Oct
13
What Haiti Needs Now
In a remarkable report marking nine months since the earthquake, HUMNEWS gives us a daunting picture of life in Haiti: still more than one million people living in tent cities, less than 2% of the rubble cleared in Port-au-Prince, and only a small amount of the money collected being released for relief and reconstruction.
The reality is that the situation is even worse than the report suggests. There are also a million or more other “internally displaced persons,” who have returned to local communities where inadequate conditions are being further overwhelmed. The HUMNEWS report calculates that the $11 billion pledged works out to about $110 per year for each of Haiti’s 10 million citizens; but the reality is that less than 20% of the amount pledged is likely to ever materialize. There are some very positive initiatives being undertaken by NGOs and by private companies, but there is a much greater level of need and of opportunity than is being addressed.
According to the HUMNEWS report,
Last week’s Haiti Huddle 2010 an effort of Helping Hands for a Sustainable Haiti, an organization founded by Lisa McFadin and Thera N. Kalmijn at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, brought together development, humanitarian and investment experts from both the US, Haiti and from other countries tackled several crucial issues.
The groups’ main mission was to work on breaking the logjam of red tape which has seemingly kept 1.3 million people living in refugee camps for the past nine months by focusing on culturally-appropriate solutions for and by Haitians; and working on practical sustainable solution to recreate an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable Haiti.
According to John Engle, of Haiti Partners, “Education and community infrastructure are the foundation to get to a meaningful development plan. The country must recognize what got us here. A lack of investment in education and lack of cultural sensitivity and in fact connectivity and communication is why little to no progress has been made in the emergency of what many Haitians are still dealing with.“
Sam Bloch, Country Coordinator in Haiti of Grass Roots United says, “There were literally hundreds of NGO’s on the ground before the earthquake focusing on community empowerment, collaboration and providing basic resources. But even before the earthquake the fabric of this community was torn and broken. Starting now it must be re-woven. The Haitian community in country and in the larger Diaspora must re-unite and mobilize, in collaboration with all the organizations that pushed us aside after the disaster. We need to reconnect the service providers for such services as counseling, education, water, structures, food systems with community leaders.”
In fact one of the most important efforts that must be made according to Douglas Cohen, Founder of the Sustainable Haiti Coalition is, “Massive investments in education for longer term solutions, jobs, building schools, and revamping curriculum that includes wireless transmission for the whole country and which provides educational materials, and increases teachers’ salaries; paving the way to inter-active curricula; films, and video highlighting Haitian success stories, with Haitians implementing their own solutions.”
At an Earth Institute seminar on October 12, Paul Levy and Alex Fischer of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, described a typical pattern of underinvestment in sustainable development, waiting for things to fall apart, spending huge sums of money to patch them up, and then turning off the spigot. They also reported difficulties finding collaborators with any command of the French language (never mind Creole, which the great majority of the population speak) or understanding of quantitative methods; a lack of current reporting on the level of environmental degradation, soil erosion, land tenure, rainfall patterns and other essential data; little coordination and information-sharing amongst NGOs; and a series of “nested vicious circles” in which repeated natural disasters further weaken and overwhelm communities’ ability to respond. (A video of an earlier conversation between Levy and Fischer, with much of their assessment and analysis, is posted at http://www.earth.columbia.edu/videos/watch/194.)
The challenge, according to Levy and Fischer, is to discover and demonstrate models that show positive results on a local level that can then be scaled up to a national level. While the facts remain discouraging, one result of their work is the Haiti Regeneration Initiative, a unique “neutral” partnership that is “Haitian government and UN and other partners endorsed but owned by its members,” and offers:
- Technical support;
- Working within a pre-defined government endorsed strategic framework;
- Increased project visibility and assistance in resource mobilisation;
- Use of pre-established and proven principles, quality standards, methodologies and processes for the development of multi-party programmes and projects.
What Haiti needs now is to significantly expand the level of investment, of sustainable development, and of assistance to achieve income growth, soil regeneration, reforestation, flood control, and economic diversity. This means reversing the trajectory of failure, and beginning the journey to ecological restoration and economic recovery.