Haiti - A Year On

Natural disasters killed 295,000 in 2010 such as in floods in Pakistan and China but there was also the earthquake in Haiti.

5 pm last January 12 an earthquake rattled through the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, for around 90 seconds measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. That hardly makes it a blockbuster. Bigger quakes happen somewhere in the world every few months. Breeze-block dwellings were no match for the quake, which had its epicentre 16 miles away. Thanks to non-existent building codes, many of the city's larger structures tumbled like a house of cards. A total of around 300,000 perished. By most estimates, around 1.5m people - which equates to roughly a quarter of the population of Haiti - were made homeless by the quake. It damaged over 190,000 houses and destroyed over 105,000. To-day, one year on, nearly 1 million people still remain under tents or tarpaulins intended as temporary shelter and rubble still clogs Port-au-Prince, reflecting a "year of indecision" which has put recovery on hold, according to Oxfam. Only 5% of rubble has been cleared. Privately, aid agencies have said it is easier to raise funds for shelters and medical treatment than to clear debris which, one said, is "less emotional, less sexy". The AP stated that “Out of every US$100 of US contracts now paid out to rebuild Haiti, Haitian firms have successfully won US$1.60." That’s less than 2 percent of contracted rebuilding funds going to local businesses.
An Amnesty International reports that armed men prey with impunity on girls and women in displacement camps, worsening the trauma of having lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones. Gerardo Ducos, the advocacy group's Haiti researcher, said:"This has so far been largely ignored in the response to the wider humanitarian crisis."

Though donors have pledged about $2.1bn (£1.4bn) the actual deployment of program funding has been agonizingly slow and haphazard, according to the UN's special envoy for Haiti, only 42% of that was spent.. Talk of permanent, sustainable rebuilding of infrastructure and housing is suspended in political limbo, with hundreds of thousands still warehoused in tents. Not even the majority of the earthquake rubble has been cleared, according to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. 4,000 western aid workers are still in the country. The spread of cholera is the culmination of overlapping health disasters. The death toll from an outbreak of cholera in Haiti has risen to over 3,300 with estimates of as many as 400,000 cholera cases , the outbreak exposed structural flaws in humanitarian health care and understandable public distrust of the aid regime. The international medical response, meanwhile, hasn’t even come close to confronting the underlying causes of the outbreak, including chronically deficient, underfunded water systems.
The cholera response highlighted the point that thousands of preventable deaths occurred. Unni Karunakara of International Council of Médecins Sans Frontières criticised the “cluster” system that ropes together different organizations under U.N. authority. “Co-ordination of aid organisations may sound good to government donors seeking political influence,” he writes. “In Haiti, though, the system is legitimising NGOs that claim responsibility for health, sanitation or other areas in a specific zone, but then do not have the capacity or know-how to carry out the necessary work. As a result, people’s needs go unmet.”
Roland van Hauwermeiren, the country's Oxfam's director, said "Too many donors from rich countries have pursued their own aid priorities and have not effectively coordinated amongst themselves or worked with the Haitian government,"

Foreign NGOs, Haitian officials and civil society groups could all find reasons to blame each other for the ongoing crisis. Like it or not, though, sustainable recovery demands cooperation.

Much of the havoc wreaked throughout Haiti was due to the lack of development and rampant poverty prior to the quake. "The quake seriously undermined what little was there before," Save the Children President and CEO Charlie MacCormack said. "It all just got even weaker."

An earthquake might have caused the natural disaster, but in Haiti - 12 months on - poverty is the real killer. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of the haiti earthquake or disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane are clearly related to the degree of their poverty.

SOYMB has covered the Haiti tragedy in a number of blogging posts. A year ago it directed attention to a Lancet report that said "... the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of “jostling for position” and needless competition for funds.“Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” "

A year on and little changed.