Brazil even more commited with Haiti. President Lula in Port-au-Prince.

"Haiti needs the forgiveness of his debt to rebuild the country"

President Lula called on creditor nations to forgive Haiti debt which reaches US$ 1.3 billion. That would be - according to Lula - a way to allow the Haitian government to take the money that would be to pay off the debt and apply on the reconstruction of the country. Lula defended the measure in a speech made on Thursday (Feb 25) in Port-au-Prince after signing of three acts - the construction of water reservoirs, food production and improvement of public schools network - together with the President of Haiti H.E. René Préval.

Lula recalled that earlier in this week, during the summit meetings held in Cancun, Mexico, he could witness the willingness of the Countries to help the Haitian people. Just before, at the meeting of {UNASUR} the Member Countries discussed the donation of over $ 100 million for the Haitian government. Lula stressed by several times that the aid to Haiti should be done following the needs defined by the local authorities.

Shoe vendor on a street in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti. Lula advocates debt relief for Haiti that the country can invest in its rebuilding.
Photo: Roberto Cordeiro / Blog do Planalto

The Brazilian president flew over the capital accompanied by Haitian President Préval. According to Lula, one of the priorities is the removal of rubble in towns and the lifting up of 50 to 60 modern tents per location in order to gather the families. Préval explained about his will on importing tractors and machinery from the Dominican Republic and the United States for the task force. According to the Haitian president, the machinery at the capital should be moved to the countryside.

"If Brazil has already built a very strong policy compromised on Haiti's close future, after seeing with my own eyes what happens to Haiti, we will do very much more. Things are even much more serious than we imagined. In this moment of pain and despair is exactly when we need to raise our heads and believe that Haiti will come out stronger of all this. A people that always have kept the dignity to fight. The first country to build Liberty in this Hemisphere will not bow to this setback. Men and women of Haiti will know with much more strength to build a fairer country for their own people, "he said.

Source: Presidential Palace (Planalto) Blog,

Could a Start-Up Competition Help Haiti?

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By LORA KOLODNY 

Could a nation still lacking basic resources and infrastructure and still reeling from a devastating earthquake benefit from entrepreneurial education and cash grants for small businesses? Startup Weekend, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, thinks so.

Since 2007, Startup Weekend has been orchestrating gatherings of entrepreneurs, application developers, marketers and designers who, over 54 hours in 3 days, pitch their business ideas, self-select, break into teams, and then work to build what they hope will become successful technology start-ups. Each Startup

Weekend culminates with a business competition, where participants and invited panelists vote for the best overall start-up to receive a prize. So far, according to Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen, the organization’s directors, Startup Weekend has held 83 events in 62 cities, and those events have begin 290 ventures.

Several companies hatched at these events are now operational, a few with full-time employees, including: Mugasha, an electronic dance music site based in Portland; Skribit, an Atlanta-based tool that helps bloggers gather story suggestions from their readers; Foodspotting, an online food guide based in San Francisco that emphasizes local dishes and user-contributed photographs; and SnapImpact, a Boulder, Colo.,-based site and iPhone app that matches volunteers to charities and projects.

But Startup Weekend has never held an event in a developing nation, let alone an area recovering from a natural disaster. Attempts to organize a Startup Weekend in Nigeria in 2008 failed because the group  lacked a network in the country to help secure a venue, promote the event, and recruit participants.

Nonetheless, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen intend to hold Startup Weekend: Haiti in the fall, following the rainy season. To do so, they will have to raise sponsorship funds here and forge partnerships there with experts and organizations including schools and government offices. They face a steep challenge and need to learn a great deal about economic development, said Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend, “but sometimes big challenges are best met by people unfamiliar with the obstacles.”

So far, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen have obtained one corporate sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark, a division of the software giant that offers free software and support to start-ups. BizSpark donated a venue for a fundraiser at the SXSW conference in Austin next month. Mr. Nelsen hopes the event will lock in at least $8,000 in donations and maybe more.

Startup Weekend will also seek donations online, using the services of San Francisco-based Piryx, a fund-raising platform that has worked extensively with politicians and nonprofit groups. In fact, it was Tom Serres, chief executive of Piryx, who suggested holding a Startup Weekend in Haiti.

Acknowledging their own lack of experience, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen say they don’t know who will show up for the event in Haiti. They hope to recruit a mix of aid workers and residents with business ideas. “Whether people have ideas for farmers markets and Internet cafes, or high-tech, medical and logistics businesses, we want to help them get started and let them know we can continue to support them financially and with advice,” said Shaherose Charania, who is chief executive of Women 2.0 (another entrepreneurial support venture) and who has volunteered to serve as a coach.

Everyone is hopeful, but not everyone is convinced. “They might succeed if they do their research,” said Melissa Carrier, executive director at the center for social value creation with the University of Maryland. “But there is a strong risk that Haiti may not be ready to absorb this kind of economic development by the fall. Basic needs of the citizens may still be so under-met that there won’t be capacity to even think about business creation and jobs.”

Startup Weekend promises to spend 90 percent or more of the total budget raised for this initiative within Haiti’s borders and to post its budget on its Web site. “Beyond that, I don’t want to make other promises,”

Mr. Nager said. If the event inspires the creation of one company or one job even, he said, he would consider it a success.

See The Prize’s guide to coming business plan competitions. And here’s how to win a competition.

In Haiti, Practicing Medicine From Afar

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By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Published: February 8, 2010

In the desperate days soon after the earthquake in Haiti last month, foreign medical volunteers relied on improvised, low-tech devices for consultations and coordination. But American doctors are switching to more sophisticated technology to help improve public health in Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations.

“We are in this for the long haul,” said Scott C. Simmons, whose title at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is director of telehealth.

Telehealth, better known as telemedicine, is an offshoot of the space program; it was developed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the 1960s to serve the astronauts. In the live, real-time version, it involves a video hookup between a patient on the scene and a doctor or other health professional in a hospital or office. Sometimes a doctor or nurse on the scene will consult via telemedicine with a specialist elsewhere.

At the University of Miami’s 240-bed tent hospital near the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where volunteer surgeons from the United States have performed 1,000 operations since the Jan. 12 earthquake, doctors should soon be able to consult via satellite with specialists in Miami and other medical centers, said Mr. Simmons, an engineer who helped develop portable telemedicine for NASA’s space shuttles.

The satellite connection should provide sufficient bandwidth for telemedicine consultations; meanwhile, the Haiti field hospital is making do with high-speed Internet connections donated by a Miami philanthropist and connections through Access Haiti, a wireless regional network linked through the neighboring Dominican Republic.

It is also getting help from a network of volunteer ham radio operators like Jack Satterfield, a fisherman from St. Petersburg, Fla., who helped get an imperiled day-old infant from Haiti to the Navy hospital ship Comfort offshore. “Their doctor talked to our doctor” via the military’s radio system for amateurs, Mr. Satterfield said.

The Comfort, part of the United States military’s Southern Command, has 82 physicians and 136 nurses. Capt. Miguel Cubano, surgeon general of the command, said he was in “discussions to set up a long-term presence in Haiti.” Among other things, Captain Cubano said, it could provide telemedicine consultations with the Center for the Intrepid, a military rehabilitation hospital in San Antonio.

The ship is no stranger to Haiti. The Comfort provided assistance after the hurricane last year. “Haiti was a priority for us before the earthquake,” said Captain Cubano, who is also a surgeon.

Southcom, short for Southern Command, has a partnership in advanced technology with the University of Miami.

Dr. Anne E. Burdick, associate dean of telehealth and clinical outreach at the Miller school, said the university’s program could be “a hub for connecting Haitian patients with health care providers in several U.S. telemedicine programs around the country.”

In a test with the Southern Command, Dr. Burdick said, the school used live teleconferencing to link kidney transplant patients in Guyana with a surgical team at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

John Linkous, chief executive of the American Telemedicine Association, a trade and advocacy group in Washington, said it was often hard to persuade busy physicians to stay for long in developing countries. After a visit, however, they are often ready to help out with telemedicine consultations.

The video sessions are often prepared in advance with secure Internet messaging, including pictures, X-rays and pathology reports. More often, the exchange is entirely by Internet, with a response sent back within hours.

Dr. S. Ward Casscells, a Houston cardiologist who was assistant secretary of defense for health affairs under President George W. Bush, noted that telemedicine had become simpler and less expensive in the era of the Internet and advanced cellphones.

Dr. Casscells urged the military to leave telemedicine equipment behind when the disaster eases in Haiti and train local medical people to use it.

World Bank: We Are in Haiti for the Long Haul

Go to Original (The Huffington Post) > 

Yvonne Tsikata 

World Bank Haiti Country Director

Posted: January 21, 2010 06:11 PM

Today's announcement that we're waiving all payments from Haiti for the next 5 years while we continue to work to forgive its debt of US $38 million -- less than 4% of the country's external debt -- is only a small sliver of our much larger commitment to Haiti.

Since 2005, we have provided US $363 million in grants that have been used to further the country's reform agenda and improve its overall economic prospects.

Additionally, in June of 2009 Haiti received US $1.2 billion in debt relief after reaching the completion point under the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), which allows creditors, including multilateral institutions, to provide debt relief to the world's poorest and most heavily indebted countries.

Haiti was already showing encouraging signs of improvement when the earthquake struck.

It had posted three successive years of economic growth since 2004 -- when the economy contracted by 3.5% -- and the government was making headway in improving governance and transparency, especially in the area of public financial management systems.

In spite of the global financial crisis and the fall of remittances, Haiti's economy grew more than 2% last year.

The earthquake has put the brakes on all that, but at the Bank we look to redouble our support to Haiti and its people by building back better and putting the reins of development in the hands of the Haitian communities.

A team of World Bank experts is on the ground in Haiti, to assess how our current projects can be best redeployed to support recovery and to prepare for an emergency operation in response to the earthquake. Bank specialists will join a multilateral team -- including staff from the UN, the European Union and the Inter American Development Bank -- that will be working in Haiti for the next few weeks to conduct damage and reconstruction assessments in every major sector, including health, education, water, sanitation, electricity, and roads.

Going forward, we would like to put special emphasis on the capacity generated by community-driven development projects, where people at the local level decide their priorities.

We have supported a number of such initiatives going on in Haiti at the moment that have proven to be particularly successful on the basis of community involvement. This will be critical in the reconstruction.

Just to give an example, by May 2009 our community-driven initiative had completed 549 projects, primarily for agricultural support and other infrastructure -- including grain mills, water pumps, and local roads -- as well as income-generating activities.

It provided technical support to 4,032 community-based organizations in rural areas, benefiting around 763,000 people in poor rural areas (or 57 percent of the population of the rural communities covered by the program).

We also want to build back better, making housing and infrastructure more resilient to natural hazards, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.

We want to work with the Haitian authorities to strengthen code enforcement and the institutions that supervise this, while continue building the government's capacity to ensure that this happens.

In a joint effort with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) we have recently produced a Reconstruction handbook that I'd like to share here with anyone interested.

In sum, we will be focusing on ongoing projects that work quickly, effectively, and with the people.

The recent tragic events in Haiti have proven the resilience and determination of the Haitian people -- who have not given up on their country or their future or even their hope to still find survivors in the wreckage of their battered capital.

We want to join their determination to build a better future based on their own priorities and the help of the international community.