THE NGO REPUBLIC OF HAITI
(The Nation) - By Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman
Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation
Institute and the Puffin Foundation.
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. 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.
