Still waiting in Haiti-Added COMMENTARY By Haitian-Truth

Almost three years after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, more than a third of a million Haitians are still living in tent cities. This shocking failure illustrates the limitations of the international aid system.

Humanity is pretty good at pitching in with disaster relief in emergencies — in getting medicine, food and water to people who need it. What we clearly don’t know how to do, on a grand scale, is build enough capacity in a fragile state to rebuild after a disaster and protect against the next one.

The problem isn’t a lack of money. Public donors pledged $9.5 billion US for relief and recovery in Haiti from 2010 to 2012. More than two-thirds of that has been disbursed.

But only $215 million — two per cent of the total pledged — has been disbursed for housing, and much of that still hasn’t been spent.

It’s hard to think of any need greater than housing, after the initial rescue and relief effort. Yet in Haiti, everything from highway construction to agriculture seems to have taken precedence over housing.

Part of the problem is that donors have their own priorities and their own well-worn ruts, and the Haitian government is as much a bottleneck as a channel. Everybody had a pet project in the months following the earthquake, and many of those projects are now half-finished or acknowledged failures.

It might seem that the answer is for a highly co-ordinated, top-down international approach — just go in and build the country up, like a game of SimCity. But the now-defunct Interim Haiti Recovery Commission never turned into that, and that’s probably a blessing. The massive foreign presence in Haiti, well-meaning as it is, seems to be politically toxic and it eats up money that could be enriching the Haitian economy. Disaster resistance isn’t just about concrete and rebar — it’s about institutions and jobs.

Canadians, as donors, have a keen interest in seeing a more effective approach to Haitian aid. Nobody wants to see much-needed money dribble away into meetings and reports while the humanitarian crisis persists.

Ottawa Citizen.com

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COMMENT: HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG
Like shutting the barn door, after the horse is gone.

The problems were obvious, even as the dust from the quake was still settling. The entire operation was a Chinese Fire Drill as ONGs ran over each other, in an effort to find a lucrative place at the trough. ONGs talked to ONGs and other ONGs, then to MUNISTAH…. but no one talked to the Haitians.

There was absolutely no control over any of the money and most of the billions was siphoned off. Someone should take a close look at the big pigs… the RED CROSS, CHEMONICS, OXFAM, THE CLINTON FOUNDATION to name a few.  Others, like IRD, threw millions into houses in Leogane and then distributed these to people who didn’t need them. These people then sold them to people who did need them and had some money.

Those without money – and that means most Haitians, are still in tents.

In any other world, the guilty would go to prison.

Unfortunately, this is Haiti and the guilty go to fine restaurants and drive big cars while the poor go nowhere.

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