainable development, the concerns of the global community, and the voices of Haitians. Please please download and complete our current membership form, and send us information on your activities and how we can support and assist you.
Thank you, Douglas Cohen and Jonathan Cloud, co-founders