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. When
the NGOs first descended post-quake, there was all 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 .
