Half a year after the devastating magnitude 7 earthquake, Haiti still lies in ruins, leaving people with little hope and the government the monumental task of rebuilding what was destroyed.
After months of planning and billions in aid pledges, some 1.5 million Haitians are still homeless and have little access to basic social services.
Where Has the Money Gone?
In March, donors pledged to contribute some USD10 billion to support Haiti’s reconstruction efforts. But the release of the funding appears to be as sluggish as the Caribbean nation’s rehabilitation.
Of the USD10 billion, some USD2.5 billion is expected to be provided by the end of 2010. However, through June 30, only about 10 percent of the committed money for this year has so far been released, according to data compiled by the office of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who is now the United Nations envoy to Haiti.
U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said that not enough aid has reached Haiti, stressing that urgent humanitarian relief is only being financed at 60 percent, Ban told BBC Radio July 6.
The U.N. in February first appealed for nearly USD1.5 billion to address immediate humanitarian needs such as food, water, shelter and medicine through the rest of 2010. Only USD530 million, or 36 percent of the sum, has been collected.
“We don’t have the resources to do everything. We are trying to do our best,” Nigel Fisher, the U.N.’s chief humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, was quoted by The Miami Herald. “There is a long way to go for the donor community to meet its obligation.”
Charities and aid groups have mobilized an estimated USD1.2 billion in the weeks after the Jan. 12 earthquake. But Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive wonders where all this money has gone.
“Millions and millions have been received and we have no idea what they have done with that money,” Bellerive said in an interview with The Miami Herald.
Non-governmental organizations say they are setting aside money for reconstruction instead of spending on relief efforts. The American Red Cross, for instance, has spent only about one-fourth of the USD465 million it has mobilized for Haitian relief.
The Red Cross is now targeting long-term development programs such as building the first of 30,000 transitional homes in Jacmel and Leogane to help move people out of tent camps before the hurricane season, said Julie Sell, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Haiti.
“We are now in a kind of transitional phase,” Sell was quoted by The Miami Herald. “What the Red Cross is trying to do is not spend money fast, but spend money wisely.”
Donors in March committed some USD5.3 billion in long-term aid for Haiti, which is earmarked for the next 18 months.
More financing for may be coming soon, The Miami Herald said. The U.S. Congress could vote this week on a spending bill, which covers more than USD700 million for Haitian reconstruction. The U.S. pledged some USD1.2 billion, including $253 million in debt relief, for Haiti.
Fisher said he believes donors have been waiting for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission to be up and running before releasing funding.
The 26-member commission, which met for the first time in June, has yet to propose a specific rehabilitation project. Headed by Bill Clinton and Bellerive, the commission does not have a permanent director yet.
The commission, which meets again later this month, “has clearly failed in its task,” The Guardian said, suggesting that the IHRC needs to be reinforced by recruiting “a figure who will show proper commitment and who has the diplomatic skills and global authority to extract from donors the money they have promised and to restore a sense of purpose to the Haitian government.”
ActionAid agreed with The Guardian’s observation. The organization declared July 9 that Haiti’s reconstruction plans were flawed.
“The rebuilding, overseen by a special commission led by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, reflects the wishes of donor countries – mainly the U.S. and the EU – rather than the needs of Haitians themselves,” ActionAid said.
Bellerive said the government has a pipeline full of projects but funding is missing.
“How do you communicate a vision of the future when you are still waiting for a real start of the execution of the commitments to create that same future? How do you communicate when obviously things are done without any coordination with the government?” Bellerive said. “It’s not only the hundreds of thousands of people [in the camps]. Our obligations are just as crucial for the millions who were suffering from the lack of basic services and opportunities even before the earthquake,” Bellerive was quoted by The Miami Herald.
Lack of Political Capacity
As Haiti’s rehabilitation moves at a slow pace, President Rene Preval’s administration takes much of the blame.
U.S. senators, for one, said that Preval and his government failed to assure Haitians that they are in charge and leading the rebuilding effort. A report put together by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee notes that the nation’s rehabilitation process has “stalled.”
“As the sense of immediate crisis has subsided, so has the sense of urgency to take bold action – the ‘reimagination of Haiti’ hoped for months ago – and the commitment to prevent a return to the dysfunctional, unsustainable ways of life past,” The Vancouver Sun quoted the report.
The Haitian government also drew flak from international organizations for creating obstacles of its own such as delays in clearing supplies through customs, The New York Times reports.
“Politics did not cause the earthquake, but political will might have softened the impact. But Haiti’s battered government has struggled to cope. It was ill-equipped in terms of resources and administrative skills before 12 January and many officials lost their lives that day. Since then, only the flimsiest of reconstruction plans have emerged,” according to The Guardian.
The weakness of the Haitian government has in turn hampered the operations of aid groups, which, The Guardian said, don’t want to bypass the Haitian state.
“A national government must be involved in order for aid to be properly coordinated and to have legitimacy. Even if they wanted to, charities cannot start running Haiti without money and without an explicit mandate,” The Guardian said.
Haitian and U.N. officials call for patience, pointing to accomplishments in providing emergency food, water and shelter, as well as preventing starvation, exodus and violence.
“What hasn’t happened is worth noting,” U.N.’s Fisher was quoted by The New York Times. “We haven’t had a major outbreak of disease. We haven’t had a major breakdown in security.”
The Haitian government also lost large numbers of civil servants and needs to juggle “conflicting pressures” from international donors, according to The New York Times.
NGOs in Disarray
Even as the Haitian government is being blamed for Haiti’s sluggish rehabilitation, NGOs are also said to be hampering the nation’s recovery. Coordinating the operations of aid groups in Haiti has posed another challenge in rebuilding the Caribbean country.
Officials of the Caribbean Community have raised their concern on “the unwillingness of the resource-rich non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active on the ground to align and co-ordinate their operations with the priorities of the government of Haiti,” CBC News reports.
Between 8,000 to 10,000 aid groups are operating in Haiti.
NGOs have been slow to follow even in areas where the Haitian government has made efforts, according to The Miami Herald, citing the failure of NGOs to build temporary shelters in huge swaths of land at two camps cleared by the government.
Aid workers are baffled by the complexity of the disaster in Port-au-Prince, where social, education and health services were already lacking even before the earthquake.
“This is the hardest thing that any of us have done in a long, long time,” David Morley, president of Save the Children Canada, was quoted by The Vancouver Sun.
Shelter: Most Immediate Concern Now
With the onset of the rainy season, aid groups say shelter remains the biggest concern for some 1.5 million Haitians residing in makeshift camps. Emergency shelters built with tents, tarpaulins and plastic sheeting are wearing out.
The construction of shelters is being hindered by concerns on rubble removal and land titles.
The Canadian Red Cross has not yet been able to commence large-scale production of transitional hurricane-proof shelters due to the lack of suitable land.
“A lot of space is occupied by the rubble. Basically, there is a lack of land where we can put up those shelters,” Jean-Philippe Tizi, the Canadian Red Cross’ director of Haiti operations, was quoted by The Vancouver Sun. “We don’t have a large green field where we could build a large number of shelters for a large number of families.”
Haiti will need some 125,000 transitional shelters, international experts estimate. Only more than 5,500 shelters have been completed, according to The New York Times.
Aid groups have been reluctant to construct transitional or permanent shelters in communities where land title is unclear, CBC News reports. The report by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said that “key land-policy decisions have been inexplicably delayed.”
Some of the 1,200 camps sit on private lands whose ownership is now unknown as records were destroyed by the massive earthquake.
Some landowners are evicting camp dwellers despite a moratorium on forced evictions by the Haitian government and the U.N. in April. The accord “has not been publicized and there is no one to enforce it,” CBC News reports.
Haitian businessman Vladimir Saint-Louis, for instance, has allowed fellow Haitians to live in his 400-meter soccer field following the massive earthquake. But six months after the disaster, Saint-Louis has become frustrated.
“All the government officials we sent letters to, all the letters went unanswered,” Saint-Louis told CNN.
Leslie Voltaire, Haiti’s special envoy to the U.N., said permanent housing will be eventually built.
“In October, several dozen model homes will be built and displayed at a housing expo in Oranger, Haiti. People will be selected to live in the prototypes and to evaluate them,” Voltaire was quoted by The New York Times.
Since May, Preval has been working to relocate earthquake survivors into new semi-permanent communities. His plan, which the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee described as still in “early draft form,” has yet to fully materialize.
One of the government-selected shelter communities in Corail-Cesse Lesse is so remote that it offers little mobility or employment opportunities for residents.
“That site does not represent clear strategic thinking on the part of the government,” Julie Schindall, a spokeswoman in Haiti for Oxfam, was quoted by the New York Times. “It’s like Sudan. There’s not a tree in sight. And people feel marooned. They are having major issues finding income-generating activities and soon they are going to have trouble feeding themselves. It’s inevitable.”
Haiti, Six Months from Now
With six months to go before the Haitian earthquake’s first anniversary, experts still don’t foresee things turning around for the Caribbean nation.
Erik Johnson, head of humanitarian response for DanChurchAid, expects that true recovery will remain elusive after another half year. Disasters, he said, tend to follow a fairly consistent trajectory, CBC News reports.
By then, people will still be in camps but numbers will have started to thin out, there will be large international presence, and rehabilitation of housing, schools and other public buildings will have commenced, Johnson said.
U.N. humanitarian spokesman Imogen Wall gave a blunt response when asked about Haiti’s condition six months from now.
“It will take time to get 1.5 million people back into the kind of long-term living arrangements that they want and need,” she was quoted by CNN.
Some mechanism should be created to engage ordinary Haitians in the process of rebuilding their society to allow citizens to have a clear stake in the nation’s future, according to The Guardian.
“With elections due in the autumn, and an impoverished population feeling betrayed, there is a great danger that the country will slip back towards the endemic violence that has plagued it in the past,” The Guardian said.
Polls for president, the chamber and a third of the Haitian senate are slated for Nov. 28, CBC News reports.
“The international community is quite capable of intervening on an epic scale when fired up with sufficient political will. With regard to Haiti, the failure of that will looks like a monument to western dishonesty. Haiti was promised a better future,” The Guardian concludes.
