Haiti - Five Year After

Five years after a massive earthquake killed 200,000 people in Haiti, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is still appealing for funds. Five years after the earthquake, the UN warns progress is threatened by poverty and inequality. Five years after the earthquake, what does Haiti vave to show for $13 billion in aid?

“Five years later, the money that came didn’t build anything, the same structural problems remain the same and we are back to the same level of debt prior to the earthquake,” said Gregory Brandt, president of the Economic Forum, “The country is better off in one aspect, security,” he added. “But it’s fragile because there hunger, poverty, job creation and decentralization still haven’t been addressed.”

Today, some three million Haitians remain unsure where their next meal will come from. To provide them the essential food they require, about $28 million will be needed in 2015. “Persistent chronic poverty and inequality, environmental degradation and continuing political uncertainty threaten achievements Haitians have made over the past five years,” WFP’s representative in Haiti, Wendy Bigham, warned. 

"You have donors disburse money, but that doesn't mean all that money is spent on the ground," said Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "If the expectation was to build back better and transform Haiti's public sector, then yes, by any measure it's been a failure," Johnston told NBC News. 

Across Haiti, 85,000 people still live in crude displacement camps and many more in deplorable conditions. At least 200,000 people are in new hillside slums, known as Canaan-Jerusalem, where there are wooden and tin homes but no running water, electricity or sanitation yet. A government audit in 2013 found that USAID underestimated how much would be needed for settlements, ballooned the budget from $59 million to $97 million while cutting its goal from 15,000 houses to 2,649. It's put up about 900 so far.

"We realized we are not going to come anywhere close to building the kind of housing stock Haiti requires," said Hogan, saying the focus has shifted to financing so Haitians can build or improve homes themselves.

"If you gave $10 to the American Red Cross, eventually, 90 percent of that money would have gotten spent on something — part of a tarp to go over a family's head, part of a bag of rice to feed a couple of people, salary or transportation for American aid worker. That money would have been spent very, very quickly," Katz said. "But there's no practical connection between putting a tarp over someone's head on Day 3 or 7 and putting a roof over someone's head five years later."

Of the government buildings under construction, all except for the Supreme Court, are being built by the Dominican firm HADOM/ROFI. They are behind schedule and over the holidays the company stopped work, said Guillaume Innocent, who’s in charge of the projects for the government’s Unit for Housing Construction and Public Buildings (ULCBP). The contracts were given as part of a controversial no-bid deal, totaling more than $200 million, to a company owner and influential Dominican Senator Felix Bautista. Bautista, facing court action, is accused of wielding his influence to win the post-earthquake contracts.

Some global development analysts say that the spending structure — with the vast majority of money being funneled through foreign contractors instead of the Haitian government or local outfits — has built-in inefficiencies, compounded by a lack of accountability and transparency. The new goal is to put 17 percent of funding in Haitian hands. A North Carolina company that was paid $12.9 million to develop a Creole-based school curriculum yet the US AID's inspector general, noted that some team members didn't even speak French.

Then there's the troubling case of Fugees rapper Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti charity, which took in $16 million in 2010 on the strength of his star-power, and spent more than $4 million on internal expenses like salaries, consultants, travel and office and warehouse expenses. Yele dissolved in 2012 amid questions about its bookkeeping and payouts, and the New York attorney general's office said this week it is still investigating the group's finances. On a smaller scale, North Carolina authorities yanked the license of a charity called Share Our Shoes after finding more than $50,000 in questionable expenses.

What SOYMB blogged at the time