Associated Press
By TRENTON DANIEL
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Attorney Reynold Georges showed up with a judge and a police officer on a recent afternoon at Camp Acra, a cluster of tents and plywood shelters scattered across rocky hills dotted with trees in the heart of the Haitian capital. The lawyer told the camp of some 30,000 people that they were squatting on his land and had to leave, witnesses said. If they didn't vacate, he said he'd have the place burned down and leveled by bulldozers. Camp leader Elie Joseph Jean-Louis said other angry residents, who had lost their homes in a catastrophic 2010 earthquake, fought back by lobbing rocks at Georges and the people he had come with. The camp residents managed to protect their homes that day but they also brought to life a far-reaching problem. In the few weeks since the mid-April confrontation, their plight has become a symbol for what many say is the growing use of threats and sometimes outright violence to clear out sprawling displaced person camps, where some 320,000 Haitians still live.
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The standoff set off a chain of events that left several shelters burned and a camp resident dead. It occurred a little more than a week before the human rights group Amnesty International issued a report on the jump in camp evictions in Haiti over the past year. "This terrible event is proof of the consequences of continuing forced evictions in Haiti," Javier Zuniga, a special adviser to Amnesty International, said in a statement about the standoff. "They have been living in camps with appalling living conditions. As if this were not enough, they are threatened with forced evictions and, eventually, made homeless again." Georges tells a different story. The former senator, whose most famous law client is former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, denied that he had threatened residents, saying he was only there to show officials what he said was his land. "If they said that, they are crooks and liars," Georges said of camp residents. After Amnesty released its report, Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamonthe told The Associated Press that the government of President Michel Martelly was in fact trying to stop the evictions. The government does not "believe in forced evictions," Lamonthe said. "There are some private owners that do it, but the government itself does not condone that."
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Haitians displaced by the earthquake are entitled to special legal protection under the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which prohibit forced evictions unless necessary to protect the safety and health of those affected. National authorities are responsible for protecting and providing humanitarian assistance to those displaced people. By all accounts, clearing the camps in a humane way reflects the epic challenge that Haiti still faces more than three years after one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. The earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and displaced as many as 1.5 million others, a staggering number in a country of 10 million. In its aftermath, settlements such as Acra sprang up around the crowded capital where land runs scarce, with people building shelters with debris, tree branches, salvaged timber, tarps from aid groups and bed sheets. The camps eventually became miniature cities with their own stores, barber shops, bars and churches. About 385 of the settlements are still standing. Aid groups and officials from Martelly's government say fewer visible encampments and a smaller number of displaced residents are proof Haiti is recovering. But housing advocates worry that many people are actually being evicted with no place to go, at the hands of authorities or people such as Georges who claim to own the land. Evictions were far more common just after the quake, with the International Organization for Migration calculating that 6,650 people were forced from informal camps during the last six months of 2010.
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The practice tapered off, however, with just 279 people evicted in the last six months of 2012, according to the organization. Now, that number is growing again as private property owners grow impatient to regain their long-occupied land. According to the migration organization, 977 displaced people left the camps through force or threats during the first three months of 2013. The story is different on public lands, where many displaced people have already moved out of after the government offered rent subsidies elsewhere. Earlier this year, about 700 people were kicked out of another encampment on private land in the Port-au-Prince district of Carrefour after police fired warning shots and a judge ordered them to leave. People from yet more camps have said they've fled their temporary homes after fires tore through the settlements in the middle of the night or in some cases when police destroyed their tents or lean-tos with machetes. But unlike Camp Acra, no one in those cases was reportedly killed by the authorities.
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That bloodshed has thrust Camp Acra into the heart of the debate, with much of the ire focusing on Georges and his infamous client. Duvalier, the ex-dictator, returned to Haiti from exile in 2011 and is fighting off human rights charges stemming from years of brutal rule. Camp residents say the former strongman is also among several Camp Acra visitors who have claimed ownership to the land. Although most of the area is believed to belong to the government, as well as a small portion to Haiti's influential Acra family, even humanitarian groups specializing in housing issues aren't certain who the owners are. Land disputes in Haiti are often settled with bags of cash, guns, machetes or arson. Residents say Georges' visit was only the start of their problems. Hours later, an unidentified band on motorcycles raided the camp while residents slept, setting fire to seven makeshift homes, according to an Amnesty investigation. Residents who woke to the smell of smoke quickly doused the flames with buckets of water.
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Over the long night, several hundred residents walked down the hill to a police station to report the raid, but the officers refused to help, said camp leader Jean-Louis. "The police said they didn't have gas for their cars," he said. Angry camp residents protested by lighting a bonfire of tires and other trash and blocking Delmas 33, a major thoroughfare. It was around the same time that the tensions turned deadly. At around 5 a.m., one camp resident, Merius Civil, left his shelter to throw out the trash, just as police officers from the station stormed the camp, his sister Anele said. The officers arrested Civil as well as neighbor Darlin Lexima, said Patrice Florvilus, an attorney representing the dead man's family and other Camp Acra residents. Lexima said he later saw Civil in police custody, too dazed to speak. "I saw that his face was bashed in, his nose was bashed in, and he had marks on his body," Lexima said. Florvilus' law firm said that it believes Civil died at the Delmas station, and that witnesses reported seeing officers carry a sheet-covered body from the station to a patrol car. Police Inspector Jean-Faustin Salomon offered a different account, saying Civil died at a hospital. He also said a preliminary report showed neighbors beat Civil and Lexima because they didn't participate in the protest. "A good man has left the world," sister Anele said sitting on a bucket in the doorway of her brother's shelter. "Now that he's dead I want to know why." For the Rev. Waler Baptiste, a Camp Acra pastor, the settlement came under attack for a simple reason: Haiti wants to rid itself of displaced people without giving them anywhere to go. "People have been trying to remove us to take back their land," Baptiste said. "The government doesn't care about us. Whoever can take advantage of us will try to take advantage of us."

Associated Press
By Trenton Daniel
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Haiti has violated international human rights obligations by failing to protect people who have been forced to leave the impromptu settlements that sprang up in the Caribbean nation after the 2010 earthquake, a global advocacy group said Tuesday. A report by Amnesty International said it found that thousands of displaced people have been evicted from public spaces and private properties. People kicked out of settlements find themselves "further marginalized and driven deeper into poverty," it said. The government of President Michel Martelly has condoned the evictions led by mayors, police officers and others, the report charged. "They are tolerated by the state and carried out in total impunity by state agents and private individuals or groups (non-state actors) alike," it said. Amnesty said it wrote to Martelly, the prime minister and mayors of two cities that have seen evictions in an effort to arrange meetings with them, but the requests were declined or went unanswered.
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Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press Monday night that there were "some" landowners who were responsible for forced evictions but it was not something the government endorsed. "We don't believe in forced evictions," Lamothe said by telephone. "There are some private owners that do it, but the government itself does not condone that." Lamothe cited a government-led effort that pays rental subsidies to camp residents. He said it has "relocated over 1.2 million people and has respected their lives and in a peaceful matter. Our policy is respecting their lives and relocating them in a peaceful manner." The post-quake encampments became symbolic of the widespread devastation caused by the January 2010 earthquake, which toppled thousands of buildings and killed more than 300,000 people. The number of people still living in camps has become a barometer of the success or failure of how to house Haitians, though it's unclear what happens to most people after they leave the formal camps. Amnesty said its study documents a pattern of forced evictions of families left homeless by the quake.
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This has involved mass removals without notice, it said. Amnesty said forced evictions violate the rights of displaced people at all stages: threats prior to an eviction, violence during eviction and homelessness afterward. More than 20,000 families, about a fifth of those still living in makeshift camps, face forced eviction by private landowners or the authorities, the study said. "Homelessness is the most immediate consequence of forced eviction," it said. "For those living in Haiti's makeshift camps and already coping with displacement, it signals the start of yet another phase of uncertainty, disruption and distress." Like Lamothe, Martelly has said he opposes evictions but they've continued anyway. Residents of settlements and housing advocates have accused city officials and police officers of violently dismantling the tarp-like structures and evicting people.
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Amnesty last week called for an investigation into the alleged police beating of a Haitian man who was protesting an arson attack in a camp under the threat of eviction. The International Organization of Migration reported last week that 6 percent of the estimated 27,230 Haitians who have left camps this year came as the result of evictions. It didn't give a reason for the evictions, but some landlords and city officials have kicked people off public and private property to reclaim the land. That group's report said 320,050 people remain in the settlements. This marks a 79 percent drop since the number of people living in the tent camps peaked at 1.5 million.

4/22/2013
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
JCHARLES@MIAMIHERALD.COM
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For the first time since four back-to-back storms and hurricanes battered Haiti five years ago, the U.N.’s lead feeding program and other agencies don’t have enough food to stockpile in strategic areas before a major storm hits. In some of the most remote corners of the country, people are dying needlessly of cholera because treatment centers have been abandoned, aid groups have disappeared and community health aides tasked with helping prevent the deadly waterborne-disease haven’t been paid in months. And in hundreds of post-earthquake camps, Haitians hoping to trade in their 3-year-old tarps for a roof over their heads soon could have their hopes dashed as international aid workers are laid off and money for rental subsidies dries up. A lack of donor response to Haiti’s ongoing humanitarian crisis is crippling everything from hurricane preparedness to cholera treatment programs to camp relocation efforts, and putting at risk the humanitarian gains made in recent years, the heads of U.N. humanitarian agencies say.
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This worrying reality comes as 320,050 Haitians displaced by the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake remain in tent cities and at a time when more Haitians are at risk of hunger and malnutrition because of a disappointing winter harvest coupled with the ongoing impact of last year’s tropical storms and drought. “The situation is quite deplorable and that is mostly due to a lack of funding,” said Oliver Schulz, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti. “Three years after the earthquake, the situation should be better, not worse.” Last month, the French-based medical group, which is independently funded, sounded the alarm. It said that cholera-related deaths were four times the acceptable rate and evaluations of public health facilities in four Haiti departments — Artibonite, Nippes, Southeast and North — showed that the quality of cholera treatment had declined significantly due to a shortage of funds. With May traditionally one of the wettest months, greater outbreaks of the deadly disease are likely, the group warned. Already, cholera has killed more than 8,000 Haitians and sickened more than 653,000. “More and more organizations have left and this is causing us problems,” Schulz said referring to the nongovernmental organizations or NGOs that flooded Haiti in the wake of the quake.
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Just as pressing as the cholera threat in a country that lacks proper sanitation and drinking water is food security. After last year’s weather-related disasters, malnutrition rates are increasing and food shortages are affecting seven out of 10 departments in the country, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said earlier this month. Aid appeals by the U.N. and Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe have gone largely unanswered. For some donors, the lack of response is due to the increasing pressure of other humanitarian emergencies around the globe. Others are concerned about the Haitian government’s ability to effectively use the funds. “The situation is bad,” said Gary Mathieu, head of Haiti’s National Food Security Coordination unit. Mathieu said that last year Hurricane Isaac and Sandy, which just brushed Haiti, caused $250 million in losses in the agriculture sector and left 1.5 million Haitians without enough food to eat. The government, with help from NGOs, has been able to help about 700,000 people, he said. But 800,000 are still waiting for assistance. Making matters worse was this winter’s disappointing harvest. “In some cases, it hasn’t rained between November and now,” said Myrta Kaulard, country director for the World Food Program. “The satellite imagery is showing some parts of Haiti have started to be green again, but experts are saying that this time of year, the satellite imagery should show more green spots than what we can see now; so it means the rains have started late.”
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But it will be June and July before the impact of the rains is known. In the meantime, Kaulard said WFP is dipping into its emergency reserves to feed the population, which is also reeling from rising food prices and steep unemployment. In December, 80,000 schoolchildren received food for five members of their families, allowing 400,000 Haitians to be fed. Current distributions are targeting 200,000 Haitians through 40,000 schoolchildren. Nothing has happened to warrant the decrease, Kaulard said. It’s just what WFP can afford. “What we are using now for this round of distribution is the stock we would have used to preposition food for the hurricane season,” she said. “By July, we will have all of our warehouses empty. That is really when the hurricane season is starting.” WFP, she said, needs $3.7 million to have stocks ready for the June 1 start of the hurricane season, $2 million to continue its feeding programs, and another $5 million for a cash-for-work program. To cope with the food crisis, Kaulard said Haitians are chopping down trees for charcoal, flooding the local market so much that the price of charcoal has dropped. Others living along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border towns are eating poor quality rice that’s usually used as chicken feed because it’s all they can afford. Of $144 million requested by the United Nations in a 2013 Haiti humanitarian appeal, only $32 million was funded, according to U.N. data. And of $5.4 billion pledged after the earthquake, only around 56 percent had been disbursed as of December, according to the U.N.’s Office of the Secretary General’s Haiti Special Adviser.
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Lamothe, who met with donors last week during a six-day tour of the United States, reiterated his call for the international community to make good on its pledges. “It’s very easy at the start of an emergency. People come to you and ask, ‘How much do you need?’ ” said Vlatko Avramovski, who runs the database collection system for the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration that has been key in tracking the displaced and helping donors and the government relocate people from camps to homes and plan housing initiatives. Earlier this month, IOM received $1.2 million from Canada to help with its funding shortfall. It is still appealing for $900,000 to ensure the continuity of its tracking efforts at least until June 2014. “The donor community is responding to many complex emergencies,” Helen Clark, head of the U.N. Development Program, told The Miami Herald, referring to the war in Syria and the crisis in Central Africa, among others. Clark said the current humanitarian challenges in Haiti point up the need for a new initiative she and six other top international officials unveiled in Haiti on Sunday. The initiative touts the need to invest in disaster-risk reduction.
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The seven-member delegation is called the “Political Champions for Disaster Resilience,” and includes the head of the Caribbean Community and the British Secretary of State for International Development, among others. Their goal, said Clark, is not just to keep the international spotlight on Haiti, but to support governments in their efforts to reduce a country’s vulnerability to natural disasters by helping prioritize strategies and budgets to reduce disasters. “We want to encourage Haiti in the efforts it is making,” she said. “If donors can see that a country itself is prepared to invest, that really makes the case for backing them.”

Haiti – The latest IOM Haiti Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) published this week reports a decrease of some 6,400 households or 27,230 people in Haiti’s camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) between January and March 2013. The largest decrease was reported in the commune of Delmas (2,623 households), followed by Port-au-Prince (2,229) and Pétionville (946), which together accounted for 94% of the decrease in internally displaced households. Compared to the height of displacement in 2010, when some 1.5 million Haitians were living in camps following the January 2010 earthquake, the number of IDPs has now shrunk by 79%. But 81,350 households or 320,050 individuals still remain in 385 sites countrywide. About 60 per cent of the reduction in displaced households in the last three months can be directly linked to the government’s rental subsidy programs, carried out by various partner agencies, including IOM. Of the families remaining in camps as of March 2013, 14,430 families (17.7%) are being lined up to join the rental subsidy support program.
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But almost 67,000 households still have no prospect of moving out of the IDP sites, and 21,600 of them are at risk of being evicted. Since January 2010, evictions have accounted for 6% of the overall decrease in IDP households. According to the DTM, most of the 385 IDP sites that remain consist of precarious, makeshift structures that leave residents extremely vulnerable, particularly during the hurricane season. Some 86 per cent of the sites have no transitional shelters (T-Shelters); about 11 per cent have mixed structures that include tents, makeshift shelters and some T-Shelters. Adding to the dreadful living conditions, only 22 of these 385 sites, hosting 32 per cent of the displaced households (nearly 96,000 individuals), have dedicated camp management support. This support includes capacity building of camp committees, rapid assessment following floods, emergency and routine distributions, and reporting of camp vulnerabilities such as sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases. It is critical because camp coordinators act as the voice of IDPs to external actors, both local and international. “Earlier this month, IOM received a generous contribution of C$1.2 million from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) that will allow us to continue to provide camp management and camp assessments in all remaining IDP sites for the time being,” said Gregoire Goodstein, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti. “But we are still appealing for US$ 900,000 to ensure the continuity of our Displacement Tracking Matrix at least until June 2014,” he added.
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As displaced families become more difficult to identify two years after the earthquake, the DTM has become an increasingly essential tool for the government and the humanitarian community. It generates lists of individual beneficiaries which are shared with government and partners who manage return and housing projects. The lists are crossed-checked with the database in order to keep track of all individuals who have already benefited from some form of assistance, to avoid duplication of support. “Without this capacity, and regular updates of IDP site registrations, the government and humanitarian partners would not have an effective verification tool to make grant and relocation decisions. This could lead to a situation where it would be impossible to distinguish IDPs from the urban poor,” says Goodstein. For more information, please contact
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Michela Macchiavello IOM Haiti Email: mmacchiavello@iom.int

3/28/2013
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Earlier this week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures in favor of the 567 families that have been under constant threat of eviction in the Grace Village camp. Given the “imminent” threat to those in the camp, the IACHR urged the Government of Haiti:
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To adopt the necessary measures to avoid the excessive use of force and of violence in any eviction. In particular, to guarantee that the public authorities' actions as well as those of private parties pose no risk to the life and personal integrity of the camp residents;
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To implement effective security measures, in particular, to ensure that there is an adequate patrol around and inside the camp and to install police stations close to the camp. To this effect, the IACHR asks the Government to provide special protection to women and children;
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To ensure that the residents have access to the potable water required for basic needs;
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To consult with the beneficiaries and their representatives regarding the measures that need to be taken. In particular, ensure that the camp residents' committee as well as grassroots women's groups can fully participate in the planning and execution of the measures implemented for the benefit of residents, including measures focused on the prevention of sexual violence and other forms of violence in the camp; and
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To inform [the public] regarding the adopted measures so as to investigate the events that justifies the adoption of precautionary measures
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As we have written previously, the residents of Grace Village have faced significant and on-going harassment, which has included government complicity at both the local and national level. The alleged owner of the land is Pastor Joel Jeune, the founder of a Florida based 501(c)(3) organization, Grace International Inc. As the request for precautionary measures points out, the pastor’s close “ties to the mayor’s office and the local police force him to enlist the help of Haitian police to carry out illegal evictions. With his private security forces and the Haitian police, Pastor Joel Jeune has orchestrated and participated in violent, forced evictions of displaced families living inside Grace Village.”
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Amnesty International had warned earlier this month that the camp was “under threat of forced eviction” and that there was a “list of people from the camp” that the police were going to arrest. Amnesty urged the Haitian government to “ensure that residents of Grace Village camp are not evicted without due process, adequate notice and consultation, and that all those affected have access to adequate alternative accommodation.”
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In requesting the precautionary measures, human rights lawyers Mario Joseph, Patrice Florvilus and Nicole Phillips argue that: the Haitian government’s failure to protect a vulnerable group, while simultaneously assisting non-state actors in brutalizing this vulnerable group, violates the Equal Protection clause enshrined in Article 24 of the American Convention on Human Rights. Finally, the Haitian government’s failure to protect displaced families in Grace Village from forced evictions interferes with these individuals’ exercise of fundamental rights, including the right to life, personal liberty, privacy, family, property, and judicial protection, as guaranteed by the Inter-American Convention. The recommendations by the IACHR “reconfirm that forced evictions from displacement camps not only add trauma to earthquake victims, but also violate Haitian and international human rights standards,” said Nicole Phillips of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. She added, “landowners should raise their concerns with the Haitian government and international community who have not provided adequate housing to earthquake victims, rather than waging violence against displaced communities desperate to find a safe home.”
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Meanwhile, in Haiti today, hundreds perhaps thousands of displaced persons are marching for adequate housing and against forced evictions. Bri Kouri Nouvèl Gaye, which is tweeting updates from the march, notes that, “Each time the IDP protest passes a camp the number of people grows; was several hundreds, now thousands.” According to the UN, over 70,000 people (20% of the total displaced population) are facing threats of eviction in 2013.

3/11/2013
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The top United Nations humanitarian official in Haiti has expressed grave concern about recent incidents of forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs), following his visit to a site in the capital, Port-au-Prince, from which thousands of people were forced to leave. While recognizing the right of owners to enjoy their property, the acting UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Haiti, Ross Mountain, recalled that the practice of forced eviction often results in violations of human rights such as the right to life and security of the individual. Following a visit to the Acra 2 camp on 2 March, Mr. Mountain stressed that “these families have suffered intimidation, physical violence and the destruction of their shelters, including through arson.” His visit comes after the eviction of about 1,000 displaced persons in Acra 1 and Acra 2 on 17 February. Nearly 350,000 IDPs are estimated to be living in 450 camps, according to a news release issued by the office of the Humanitarian Coordinator. More than 66,000 in 150 camps have been forcefully evicted since July 2010, according to figures cited by the humanitarian community. Another 73,000 are or will face eviction threats this year. “Haitian authorities have the responsibility to promote and protect the rights of all their citizens, including IDPs,” Mr. Mountain stated. Following the visit, he met with the Minister of Human Rights and the Fight against Extreme Poverty, Rose Anne Auguste.
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The Minister said a judicial inquiry into the forced evictions is ongoing, and security around the most at-risk camps has been strengthened. Haitian President Michel Martelly has condemned forced eviction and launched the 16/6 programme, a project that supports the return and resettlement of displaced persons living in camps, as well as the rehabilitation of the neighbourhoods affected by displacement. Mr. Mountain is also the acting Deputy Special Representative at the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym MINUSTAH. The Mission supports the country’s recovery efforts, including the promotion of stability and security, and strengthening the rule of law, respect for human rights and good governance.

After a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, governments and foundations from around the world pledged more than $9 billion to help get the country back on its feet. Only a fraction of the money ever made it. And Haiti's President Michel Martelly says the funds aren't "showing results." Roughly 350,000 people still live in camps. Many others simply moved back to the same shoddily built structures that proved so deadly during the disaster. Martelly says the relief effort is uncoordinated and projects hatched from good intentions have undermined his government. "We don't just want the money to come to Haiti. Stop sending money," he tells Shots. "Let's fix it," he says, referring the international relief system. "Let's fix it." Disaster specialist Dr. Tom Kirsch from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine agrees with Martelly. "Clearly we saved lives," he says. "Clearly we put people in tents. Clearly we did all kinds of stuff. But at the same time the level of chaos and the overall ability to reach needy people, we don't know how well we did." Kirsch, who's been in Haiti several times since the quake, added, "We could have written a check to everyone in Haiti for — I don't know — $10,000 a piece, which would support them forever rather than the way we spent it."
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So where did all that money go?
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We got put that question to reporter Jonathan Katz, author of the new book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He was Haiti bureau chief for The Associated Press at the time of the quake. Here are highlights from the conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity.
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Shots: Aid pledged to Haiti — $9.3 billion worth from 2010 to 2012 — is about a third of all global health aid donated in 2012. What happened to the money that was supposed to go to Haiti?
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Katz: Money did what money tends to do in most foreign aid situations. That is, rather than being a model in which a rich country gives a poor country a big bag of cash and says, "Here spend this on fixing things up from whatever the latest crisis was," what actually happens is that very little of the money actually leaves the donor countries.
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First of all, you've got billions of dollars that are promised but just never delivered. You've got billions of dollars more that were sort of creative accounting. Donor nations say they're providing debt relief, yet those debts were never realistically going to be paid back. So some of the money is sort of fictive.
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So how much actually made it into Haiti?
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Even among the real money, if you look at what was labeled as humanitarian relief, in the months right after the quake, that amounts to about $2.5 billion. Ninety-three percent of that money either went to United Nations agencies or international nongovernmental organizations, or it never left the donor government. So you had the Pentagon writing bills to the State Department to get reimbursed for having sent troops down to respond to the disaster. If we're talking about reconstruction, it's really a misnomer to think that relief aid was necessarily going to have the effect of rebuilding a country in any shape or form.
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So what was that money spent on?
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Band-Aids. Literally bandages. Short-term relief. Tarps to put over your head. Food to fill emergency gaps in supply. But food gets eaten. Tarps wear out. Band-Aids get pulled off. And ultimately, all that money is spent, but people aren't left with anything durable. When you hear about all these billions of dollars [in aid donations], the imagination is that they're going to go and rebuild the country after the earthquake. They were never intended to do so and, lo and behold, they didn't.
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There are often complaints after big disasters about waste and inefficiencies. Was the Haiti earthquake different from any other international disaster or is this typical?
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What is interesting about Haiti is the extremes. There are lots of places that have weak governments, but Haiti's government is weak in a special way.It's the product of so many years of aid going around the government and international efforts to undermine the government. Presidents being overthrown and flown out on U.S. Air Force planes and then reinstalled and then overthrown again. That left the Haitian government in such a weakened state. Then the disaster itself was also so much more extreme. It was so concentrated. It hit the capital city. Whether your estimates for a death toll is in the 80,000 range or closer to the government's estimate of 316,000 — in a city of 2.5 million people — it's just an extraordinary number. It was an incredibly horrific disaster. It hit the country right at its heart and destroyed a government that was already weakened.
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But beyond that, the attitude that so many foreign aid groups have regarding Haiti is that you can basically come in and do whatever you want. So there was no accountability, no coordination. People were just running around doing what they thought was best or what they thought was best for them. And it really created a mess.

2/26/2013
Associated Press
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A U.S. government agency has announced a mortgage program that aims to help up to 4,000 families in Haiti. The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation says the effort will combine loans from OPIC and grants from other groups. The money awarded will include $1,000 mortgages. Financing will also be given for home repairs. Many people still need to repair their homes three years after Haiti was hit with a massive earthquake. The 2010 disaster toppled thousands of buildings and killed thousands of people. Home financing is relatively new to Haiti. Most of the population is unemployed or underemployed and banks seldom offer loans to anyone but the country's tiny elite. The bulk of Haiti's 10 million people are renters. OPIC made the announcement Monday.

2/8/2013
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Three years after Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake, some 87,750 families are still living in 450 makeshift, insanitary and often dangerous camps scattered throughout the country. The European Commission Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO) has now stepped in with a new EUR 6 million contribution to an IOM programme which supports the relocation of camp residents to safer housing options through the provision of rental subsidies. The new ECHO funding will allow IOM to extend the programme until December 2013 targeting at least 7,560 families in some 50 of the highest risk camps in terms of poor sanitation, flooding and landslides. A total of some 36,500 families or 146,000 individuals are expected to have received rental subsidies by the end of 2013. This will reduce the total number of individuals in camps to approximately 50,250 families or 201,000 individuals. As part of return programmes introduced in 2011 by the Haitian Government and the Office for the Construction of Accommodation and Public Buildings (UCLBP by its French acronym), some 159,178 families, or 636,712 individuals, have already been assisted with relocation to communities where they lived before the earthquake.
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ECHO started backing the IOM project with a EUR 1.7 million contribution in August 2012. The scheme had a two-fold impact. On the one hand it offered displaced families the opportunity to have a fresh start in a better home. On the other, it restored to Haitians access to public spaces and services and gave back occupied private land to the people who owned it. In addition, it created conditions for the rehabilitation and construction of new infrastructure. Between August and December 2012, IOM used ECHO funding to facilitate the relocation of 1,560 families and the closure of 26 camps in the communes of Port-au Prince and Tabarre. Five were located in public schools and 21 on private land, with very limited access to water, sanitation and other services. All of them were at risk of flooding and water-borne diseases, including cholera. IOM also used the funding to rehabilitate water and sanitation in the evacuated schools, pending the return of students. It also dismantled remaining shelters, cleared debris and disinfected the sites, which had been occupied by displaced families since the 2010 earthquake. ‘Decommissioning of camps allows the legitimate land owners to get back their plots. Many of them have subsequently started new housing construction in response to increased demand created by return programmes and specifically by the relocations from the camps,’ says IOM project manager Chiara Milano.
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The programme also contributes to job creation, as the rental subsidies allow landlords to improve their houses or build additional rooms and improve access to water and sanitation. Beneficiaries also frequently invest the money saved by the rental subsidies in income generating activities and small businesses. Given the large number of families still living in camps and the need to continue to improve the international community’s response to IDPs, a portion of the new ECHO funds will also be allocated to supporting IOM’s Data Management Unit (DTM.) The DTM produces a bimonthly report on the total population living in camps. It also gathers, analyzes and disseminates critical information on the camp populations, which in turn is used by the Government and humanitarian partners to plan and implement targeted programmes. “IOM works in close partnership with the Government of Haiti. So far the results of return programmes have been very encouraging, but a major effort is still needed to provide durable solutions for the remaining families still living in camps, as soon as possible and especially before the new cyclone season, which will start in June,” says Gregoire Goodstein, IOM Haiti Chief of Mission.
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For more information, please contact Francois Desruisseaux, Tel. +509 37 92 71 69, Email: frdesruisseaux@iom.int or Michela Macchiavello, Tel : +509 3773 1958, Email: mmacchaivello@iom.int
International Organization for Migration:

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
JCHARLES@MIAMIHERALD.COM
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CROIX-des-BOUQUETS, Haiti -- The bright green, orange and blue box-shaped tiny buildings beckon like neon signs on a dark night. Partially built and the size of a tiny motel room, the two-room structures are a huge improvement over the tattered tents and tin shacks where 347,284 Haitians still linger three years after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. But as Haiti’s government moves to resolve the biggest reconstruction issue — permanent housing — officials are facing a lack of funds to solve the problem and getting criticized over the size and location of the houses that are being built. Some even question whether the government should be in the construction business. “It’s better than a tent, but it’s not the real aspirations of the people,” said Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner who worked on housing issues after the quake. “I think it’s a bad idea to give a product like that to the people. They want respect and you are downgrading them.” But Patrick Rouzier, housing adviser to President Michel Martelly, said the 344-square-feet houses are more than dignified. They consist of two-rooms, a kitchen and bath. “We cannot cross our arms and say we won’t do anything for the people underneath the tents,” said Rouzier, a businessman. “We saw what [hurricane] Sandy and the other guy, Isaac, could do. Do you still say, ‘Listen since we don’t have the money to give them houses, let’s keep them in the camps?’ I rather help them and at least for the next hurricane season they won’t be in the tents.” At a cost of $48 million, the 3,000 houses being built on the outskirts of Croix-des-Bouquets are only part of the government’s housing fix. The plan also includes revitalizing quake-damaged neighborhoods and urbanizing slums and undeveloped areas.
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Internationally, there has been a low success rate for the type of contractor-built, government-sponsored post-disaster projects the new community represents. The reasons are complex, say housing experts, and include issues of poor or non-existent housing policies, tenant selection, remote locations and the costs to expand the starter homes. What seems logical is very difficult to replicate in a way that creates thriving new communities occupied by formerly-displaced families, the experts say. Even before the quake left more than 300,000 dead and wiped out 410,000 homes across Port-au-Prince and its surrounding cities, Haiti’s housing stock was substandard. The poor lived mostly in deplorable slums scattered around the capital. Houses that didn’t pancake in the trembler were later tagged as green for inhabitable; yellow for repairable or red for demolition. But after promising to help Haiti “build back better,” donors hesitated to pour money into permanent construction. Instead, they financed repairs for homeowners, rental subsidies for tent dwellers and the construction of 160,000 temporary shelters for a half-million people.
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Nowhere are the failed promises of reconstruction as glaring as in the empty model homes sitting inside Zorange, a public housing village near the Port-au-Prince airport. Designed mostly by foreign architects and builders, the homes were promoted as part of a housing expo championed by former President Bill Clinton. But the project never received the donor financing or Haitian government ownership to match Clinton’s enthusiasm. “It was hoped that either a private sector or maybe an investor, or maybe a large donor would pick up and scale up one of these models. But this is where the money has run short,” said Jessica Faieta, the United Nations Development Program’s deputy regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. Not far from the failed expo is one of the few donor-financed permanent housing projects that did happen. The 400 houses, also in Zorange, were financed by the Inter-American Development Bank for about $8 million, with construction overseen by the government. The houses, however, remained unoccupied for about eight months before quake victims like Marie Therese Pierre were identified by a government agency and allowed to moved in. For Pierre, the sparsely furnished two-room house with a kitchen and bath, is a big upgrade from her poorly-constructed Cité Soleil house that fell in the quake. But like other tenants, Pierre, 67, worries about being able to pay the monthly $35 to $47 monthly rent, depending on the model’s size. “This can’t pay rent,” she said, pointing to the coffee brewing in an oversized pot that she sells.
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The new homes being built are also rentals. Haiti’s still unreformed property laws prevent the sale and transfer of government land. This has raised other concerns among critics of the project who say its desolate location about 10 miles northeast of Port-au-Prince makes it difficult, if not impossible, for incoming tenants to scrape a living. Others like, Dr. William Pape worries about the public health implications of having so many people clustered so closely together. Founder of the region’s largest HIV/AIDS research clinic in the hemisphere, Pape has expanded his focus to the capital’s slums in the wake of the disaster. “I think the intention was good to bring them there, but we could have done better,” said Pape, who has visited the site. “The ventilation is not good. I think people are sitting in cubicles; it’s almost in a prison. It should have been conceived better because when you bring people from their old shacks to a new place, they should see that their situation is improving.” Rouzier said people’s situation will improve. As a model for decentralizing the overcrowded capital city, a new school, sporting center and $10 million industrial park to generate employment are being built at Morne-a-Cabris, named after a nearby mountain.
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“Nobody did this before. It’s not like we have a book that we can just open,” he said. “We will make mistakes, but I rather a bad action than no action.” In recent months, donors have commended the government for devoting units to housing, and creating a strategy document to address the country’s housing deficit. With the lack of land and money still huge hurdles to providing some 500,000 houses over the next 10 years, some say the State should decide whether it’s better to build new public housing or invest in infrastructure, such as sanitation. “This city is expected to double in population in 17 years,” Maggie Stephenson, senior technical adviser with UN Habitat in Haiti said about the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. “So the earlier strategic investments happen the better.” One place where investments soon will happen is in the post-quake mountainside slum of Cannan, a few miles west of Morne-a-Cabris. Clement Belizaire, director of the government’s camp relocation and rehabilitation program, said $20 million in roads, water treatment and lighting projects will soon be installed in the makeshift area, where tens of thousands of displaced quake victims live in illegal shanties. The project is just one of the undertakings of Belizaire’s office, which is charged with clearing out six camps and rehabilitating 16 neighborhoods associated with those camps. Recently, the office launched a pilot project to rebuild 19 two-story apartments for low-income homeowners in Morne Hercule, a community in Petionville. Belizaire hopes to replicate the project in other neighborhoods but he concedes that a lack of funding remains a huge issue. “All of the big money is gone so we have to spend every single penny with a lot of wisdom.”

.....On Jan. 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit already deeply impoverished Haiti, killing more than 200,000 and leaving another 1.5 million in makeshift camps. It was one of the worst humanitarian disasters in years, and though the response was rapid and generous, three years and billions of dollars in aid later, hundreds of thousands are still without homes. How has aid money been spent and can Haiti 'build back better?'
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1. Where did the aid money go?
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As horrific images and stories emerged from the rubble-filled Haitian streets, governments, residents, and private groups around the world began to write checks.
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Governments and international agencies pledged $12.6 billion to be used to from 2010 to 2020. As of Sept. 2012, donors had disbursed roughly $6 billion (48 percent), according to the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti. Pledges, however, are non-binding, and disbursed does not mean spent. Private organizations, mainly non-governmental organizations (NGOs), received $3 billion more in pledges.
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At least $2.4 billion of the public aid was spent on providing food and water, handing out tarps, and other emergency aid. But that money is drying up. In 2012, aid agencies received just $63 million of the $151 million needed to carry out such work. They need $144 million more this year. Billions are needed for long-term reconstruction and to eradicate a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 8,000. “There is some donor fatigue now,” says Andrew Pugh, country director for humanitarian organization Oxfam’s Haiti office. “But if the remaining 50 percent [of pledged money] is received, that will go a long way to helping Haiti.”
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2. Where did the people go?
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The estimated 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake descended upon any patch of green they could find to set up tarp-covered structures and tents. They surely thought the flimsy structures would be temporary. Yet, 347,284 Haitians still live in 450 camps today. Those who moved out did so with the help of government, UN, and international NGO subsidies to pay rent for a year, or they moved in with family members. Still tens of thousands of others traded their shacks for equally precarious shelter in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. “One of the biggest questions is what happened to these 1.2 million people that moved out of camps. Where did they go?” asks Jake Johnston, international research associate for the liberal, Washington-based Center for Economic Policy Research.
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To house the former camp dwellers, aid agencies have built 5,911 permanent houses and repaired another 18,725 homes that were damaged in the earthquake. The larger focus has been on constructing 110,964 temporary shelters, simple plywood structures meant to last no longer than a few years.
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3. What role is the government playing?
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After a postponed, controversial general election, Michel Martelly, a musician-turned-politician, took office as president in May 2011. Political turmoil followed – including five months without a prime minister – leaving the government sidelined from the reconstruction process. Just 10 percent of the $6 billion in aid has gone to the government. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe recently told reporters that routing aid money to NGOs “weakened our institutions.” That may be changing. The government and NGOs say they are working together more closely. “In 2010, there was very little [government] engagement,” Mr. Pugh says. “We see more capacity at the ministry level.… They’re taking an active leadership role.” "No country will get out of poverty living on charity," President Martelly's administration told The Christian Science Monitor. "True, Haiti still needs help, but Haitians need … jobs and sustainable development."
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4. Is Haiti being 'built back better?'
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President Martelly has repeatedly said, “Haiti is open for business.” He has traveled the globe pushing for more foreign investment to create jobs. The biggest success is the Caracol Industrial Park, a $300 million project on the north coast that could potentially employ 65,000. It opened this fall with one tenant, a subsidiary of a Korean sewing company, employing 1,000 people. Numerous hotels also continue to pop up: Last month workers broke ground on a Marriott expected to be Haiti’s first four-star hotel. Yet, the economy is sluggish (growing by 2.6 percent, instead of the 7.9 percent the International Monetary Fund had projected). And summer storms devastated crops, pushing food prices higher, causing inflation to go up, and raising concerns of widespread hunger

Council for Global Development
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As we approach the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, reconstruction and recovery efforts continue—as does the debate within the development community: Why aren’t recovery efforts moving faster? Are international donors and NGOs helping or hurting recovery? Can traditional aid work amidst Haiti's weak government institutions? Are there alternative approaches that would be better?
CGD’s efforts on Haiti’s challenges continue. Here are our recent suggestions for alternative approaches in Haiti, as well as previous innovative ideas that remain relevant:
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1) Cash Transfers for Haitians, Vijaja Ramachandran, Senior Fellow: Hurricane Sandy has exacerbated the food crisis in Haiti, as well as increased the incidence of water-based diseases, like cholera. Donors have responded accordingly, but donors must also take steps to improve the quality of their assistance to Haiti. Cash transfers are often the best way to empower disaster victims to rebuild their lives, while also generating demand that fuels the local economy. I recommend the World Food Programme’s Cash for Assets program as an effective model to be implemented for Haitians to purchase much-needed goods and services, in addition to coordinated humanitarian relief.
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2) Improve Transparency and Accountability.
Vijaya Ramachandran, Senior Fellow, and Julie Walz, Policy Analyst: Since the 2010 earthquake, over $6 billion has been disbursed in official aid to help the people of Haiti. Almost 90 percent of aid has gone to international NGOs and private contractors (9.5 percent has gone to the Government of Haiti and .4 percent to Haitian NGOs and businesses). Yet, there’s very little transparency about how this money is spent. Funders should require more evaluations of NGO and contractor activities, and also report their activities in the IATI format. Further, the Government of Haiti should be encouraged to procure services through competitive bidding. This would not only increase accountability of NGOs and contractors providing the services but also enable the Haitian government to build control over the process.
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3) Increase Local Procurement, Vijaya Ramachandran, Senior Fellow, and Julie Walz, Policy Analyst:
Out of every $100 spent by the US Government for reconstruction following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, only $1.35 went directly to Haitian companies. The current US development strategy focuses on stimulating economic activity and pledges support to Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises along with the development of Caracol Industrial Park. Yet, a key tool is missing in the strategy to build economic security and jobs in Haiti – buying from local businesses.
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4) Better Haiti Aid: Migration, Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow: “The U.S. government added Haiti to the list of more than 50 countries eligible to participate in the H-2 visa program for temporary and seasonal workers, ending a longstanding policy of excluding Haitians from America’s largest temporary employment-based visa program. This is wonderful news for Haitians and Americans. It has the potential to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in new economic opportunity for Haitian workers and their families—at no cost to the U.S. or Haitian governments, and with no increase in overall U.S. immigration. This seemingly tiny change has vast economic potential. Given the huge wage differences (an estimated $19,000 in additional annual income per Haitian worker), if just 2,000 Haitians are permitted to work as H-2 workers in the United States each year, over the course of 10 years, that’s $400 million in additional, new income for Haitian families. That’s equal in size to the entire U.S. post-earthquake budget for reconstruction in Haiti.”
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5) Cholera in Haiti: The Blame Game, Victoria Fan, Research Fellow, and Richard Cash, Senior Lecturer on Global Health, Harvard School of Public Health:
“Since October 2010, Haiti has struggled to control a deadly cholera outbreak—on top of ongoing recovery efforts from the devastating earthquake in January 2010. In December 2011, a group of lawyers in Haiti, on behalf of some 15,000 victims of cholera, sued the United Nations for $50,000 for each victim and double that for families of those who died. Focusing on these immediate objects of blame are of epidemiologic interest, but deflect attention away from the country experiencing the disease, and in this case, unable to control the spread. In a country where aid agencies and NGOs play major roles relative to the government, this outbreak should draw attention not only to immediate causes but more importantly to the long-term failure by every involved party and to the urgency of improving Haiti’s water and sanitation as soon as possible.”

Over the next month, Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch blogger and CEPR International Research Associate, Jake Johnston will be in Haiti following up, on the ground, many of the issues this blog has covered since the earthquake nearly three years ago.
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Port-au-Prince – In the last thirteen months, the “official” total of displaced persons in Haiti has decreased by 35 percent and over 300 camps have been closed. One could be forgiven for thinking the decrease was even larger. The sprawling tent camp near the airport, for everyone entering Haiti to see, as well as the Champ de Mars camp, are no longer. With their closure, some of the most visible signs of the stalled reconstruction effort have been erased. As the three-year commemoration of the earthquake approaches, the reduction in the IDP population will undoubtedly be touted as one of the great successes of the relief and reconstruction effort. And yet an estimated 360,000 Haitians remain in official tent camps. Those who remain may not be as visible; many are tucked behind high walls and off main streets but their situation remains just as dire and continues to deteriorate. The most recent OCHA Humanitarian Bulletin notes that those who remain in the camps “face worsening living conditions, as humanitarian partners pull out as a result of lack of funding.” It is estimated that at least 230,000 will still be in the camps at this time next year. For those that have left the camps, little is known about their current status. According to OCHA, over 250,000 have left the camps due to resettlement programs, yet there has been no systematic tracking of what has happened to them. The government’s flagship relocation program, “16/6”, began over a year ago, meaning the one-year rental subsidies offered to camp residents have already run out, or will in the next few months. One former resident of the Champ de Mars camp said that his subsidy will run out next month, and with no steady employment, he expects to be back on the street soon. If so, he, and others in similar situations, would likely fall outside of the “official” camp population.
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Some studies by actors involved in rental subsidy programs have shown high rates of success concerning families finding housing even after the one-year is up. The International Federation of the Red Cross, for example found that, of 354 families whose rental subsidy had run out, 63 percent had stayed in their apartment, while only 10 percent could not be found. Nevertheless, there is a need for further research on what will happen to families once their yearly rental ends. A greater focus from all involved in relocation on the long-term impacts of their programs is urgently needed. There is also evidence that the rental subsidy option could be nearing its end. In April, studies by aid agencies estimated the amount of available rental options to be roughly 19,000 in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area. The studies led the Shelter Cluster to recommend an increase in the rental return programs. But since that study, over 10,000 additional families have received the subsidy, meaning that the possibility of further camp population reduction through the program could be limited.
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While the rental subsidy and other return programs have had limited success in reducing the number of camp residents, the long-term impacts could be extremely dangerous. Further, it remains clear that the vast majority of those that have left the “official” camps did so not because of return programs, but because of deplorable living conditions or (sometimes very violent) forced evictions. As can be seen in the table here, only 25 percent of the reduction in the camp population can be attributed to relocation efforts. For the remaining 880,000, little is known, though it is clear on the ground that there has been a proliferation of informal camps, outside the purview of the “official” totals. Of those who remain in the camps, some 80,000 are under constant threat of eviction. One effort to follow up with former camp residents was undertaken by Mark Schuller of Northern Illinois University and in coordination with the Faculté d’Ethnologie at l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. Only one in seven of those surveyed had left the camps due to receiving money, usually from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) or an NGO. This is even fewer than those who responded that they had left the camps due to a forced eviction (one in six). Overall, Schuller found that “the data do not point to a clear answer that after one of the largest and best funded humanitarian efforts in recent history, people are better off now than before the earthquake.” One of the largest impediments to better livelihoods identified by Schuller was that the neighborhood revitalization programs that were supposed to accompany the relocations have yet to show results. It is possible that the influx of new residents into neighborhoods, which were already strained by the earthquake, is making them even more vulnerable to the next disaster. The $65 million dollar World Bank “Port au Prince Neighborhood Housing Reconstruction” project, partially funded by the Haiti Reconstruction Fund, has only disbursed $5 million as of November, and won’t be completed until 2015 at the earliest.

Canada is holding back aid to Haiti over concerns about mismanagement of funds in the Caribbean nation, International Cooperation Minister Julian Fantino said Friday to a Canadian paper. Several million dollars in aid "has been frozen for the moment," Minister Julian Fantino told the daily French-language newspaper La Presse. Some established aid programs are continuing, but no new monies would flow until there is better management of reconstruction efforts, he said, three years after a devastating earthquake killed more than 200,000 on the island. Ottawa had committed Can$390 million ($395 million) to Haiti reconstruction, making Canada one of the top donor nations to Haiti.
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Fantino visited Haiti in November to assess the situation, and said the country "is still in very bad shape." He lamented a lack of progress in the reconstruction, in his view, blaming poor management on the ground. "Are we going to continue doing things the same way in Haiti? I don't think so. Because we're not seeing the kind of progress that Canadians should expect," Fantino told La Presse. "Will we have to continue dealing with Haiti's problems forever? They too have to step up," he added. The minister's office was not immediately available to confirm the news report, nor detail what specific aid was cut. The Canadian International Development Agency said it will continue offering emergency help "should humanitarian crises arise."

12/23/2013
Agence France-Presse
By Clarens Renois
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While people around the world celebrate the arrival of Christmas, residents of a refugee camp in Haiti say hunger and want will mark the holiday, like every other day of the year. "There are no wreaths, no Christmas trees," said Titelma Cherival, 54, still living in a makeshift refugee camp almost three years after an earthquake leveled much of this impoverished nation. "The best Christmas we could hope for is to get out here and have nice life in a normal home," Cherival said somberly. "But I see little hope of that." The faded tent where Cherival shelters with her three children is torn and covered with a tarp to keep out the rain. The camp, located in the Canape Vert neighborhood outside Port-au-Prince, houses nearly 2,000 people. Residents are compelled to get by as best they can without electricity or running water and -- adding insult to injury -- in the shadow of a complex of luxury hotels.
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The poverty is no greater at Christmas time, but the pain and humiliation of doing without comes into sharp contrast during a season dedicated to gift-giving and merriment in this predominantly Catholic country. "There will be no gifts for the children and probably not even a Christmas meal," said Jocelyne, who sells bric-a-brac to make ends meet. "Look at my three children, they do not even know what Christmas is." The massive earthquake struck in January 2010, reducing much of the Haitian capital to a pile of rubble and killing more than 200,000 people. Of the more than one million people left homeless, more than a third -- just over 360,000 -- are still living in tents, according to International Organization for Migration data.
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Endless days of grinding poverty and idleness add to the despair, camp inhabitants said. "Nobody works here. There is abject poverty. People have been brought down to the lowest place in their lives," said Fritzner Dossous, 32. "We are are dead. All we are waiting for now is to be buried." Making matters even more dire for residents of the camp, the owner of the land where it is located wants to reclaim the property and evict the camp inhabitants, who have no place else to go. "We are on private land. The owner wants to reclaim the space," said Dossous, who helps organize security for the camp, which from time to time has been attacked by unknown assailants. Thieves long ago made away with solar street lights installed in the camp, along with many of the inhabitants' meager possessions. Camp dwellers also feel abandoned by political leaders who, in flowery campaign pledges, promised to lift them out their destitution. "We are on the path that leads to the presidential palace. But once they take that road, they don't make the return trip," said one man who recalled that President Michel Martelly visited the camp during his election campaign. "We haven't seen him since... We deplore this attitude, although we love him all the same," the man added, as he proudly showed off a pink bracelet stamped with Martelly's name that he says the Haitian leader gave him.
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In the camp, many children, half naked and weak from poor nutrition, scamper among the tents, their feet encased in mud. Instead of toys, they play with empty bottles and other random objects strewn across the camp. "These kids don't go to school. Some of them were born here and don't know any other way of life. They don't know any other way to observe Christmas," said Neila Honarat, 20. Honorat, a student, noted that many teenage classmates have become mothers, when they ought to have been getting an education instead. "There is a dramatic situation in this camp. The girls become pregnant, no one knows who the fathers are. Some girls sleep around in order to get food," she said. Christella is one such girl. At the age of 15, she is already eight months pregnant. Her baby is due next month, around the same time as the third anniversary of the quake that has defined life in Haiti and probably will for the foreseeable future. "I do not know what will happen during the birth," she said. "My mother is taking care of me because my boyfriend left, he abandoned me," Christella said of the unborn child's father. It is a sad Christmas story, but one without gifts or provisions born by Wise Men. "I have no clothes for him," said Christella, slightly embarrassed. "Nothing to care for him with. Nothing at all."

12/23/12
New York Times
By Deborah Sontag

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few days after the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods. At the time, Dr. Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool. This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps. “When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money.” An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far — helps explain why such a seeming bounty is not more palpable here in the eviscerated capital city, where the world’s chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble.
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More than half of the money has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery but carries high costs and leaves no permanent footprint — tents shred; emergency food and water gets consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last. Of the rest, only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau. Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. By comparison, an estimated minimum of $1.2 billion has been eaten up by short-term solutions — the tent camps, temporary shelters and cash grants that pay a year’s rent. “Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.
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Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors. After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials were determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world’s ineffectual strategies for helping it. Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.” But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman. With no detailed financial plan ordering reconstruction priorities, donors invested most heavily in the sectors that they had favored before the earthquake — transportation, health, education, water and sanitation — and half their financing for those areas went to projects begun before 2010. “One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.
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Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down. That is the case for nearly half the money for housing. The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for this devastated city. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed. “Building takes time; it’s destruction that’s rapid,” said President Michel Martelly at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for the new teaching hospital. But building is only half the battle; the gleaming white structure, erected by the nonprofit Partners for Health in the provincial city of Mirebalais, has not yet secured its first-year operating budget of $12.5 million to $13 million. In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country’s largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Mrs. Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul. Like that hospital, many recovery projects have lingered on the drawing board or gotten delayed by land and ideological disputes, logistical and contracting problems, staffing shortages and even weather. The United States still has more than $1 billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500 million in its coffers. “It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti. Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it thus far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools but only one has been completed.
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In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems. The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall. But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards. How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted. In the mountain town of Furcy, meanwhile, the children study in a couple of plywood structures without plumbing or electricity planted in the midst of one of the construction sites. Surrounded by half-built cinder-block walls, jutting rebar and piles of stone and sand, some 480 students cram into 10 makeshift classrooms illuminated only by the natural light that seeps through the gap between the partial walls and the tin roofs. Then, no strangers to life’s setbacks, they trudge miles home over muddy, treacherous mountain roads as darkness descends.
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In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign assistance. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break. Coordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” Nigel Fisher, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, said. “Little by little, we brought them in.” Still, many Haitians never shook the feeling that they were an afterthought and that their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by the far higher salaries offered by foreigners. “We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time. In retrospect, the numbers tell the story: Donors provided $2.2 billion of humanitarian aid in response to the earthquake. The United States Department of Defense got nearly a fifth of that aid to carry out its relief operation, which involved 22,000 troops. The Haitian government got less than 1 percent.
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More of the recovery aid — 15 percent — has been channeled through the Haitian government, and the United States ambassador to Haiti, Pamela A. White, says that a shift in approach has led international donors to align “our investments with Haiti’s priorities in a truly country-led manner.” But thus far almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract to others, with each layer in the process adding 7 to 10 percent in administrative costs, as noted in a paper published by the Center for Global Development. “All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said. In a sentiment that many Haitians share, Dr. Boulos said that foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.” Dr. Boulos said he spent $780,000 to close Camp Boulos and 6 percent went to administrative costs — essentially the salary of a pastor who oversaw the resettlement. Following in his footsteps more than a year later, international groups have done things more carefully, inspecting apartments before handing out rental subsidies and conducting follow-up visits. But they are ringing up operational costs of about 35 percent. It is difficult to ascertain precisely what the hundreds of nongovernment groups in Haiti spent on their response to the earthquake — at least $1.5 billion, probably much more — and how they spent it.
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Among the more visible and transparent groups, Oxfam, its name emblazoned on thousands of latrines, provided water and sanitation to the camps and Doctors Without Borders ran field hospitals, mobile clinics and cholera treatment centers. The services they provided were vital, but, as both groups make clear in their public reporting, they were costly, too. Oxfam spent $96 million over two years and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58 percent of its $135 million in 2010 on staff and transportation costs. Not all costly foreign initiatives were equally valuable — or appreciated. One American taxpayer-financed program, scrutinized by the Agency for International Development’s inspector general, was intended to provide short-term jobs for Haitians and to remove significant rubble. But the program, and in particular the work carried out by two Beltway-based firms, was less than successful on both fronts, the inspector general said: It generated only a third of the jobs anticipated and it appeared to demonstrate that using manual labor to clear debris was so inefficient as to slow the rebuilding effort.
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One of the firms, Chemonics International, which was awarded $150 million in post-earthquake contracts, built a $1.9 million temporary home for the Haitian Parliament. The American ambassador presented it as a gift to Haitian democracy, but many legislators were more irked than thankful because the building was delivered devoid of interior walls and furnishings, as The Global Post reported, and it took almost half a year to scrounge together the money to finish it. Occasionally toward the end of that first year after the earthquake, the Haitian government succeeded in pushing back against internationally imposed agendas it did not like. The American Red Cross had pledged to spend $200 million of the nearly $500 million raised for Haiti by the first anniversary of the disaster. That presented a real challenge for an organization with limited experience in the country. So it operated primarily as a financier, issuing grants to other organizations with greater capacity here. But a linchpin of its own programming was a plan to dispense $50 million in cash, no strings attached, to 400,000 household heads in the camps. Other humanitarian leaders considered the idea of a broad, unconditional cash distribution misguided. But it was not until the Haitian government formalized its opposition in a letter — “It would unfortunately encourage a massive exodus from the provinces, thus increasing the number of people living in the camps and making conditions even worse” — that the Red Cross dropped the plan.
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Dr. Boulos said he proposed an alternative. “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.” Shortly after the earthquake, international advisers proposed different ways that Haiti could manage its reconstruction, including a Haitian-owned recovery agency embedded in the government. But a United States proposal to establish a stand-alone commission jointly led by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort” won out. In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it. “As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”
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Alexandre V. Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed. “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it,” he said. “It created a level of coordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.” Given that so much time and money was invested in creating it, people did, in fact, expect that the commission would take charge of the reconstruction process and deliver tangible results. But by the end many believed it had been little more than an exercise in assembling and then dismantling what one United Nations official called a pseudo-institution. “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project,” said Priscilla Phelps, an American consultant who served as the commission’s housing expert. “We never took a proactive role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing,” she said. “The way reconstruction money got spent was totally chaotic, and the I.H.R.C. was emblematic of that.” From the start, the commission faced two major challenges. First, President René Préval did not really support it, seeing it as a usurpation of power, several former commission members said. Second, it had no money of its own to hand out — although the separate Haiti Reconstruction Fund, a pot containing 14 percent of the reconstruction dollars, could not make grants without its approval.
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The commission’s secretariat worked out of a giant white inflatable tent on the grounds of the old United States Embassy compound, crisply air-conditioned and lined with banks of desktop computers. For a long while, the spacious tent was almost eerily empty because the commission, with a budget of $8.79 million its first year, got off to a slow start. The commission did not engage an executive director until five months into its 18-month existence. The director, Gabriel Verret, moved haltingly to hire other key employees. The vacuum, meanwhile, was filled by William J. Clinton Foundation staff members and volunteer consultants from McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers. As pro bono consultants to the commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers designed a performance and anticorruption office, and the firm subsequently won a $2.4 million contract to run it over the objections of France’s board member, who called it “a pure conflict of interest which damages the integrity of the office.” Their first — and last — monitoring report was the only real record of the commission’s work. It summarized the 75 projects valued at over $3 billion that had been approved. The numbers themselves are not very meaningful because they included projects without any or enough money — a $1 billion “funding gap” existed, an international official said. Still, the report indicated just how broadly recovery was being defined. At least $1.4 billion represented big-ticket, multiyear projects that were not directly related to the earthquake, among them improving the education system, developing agriculture in central Haiti and building roads all over the country
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Katherine Gilbert, aid policy adviser in Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office, said, “The argument for those activities being recovery is that the whole country was affected economically and every initiative is in a sense helping the country rebuild.” But, she added, “Another definition of recovery would be assisting those affected by the earthquake.” Although the commission’s bylaws called for it to “conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects,” its mode of operation was to respond, project by project, to those who sought the commission’s approval. The large board consisted of foreign diplomats and representatives of the Haitian government and society. Early on, the Haitian members felt excluded when they learned about Mr. Verret’s appointment from the media. Their frustration deepened, culminating in a confrontation with Mr. Clinton and Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, at their December 2010 meeting. An account was pieced together from the meeting’s minutes and interviews with participants. When Mr. Clinton was delayed in arriving at the Santo Domingo Hilton, where the meeting was taking place because of post-electoral violence in Haiti, a dozen Haitian board members crowded into a hotel room to prepare a written statement. Rising to read it at the meeting, Suze Percy Fillipini, an elegant former diplomat, described how the Haitian members felt like “bit players” and “tokens” who were called on to “rubber stamp” a hodgepodge of projects that “collectively do not respond to the urgency of the situation or provide the foundation for the sustainable rebuilding of Haiti.” Attending by Skype, Mr. Bellerive appeared livid and said the board members were merely “individuals,” which, in a Haitian context, meant they were nobodies, according to several members. Ms. Fillipini, her eyes flashing with tears, defended herself and the other appointees. Another member, Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian-Canadian business professor, complained that the executive director and chairmen did not respond to e-mails, saying it was neither good manners nor good governance.
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After the meeting, Professor Bourjolly recounted, Mr. Clinton approached him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You embarrassed me.” “It was really tough,” said the professor, summarizing the commission’s work as “such a waste.” Again, Dr. Abrantes disagreed. “They created a formal mechanism to receive proposals, and a vetting system that was important. Eventually, they developed sector strategies, some sketchy but others well-developed, that guide us to this day.” When the recovery commission died, the Haiti Reconstruction Fund was paralyzed, unable to make new grants. The fund, created to set aside at least some money to support the Haitian government, had “ended up significantly focused on two areas where the donors don’t have standing expertise — debris removal and housing,” Ms. Gilbert said. “No one wanted to do debris removal,” Mr. Leitmann, the fund’s manager, said. “It’s not sexy. There are no ribbons to cut. The results disappear. So we filled that niche. Housing is another example. Half our resources are going there.” Though as much as $104 million remains available for allocation, it has taken the Haitian government more than a year to create and convene a successor entity to the commission. The group, in Mr. Martelly’s words, will “restore to Haiti its sovereignty in aid management and especially its priorities.”
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By late last week, its priorities for the remaining funds had yet to be established. In the summer of 2011, when President Martelly, a Haitian musical star with no political experience, was struggling to put together a government, he was also grappling with the unavoidable fact that a smattering of housing reconstruction projects existed only on paper while a humanitarian crisis lay at his doorstep in the form of a huge, wretched tent camp in the central Champ de Mars. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, then just released, contained a telling if understated aside: “The ‘build back better’ approach does not always align with the objective of quickly finding housing solutions for camp residents.”
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The new pragmatism was born. Mr. Martelly secured international assistance to close six highly visible tent camps and repair 16 neighborhoods and to shut down the Champ de Mars settlement. Some Haitians felt he was just trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — indeed the neighborhood repairs have lagged far behind the camp closings — but others expressed relief that he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all. From the start, grand ambition had gotten in the way of tackling what was doable. “Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighborhoods,” Ms. Phelps said. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.” Idealistic discussions after the disaster were not just about building back better. President Préval expressed a keen interest in using the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently, and decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone. “There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and chaotic as it is you don’t throw it out,” Mr. Leitmann of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund said. “Another fantasy was, ‘Oh, we’ll just invest in export processing zones and that will keep people from migrating back to Port-au-Prince.’ ”
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That first year, the United States government and the Inter-American Development Bank set aside $220 million to finance the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is 175 miles north of the disaster area, and to build a power plant, port and housing development nearby. Mr. Clinton, who joined Mrs. Clinton at the Caracol inaugural ceremony this fall in a rare public fusion of their diplomatic roles, has long emphasized Haiti’s need for jobs. Some here applaud his support for subsidies to private companies; others, though, question what they see as a trickle-down theory of development, pointing skeptically to decisions like those of the private Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund to make a $2 million equity investment in a new luxury hotel, the Royal Oasis. Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing stock, and they were courting international firms to design innovative tract housing for tracts of land that never materialized. One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 housing exposition held in Zoranje, where scores of colorful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets.
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Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, the expo cost millions in public and private money. Competing firms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the hopes of winning sizable contracts. But by the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had already shifted and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead. Adjacent to the expo site in Zoranje is the only large new housing project completed so far. With $8.3 million in financing, mostly from the Inter-American Development Bank, most of its 400 small pastel houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because the authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water. Eventually, the beneficiaries were allowed to move in anyway. Fertilia Bien-Aimé, a wiry, scrappy, 65-year-old, said she won the keys to her house by accosting President Martelly during a public event in October. “I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m too old for a tent. What are you going to do for me?’ ” Squatters had ripped out the electrical wiring, sinks and toilets, she said, and rain leaks into her house as into others. Some homes lost their roofs during Tropical Storm Isaac, and the complex has had unreliable electricity since Hurricane Sandy. “But even with all the problems here,” she said, “it’s still so much better than being a displaced person.”
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The largest new settlement under construction takes the same exurban approach. A $48 million Haitian government initiative, located about 10 miles east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri, the project’s thousands of houses are rising on a barren, isolated site. Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister, described it as looking like “little tombs in the desert.” Critics have also questioned the location of the American-subsidized new housing settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house. That includes site preparation, internal wiring, individual water hookups and flush toilets. But current thinking among humanitarian officials is that those are all extras. A small, simple one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000, they say, and more people can be helped. Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by the end of November because of severe weather and logistical problems, an American aid official said. Progress has been even slower on the other American-built settlement, which is on a large, flat swath of gravel in Cabaret. Only about a dozen of the 156 houses there had a completed structure, minus doors and windows, in early December. “Lots of money, few results,” said the deputy mayor of Cabaret, Pierre Justinvil. “Look, I personally, with my own hands, have just built a whole school for less than the cost of one of those houses and more quickly. I think we Haitians need to take the wheel.”
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In the earthquake-ravaged slum neighborhood of Campeche in Port-au-Prince, Dieudonne Zidor, an elected official, agreed. Gliding gracefully up a rocky pathway, she pointed out the anarchic jumble of condemned homes, makeshift shanties and corroding shelter boxes. “As you can see, conditions are calamitous,” she said. But it is not rocket science to figure out what is needed, she added: houses, streets, electricity, water, health clinics, schools, women’s centers. Yet, though the local authorities have already approved an urban plan for the neighborhood, the American Red Cross has engaged in a lengthy process to determine how best to spend its $20 million budget to improve Campeche. Sandrine Capelle Manuel, the organization’s representative in Haiti, said it had been a productive process. “We prioritized all the issues and created a consultative group that is representative of the community fabric,” she said. “We did a strong and deep assessment, and now we need to do a master plan with the community.” But Ms. Zidor said: “All they do is hold meetings and hand out juice. In the end, they will have spent the whole $20 million giving juice to the people.” Many other neighborhood reconstruction projects have gotten stuck in the planning stages, too. The reconstruction adviser to President Martelly, in fact, recently asked a World Bank official if millions of dollars could be diverted from that slow-moving $65 million reconstruction program to pay for additional return cash grants. “He said, ‘Can you help us because we don’t want to go to the third anniversary with so many people still in camps?’ ” Dr. Abrantes said. Although so much money allocated for reconstruction languishes in the bank, humanitarian financing for Haiti has all but dried up while needs remain acute, said Mr. Fisher, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator. “The donors have made it clear that they feel the humanitarian crisis is over and that development is their focus,” Mr. Fisher said. “But it’s a false dichotomy. Of course, the country needs long-term solutions but until they are in place we still need resources to deal with the problems at hand.” Current projections, he added, are that 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake. André Paultre and Damon Winter contributed reporting.

International Organization for Migration
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Newly published reports on the number of displaced persons remaining in camps, the Shelter and Camp Coordination Management Cluster factsheet and other data, produced by IOM Haiti and its partners, provide detailed demographic information about the almost 360,000 Haitians still living in 496 sites throughout the country, as well as details on the needs to end the on-going displacement crisis. The IOM Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) registration analysis for 2012 shows that between January and August 2012, at least 84% of the population living in camps in 2012 was already there in 2010, which confirms that, most probably, they have been living at these sites since the January 2010 earthquake. The IOM analysis also confirms that a staggering 58% still remain unemployed. The majority (57%) of the households in camps are single-headed (34% women and 23% men), a reality which further adds to the difficulty of securing an income generating activity. The Cluster Factsheet also highlights that approximately 86% of those in camps do not own a home and will need to rent a property in order to leave the camps. This, coupled with the fact that more than half of the adult camp residents are currently unemployed, stresses the need for continued assistance and support to ensure the end of the displacement crisis in Haiti. Since the government-led return programmes began in 2011, a total of 158,833 earthquake-affected families (some 635,332 individuals) have received support from the international community to find various housing solutions, but some 90,000 families (some 360,000 persons) remain in camps that have not yet been assisted by return programmes. Of this group of families, some 75,000 are still living in emergency shelters, mainly made of tarpaulin and makeshift wooden structures. These families represent an absolute target priority for returns in 2013 and 2014, to avoid the risk of violence, possible secondary displacement and forced eviction. “Some 96 per cent of beneficiaries who have received subsidies have said that rental support programmes should be made available to all families still living in camps,” explained Giovanni Cassani, the IOM Emergency Shelter Cluster Coordinator.
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Since August 2011 and as part of the activities carried out by the Emergency Shelter Cluster, IOM Haiti has provided alternative housing solutions to nearly 12,000 families (48,000 individuals), in the form of one-year rental subsidies. Of these, 95% have declared to be either very satisfied or satisfied about their new housing conditions. In 2013, IOM plans to offer the same kind of support to an additional 15,000 families (60,000 individuals). “Based on the results achieved so far with the return programmes, IOM has the capacity to assist 20,000 families per year, so 5,000 more than what is already planned and for which funds have been committed by donors. In order to reach this goal, and to provide a comprehensive assistance package, IOM needs an extra US$6 million to help the families relocate, as well as the host communities where they will be returning,” explained Gregoire Goodstein, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti. IOM is also appealing to donors for US$2 million to ensure the provision of essential care and maintenance to those families who will remain in the camps; and a further US$ 800,000 to ensure the production of its Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). “Since mid-2011, the majority of organizations providing essential services in camps, including water and sanitation, health care and security exhausted their funds and were forced to leave. And so to ensure that these very basic services continue in the remaining camps, IOM is urging its donors to continue their support,” added Goodstein.
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Also on the horizon is the 2013 hurricane season when many families will still be living in these precarious conditions and IOM will need an additional US$ 1 million to stockpile non-food items to be readily available for the most vulnerable population. “The international community must not abandon Haiti now. A concerted effort is needed to ensure that at least 20,000 families still living in camps will move into safe homes in 2013 and that basic services are provided to those families remaining in camps,” concluded Goodstein. For further information, please contact Michela Macchiavello, IOM Haiti, Tel: +509.37021667, Email: mmacchiavello@iom.int
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The Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) is a monitoring tool designed to track internally displaced persons (IDP) population movement and provide updated information on the basic conditions in camps and camp-like settlements in support of the Emergency Shelter and Camp Coordination and Camp Management (EShelter/CCCM) Cluster and other humanitarian and recovery actors in Haiti. The DTM is implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in partnership with the Government of Haiti (GoH) through the Department of Civil Protection (DPC in French).
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For more information on the DTM, please visit the DTM website: www.iomhaitidataportal.info. The Emergency Shelter and Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster focuses on: camp management activities, provision of emergency assistance, transitional shelters and distribution of non-food items. The core functions of the Cluster (a group of organizations linked by a common activity) are: coordination with various stakeholders, preparedness and capacity building, needs assessment and planning, information management and reporting, application of international standards, monitoring of cross cutting issues, advocacy and resource mobilization. IOM has been the lead agency for the CCCM Cluster since the earthquake in January 2010 and for the combined Emergency Shelter and CCCM Cluster since September 2011. For more information please visit http://www.eshelter-cccmhaiti.info

12/10/2012
Associated Press
BY TRENTON DANIEL
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The international aid group Oxfam urged the Haitian government on Monday to halt evictions from encampments that still are home to more than 357,000 people nearly three years after a devastating earthquake. The bulk of the removals, according to the new report, are led by landowners eager to reclaim their property. Some landowners have resorted to threats, intimidation, stone throwing, destroying tents, setting fires and other violent acts. In some cases, city officials are behind the evictions, the report said. An adviser to Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe called the report distorted and said that the government has safely relocated people through a rental-subsidy program called "16/6." "The Government is not engaged in a policy of eviction, but it has, through the 16/6 project, taken measures to safely and permanently relocate the people living in the camps to safe and permanent shelters," adviser Salim Succar wrote in an email. "The success of the program is well known and so far a number of camps have been safely closed."
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In a separate statement released Monday, the government announced that more than a thousand homes for poor families will open this month in a community north of the capital. The new report, "Salt in the Wound," comes as Haiti prepares to mark the third anniversary of the January 2010 earthquake. The capital of Port-au-Prince and other cities in the south were once filled with the gloomy displaced-persons camps that at one point housed 1.3 million people. But that number has since dropped as people move out because of subsidies or because they could no longer bear to live in the squalid camps or, as the Oxfam report notes, were forced out. The study says that until August, around 61,000 people had been evicted from 152 camps. Another 78,000 people housed in 121 camps faced eviction. The survey interviewed 3,600 camp residents in Port-au-Prince. All but a few of the 121 camps currently under threat of forced evictions are on private property, the report said.It said many of the people in the camps are stuck there: 86 per cent of them lack the financial resources to leave. Most don't have formal jobs and live in extreme poverty, with 60 per cent saying they eat only one meal per day or even less. In a separate report commissioned by Oxfam-Quebec, development researcher Helen Spraos offers a snapshot of life in 16 camps in the Port-au-Prince district of Delmas.
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It said most are relatively small, with about 100 households. All are on private land, and most are nearly invisible because they are behind walls. Most of the women living in them are street merchants and a few do domestic work. Men scrape by through construction work, and although fewer are unemployed than women, they work only a few days each month. "Life in the camps is survival strategy for people, enabling them to subsist on reduced incomes because they no longer have to pay rent," the report notes. Many also said that the government's rental support program would only briefly postpone problems without resolving underlying issues of how to make a living. The report also calls for authorities to tackle several pressing needs, including the replacement of tarpaulins and taking measures to ensure clean water and sanitation until longer-term solutions are put in place.

Alertnet
By Anastasia Moloney
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Tens of thousands of homeless earthquake survivors living in camps sprawled across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince are at risk of eviction, Oxfam said on Monday. Around 360,000 Haitians who lost their homes in the earthquake three years ago still live in tent and tarpaulin camps in and around Port-au-Prince.Some 78,000 living in camps on property owned by schools and churches and on private land face eviction by landowners and local authorities wanting to reclaim their land. “Thousands of people are in a very precarious situation and at risk of finding themselves on the street with nowhere to go. This government should ensure the security and protection of displaced people against violence, intimidation and unlawful threats to evict families,” Andrew Pugh, Oxfam's country director in Haiti, said in a statement. After the January 2010 earthquake, many landowners allowed homeless families to occupy their property. However, this good will is wearing thin. “Displaced Haitians now face persistent and worsening threats of, often violent, eviction from landowners eager to get their land back,” Oxfam’s report said.
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Most families in the camps want to leave, but many are too poor and have nowhere to go, according to an Oxfam survey of 3,600 camp residents in Port-au-Prince. Those still in the camps are often elderly, sick and jobless, and cannot pay rent or repair their quake-damaged homes. The survey found that 60 percent of camp dwellers ate one meal a day - or not even that. “I'm stressed and living in fear because I don't know when the landowner will come back and demand that we leave the premises. I don't know where to go. I'm prepared to face the landowner's reaction, whatever the cost,” a 29-year-old camp dweller identified as Marjorie is quoted as saying in the report. Aid agencies and the Haitian government agree that resettling camp dwellers is a priority. But resettlement has been hampered by political uncertainty, weak coordination among international aid groups and a cholera epidemic, as well as longstanding land tenure problems. There are schemes by the Haitian government and international aid agencies to relocate families from tent camps on public and state-owned land into safe and repaired homes. For example, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) offers families in tent settlements a one-off payment of $500 - the equivalent of a year’s rent - if they can find a new, safe place to live.
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Such initiatives have helped reduce the number of people in tent cities by 77 percent from a peak of 1.5 million following the earthquake. “This reduction in the number of people living in camps is also partly due to forced evictions,” Oxfam said in its report. From July 2010 to August this year, nearly 61,000 people were thrown off camp settlements, according to IOM. Oxfam is urging the Haitian government to step up efforts to rehouse the remaining camp dwellers, especially those who face the constant threat of eviction. “Up until now there has been no systematic effort to address forced evictions, in terms of either a coordinated legal response to the human rights violations or a political response in the form of a comprehensive return and relocation policy,” the Oxfam report said.

Alertnet
By Anastasia Moloney
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Tens of thousands of homeless earthquake survivors living in camps sprawled across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince are at risk of eviction, Oxfam said on Monday. Around 360,000 Haitians who lost their homes in the earthquake three years ago still live in tent and tarpaulin camps in and around Port-au-Prince.Some 78,000 living in camps on property owned by schools and churches and on private land face eviction by landowners and local authorities wanting to reclaim their land. “Thousands of people are in a very precarious situation and at risk of finding themselves on the street with nowhere to go. This government should ensure the security and protection of displaced people against violence, intimidation and unlawful threats to evict families,” Andrew Pugh, Oxfam's country director in Haiti, said in a statement. After the January 2010 earthquake, many landowners allowed homeless families to occupy their property. However, this good will is wearing thin. “Displaced Haitians now face persistent and worsening threats of, often violent, eviction from landowners eager to get their land back,” Oxfam’s report said.
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Most families in the camps want to leave, but many are too poor and have nowhere to go, according to an Oxfam survey of 3,600 camp residents in Port-au-Prince. Those still in the camps are often elderly, sick and jobless, and cannot pay rent or repair their quake-damaged homes. The survey found that 60 percent of camp dwellers ate one meal a day - or not even that. “I'm stressed and living in fear because I don't know when the landowner will come back and demand that we leave the premises. I don't know where to go. I'm prepared to face the landowner's reaction, whatever the cost,” a 29-year-old camp dweller identified as Marjorie is quoted as saying in the report. Aid agencies and the Haitian government agree that resettling camp dwellers is a priority. But resettlement has been hampered by political uncertainty, weak coordination among international aid groups and a cholera epidemic, as well as longstanding land tenure problems. There are schemes by the Haitian government and international aid agencies to relocate families from tent camps on public and state-owned land into safe and repaired homes. For example, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) offers families in tent settlements a one-off payment of $500 - the equivalent of a year’s rent - if they can find a new, safe place to live.
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Such initiatives have helped reduce the number of people in tent cities by 77 percent from a peak of 1.5 million following the earthquake. “This reduction in the number of people living in camps is also partly due to forced evictions,” Oxfam said in its report. From July 2010 to August this year, nearly 61,000 people were thrown off camp settlements, according to IOM. Oxfam is urging the Haitian government to step up efforts to rehouse the remaining camp dwellers, especially those who face the constant threat of eviction. “Up until now there has been no systematic effort to address forced evictions, in terms of either a coordinated legal response to the human rights violations or a political response in the form of a comprehensive return and relocation policy,” the Oxfam report said.

IOM and its partners this week inaugurated a new shelter centre that will house 600 displaced Haitians previously living in destitute conditions in a makeshift camp. The centre, located in the commune of Cassagne, near the western city of Leogane, the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake, has 134 houses, which will provide a safe, clean and healthy environment for 600 people. It was developed by a variety of partners. The Korean organization Serving Friends International facilitated the long-term lease of the site, the sanitation and built a school for the children of the centre and of the area.
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The UN Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) donated all of the material needed to build the 134 structures. And the Korean contingent of MINUSTAH participated in the preparation of the grounds, building a bridge and the drainage system, and planting trees. IOM built the 134 houses with funding of US$ 300,000 from the Government of the Republic of Korea. The site includes toilet blocks, solar lighting, shower facilities and water. It is located near the centre of Leogane, where the resident can access health facilities. “The school that our organization built will provide education to the children of this Centre and from the area. It is our hope that these children will become independent and be instrumental in the development of their country,’ said Heegon Moon, President of Serving Friends International. The funds also allowed IOM to assist a group of 66 internally displaced families in the Gressier area, also in Haiti’s western region, to leave a camp and move into houses. “The local Council of Leogane was instrumental in facilitating the work and in making this project a reality. The issue of return to decent accommodation for displaced persons living in camps almost three years after the earthquake has been identified by the President and the Prime Minister of Haiti as one of their top priorities,” said Gregoire Goodstein, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti. “The latest information in the IOM Data Tracking Matrix or DTM confirmed that at the end of October 2012 there were 90,415 families, or 357,785 individuals, still living in camps,” added. Goodstein.
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Since 2010, IOM has provided transitional shelters to 739 families in Leogane. Leogane still has 1,724 families, or 5,931 persons, living in precarious conditions in camps. “The number of families still living in camps is much too high a number so long after the earthquake. More needs to be done to finally end the displacement crisis in Haiti,” declared Goodstein. IOM will continue supporting the efforts of the Government of Haiti in finding long-term solutions for those still displaced and living in camps, especially for those with special protection needs such as the disabled and other vulnerable groups. Since 2010, the international community has assisted a total of 158,833 Haitian families, or approximately 635,332 individuals living in camps since the earthquake to find housing solutions. These include 110,964 transitional shelters built by members of the IOM-led Emergency Shelter Cluster; 23,233 rental subsidies for one year; 5,911 permanent shelters; as well as repairs to damaged houses.