“Reconstructing to Rebalance Haiti after the Earthquake”

TESTIMONY

“Reconstructing to Rebalance Haiti after the Earthquake”

Robert Maguire, Ph.D.
Trinity Washington University And The United States Institute of Peace (USIP)

Testimony presented before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
 

February 4, 2010

EXCERPTS

(document below)

1. Welcoming Dislocated Persons: A de facto Decentralization

Since the quake, some 250,000 Port-au-Prince residents have fled the city, returning to towns and villages from which they had migrated or where they have family. An estimated 55,000 have shown up in Hinche in Haiti’s Central Plateau; the population of Petite Riviere de l’Artibonite has swelled from 37,000 to 62,000; St. Marc’s 60,000, has swollen to 100,000. The flight of Haitians away from a city that now represents death, destruction and loss might become a silver lining in today’s very dark cloud. If that is to be the case, however, we – both the government of Haiti and its international partners – must catch up with and get ahead of this movement. Already underdeveloped rural infrastructures and the resources of already impoverished rural families are being stretched. The provision of basic services to these displaced populations is an urgent priority. If conditions in the countryside are not improved, the displaced will ultimately return to Port-au-Prince, to replicate the dangerous dynamics of earlier decades.

To catch up and get ahead of this reverse migration, we should support an idea proffered by the Government of Haiti in Montreal last week: the reinforcement of 200 decentralized communities. As soon as possible, “Welcome Centers” might be stood up in towns and villages. They can be temporary, to be made permanent later. They can serve as decentralized ‘growth poles’ that offer multiple services, including relief in the short term, with health and education facilities attached. Let us not forget that Haiti has lost many of its schools and among those fleeing the devastated city are tens of thousands of students. Twenty five percent of Haitian rural districts do not have schools. And schools that exist outside Port-au-Prince are usually seriously deficient. The reverse migration we are seeing today offers a golden opportunity to rebalance the education and health system of Haiti.

The centers can coordinate investment and employment opportunities, as well as state services including robust agronomic assistance to farmers. Haiti’s planting season is almost here and now more than ever the country needs a bountiful harvest. Displaced people working as paid labor can reinforce Haiti’s farmers.

Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt – or built for the first time - including schools, health clinics, community centers, roads, bridges and drainage canals. Hillsides need rehabilitation, particularly with vegetative cover and perhaps even stone terraces. Providing work for not just the displaced, but to those they are joining in towns and villages throughout Haiti, will go a long way toward rebalancing Haitian economy and society, and toward repairing a social fabric ripped to shreds by decades of neglect and subsequent migration. This is an opportunity that must be seized.

2. Support the Creation of a National Civic Service Corps

Since 2007, various Haitian government officials and others have been working quietly on the prospect of creating a Haitian National Civic Service Corps. Citizen civic service is mandated in Article 52-3 of the Haitian constitution and, even before the quake, the idea of a civic service corps to mobilize unemployed and disaffected youth seemed attractive. Now is the time for this idea to take off. As I have recently written, a 700,000-strong national civic service corps will rapidly harness untapped labor in both rural and urban settings, especially among Haiti’s large youthful population, to rebuild Haiti’s public infrastructure required for economic growth and environmental rehabilitation and protection; increase productivity, particularly of farm products; restore dignity and pride through meaningful work; and give Haitian men and women a stake in their country’s future. It will also form the basis of a natural disaster response mechanism.

If this all sounds familiar, it should: the idea of a Haitian National Civic Service Corps parallels the same thinking that went into the creation of such New Deal programs as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

We have seen what these programs did to help the United States and its people stand up during a difficult time.

In the aftermath of the storms that devastated Haiti in 2008, Haitian President Prèval asked not for charity, but for a helping hand to allow Haitians to rebuild their country. Today he is making a similar point. Here is more symmetry between the Haiti and the U.S. As Harry Hopkins, the legendary administrator of the Works Progress Administration, pointed out: “most people would rather work than take handouts. A paycheck from work didn’t feel like charity, with the shame that it conferred. It was better if the work actually built something. Then workers could retain their old skills or develop new ones, and add improvements to the public infrastructure like roads and parks and playgrounds.” Let’s help Haiti restore its balance by supporting a national civic service corps that can accomplish the same for Haiti and its people as our New Deal programs did in the United States decades ago.

To reiterate, as was the case with our New Deal, Haiti’s civic service corps must be a ‘cash-for-work’ initiative. Cash-for-work will inject serious liquidity into the Haitian economy and stimulate recovery from the bottom-up. Already there are various entities employing Haitians in a variety of cash-for-work programs. This Monday, for example, the UNDP announced that it has enrolled 32,000 in a cash-for-work rubble removing program; a number expected to double by tomorrow. Coordination of existing efforts within an envisaged national program will be essential to maximizing how Haiti can be built back better – by its own people, with everyone wearing the same uniform.

A special commission, similar to those established by President Prèval in 2007 to engage Haitians from diverse sectors to study and make recommendations on key issues confronting his government, might be established to oversee this coordination. (Other special commissions could be mounted to tackle other topics or needs and as a means of expanding the Haitian government’s human resource circle.) Such a commission could be enlarged to include representatives of key donors. A central figure like Harry Hopkins will have to lead the endeavor. Perhaps such a figure could emerge from Haiti’s vaunted private sector. In any case, let’s avoid a repetition of the cacophony of feel good, flag-draped projects.

3. Strengthen Haitian state institutions through accompaniment, cooperation and partnership

At the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Haiti held last week, witnesses spoke of the need to rebuild the Haitian state from the bottom up, and of working with Haitian officials – not pushing them aside. I agree with these points whole-heartedly. This is not the time to impose governance on Haiti – that is a 19th century idea unfit for the 21st century. This is an opportunity to help strengthen Haiti’s public institutions, not to replace them.

As pointed out above, the capacity of the Haitian state, never strong to begin with, has deteriorated progressively over the past 50 years. In recent years that was due in part to international policies that circumvented state institutions in favor of private ones – both within Haiti and from beyond, and left the resource-strapped government virtually absent in the lives of its citizens. In the aftermath of the quake, we see starkly the results of the decimation of the Haiti state. The already weak state has been further set back by the death of civil servants and the loss of state facilities and physical resources. In this context, the government of President Rene Prèval and Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive has taken much criticism for its response – or lack thereof – in the past few weeks.

It is easy to kick someone in the teeth when he or she is already on the mat. Rather than swinging our foot, however, we should offer our hand. This is the time of the Haitian government’s greatest need. Achieving cooperation and partnership, as pointed out by Canadian Prime Minister Harper at the recently-held Montreal Conference, is the biggest concern. Over the past four years, the Prèval government has won praise internationally – and among most in Haiti – over its improved management of the affairs of the state. Political conflict, though still extant, has diminished considerably. Haiti’s terribly polarized society is a little less polarized today. Moderation and greater inclusion – not demagoguery and a winner-takes-all attitude – have worked their way into the ethos of the Haitian political culture. Partnership to strengthen the Haitian state was on the horizon following the ‘new paradigm for partnership’ agreed to at the April 2009 Donors Conference.

Let’s stay that course. Generations of bad governance and a zero sum political culture are not turned around overnight.

Quietly, but steadily in the post-quake period, the Haitian government has been picking itself up by its bootstraps beyond the photo-ops and glare of the cameras to reassemble, and then to reassert, itself. Still, given the magnitude of this catastrophe, the government is overmatched. Any government would be. This is not the time to cast aspersions. It is the time to work in partnership and to accompany Haitian leaders through their time of loss and sorrow, into a more balanced and better future.

4. Get Money into the Hands of Poor People

In 1999, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto estimated that there was $5.2 billion in ‘dead capital’ in Haiti, shared among 82 percent of the population. Of this sum, $3.2 billion was located in rural Haiti. This amount dwarfed by four times the total assets of Haiti’s 123 largest formal enterprises. This capital, principally in the hands of poor people in the form of property, land, and goods, is considered ‘dead’ because it cannot be used to leverage further capital for investment and growth. To free it up, clear titling would be required along with a reduction of red tape and corruption, and a brand newattitude toward Haiti’s most vibrant form of capitalism – its’ informal economy – and the poor entrepreneurs who make it work.

Doubtless, you have seen post-quake stories of how Haiti’s grassroots entrepreneurs began rebounding within days.

A key to Haiti’s recovery – and, yes, to its rebalancing – is to get capital into the hands of grassroots entrepreneurs – be they still in Port-au-Prince or elsewhere in the country. Formalizing dead capital – which will be a long, tedious and conflictive path, but one that perhaps can be facilitated now through such steps as the issuance of provisional land and property titles that subsequently are fully formalized – is but one way of getting liquid assets into poor people’s hands. Others, more expeditious, include:

• More small loans (microcredit) to entrepreneurs, particularly those who produce something, including farmers. Farmers with capital will not just produce more food, but will increase employment. Government studies indicate that a 10% increase in man-hours on farms will create 40,000 new jobs. One strong candidate to improve microcredit throughout Haiti is an organization called FONKOZE. With more than 33 branches country-wide, it serves some 175,000 members, mostly among those who make – or made prior to their engagement with microcredit - $2.00 a day or less. FONKOZE also facilitates the efficient and lower cost decentralizing of the flow of funds sent to Haiti from family abroad.
  
• Haiti must now benefit from a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. Brilliantly popular in such places as Mexico and Brazil, CCT programs serve as a means of transferring cash to the poorest of the poor, conditioned upon the children of poor families attending quality schools and fully operational clinics. Mexico’s program is largely rural; Brazil’s more urban-oriented. In both cases, they have succeeded in assisting millions of poor families improve living standards while sending their children to schools and clinics. As such, CCTs have invested in future human resources. Such a program in Haiti could accomplish these goals, but only if Haiti’s educational and health systems are extended into rural areas (helping to rebalance) and upgraded in existing locations (helping to rebuild). Importantly, CCT programs provide the government with the challenge/opportunity of being a positive presence in the lives of citizens. In Haiti, this is essential as a means of enabling the government to move from being largely absent to being positively present in the lives of citizens, and to demonstrate therefore that there are tangible fruits of democratic governance.

5. Seek-out and Support Institutions, Businesses, and Leaders who work toward Greater Inclusion, Less Inequality, and Enact Socially-Responsible Strategies for Investing in Haiti.

One cannot discuss the future of Haiti without considering the prospect of external investment to create factory jobs, particularly in view of the HOPE II legislation and its potential benefits. Beyond any doubt, factory jobs should be a part of Haiti’s future. Already, some of the assembly plants in Port-au-Prince are back in operation, to the satisfaction of both owners and workers. In this regard, support should be given to the “Renewing Hope for Haitian Trade and Investment Act for 2010” introduced by Senators Wyden and Nelson. But, as this legislation is considered, three important points must be kept in mind if this job creation strategy is to be a plus in helping Haiti to rebalance, ‘build back better’ and avoid mistakes of the past.

First, the fiasco of the 1980’s ‘Taiwanization’ period must not be repeated. Universal free education and rural investment are important, and though they will not precede assembly investment, they must robustly parallel it and eventually get ahead of it. Investment in Haiti should not ignore decentralized agri-business possibilities and the economic growth and development it can bring through jobs and the infusion of cash into the Haitian economy.

Second, assembly plants cannot be concentrated largely in Port-au-Prince. If nothing else, the shattered infrastructure of the city should serve as an incentive for decentralization. Haiti has at least a dozen coastal cities that either already have a functioning, albeit usually rudimentary, infrastructure or where a port and support infrastructure can be built – perhaps at a lower costs than Port-au-Prince. Decentralization to coastal cities and towns offers Haiti and investors an opportunity to undo the damage begun fifty years ago by Papa Doc’s insidious centralization in Port-au-Prince and to rebalance the prospects for economic growth and infrastructure development (including electricity) to all of Haiti.

Third, investors, owners and managers must be mindful of the fact that Haitian workers are more than plentiful cheap labor. As Secretary of State Clinton said at the April Donors’ Conference, “‘talent is universal; opportunity is not.” A key to Haiti’s renaissance is to improve the opportunity environment for all of its people. Haiti’s Diaspora offers bountiful evidence of what can be achieved when opportunities are twinned with talent.

Jeffry Sachs has equated factory jobs in Bangladesh with the first rung on a ladder toward greater opportunity and development. In Haiti, however, the ladder for most factory workers, in view of their survival wages juxtaposed with a constantly increasing cost of living and the absence of any public social safety net, has a single rung. Haiti’s opportunity environment will be improved considerably:

• If investors, owners, and mangers recognize that Haiti’s workers have legitimate aspirations to improve their lives, and their honest days’ work should be means for that, and;
  
• If investors, owners and managers follow that recognition with actions that demonstrate socially responsible investing and public-private partnerships that improve workers status and conditions, and;
  
• If the Haitian state has the strength and resources to become and remain a positive presence in workers lives by providing services to them and their children, particularly in education, health, and safety from gangs and other criminal elements whose activities are often financed by narcotics trafficking.

“Reconstructing to Rebalance Haiti after the Earthquake”

Tectonic Shifts? The upcoming donors' conference for Haiti

Go to Original (The Huffington Post) >

Mark Schuller 
Haiti scholar/solidarity activist

Posted: March 24, 2010 11:48 PM 

 

(Miami) This week former Presidents Clinton and Bush are in Haiti, trying to drum up support for Haiti's reconstruction and setting the stage for the upcoming donor conference at the U.N. on March 31.

There is no shortage of needs, and even plans to address them.

Yet the process has as yet to be transparent.

I am in the Miami airport as I write this, on my way to Haiti via a conference of applied anthropologists in Mexico.

Miami is a familiar stopping off point for groups and individuals going to Haiti.

My flight happens to be next to the one to Port-au-Prince.

Striking to me is a much higher percentage of blan ¬- foreigners - waiting for their flight.

Still more striking is the type of blan: as a foreigner myself I used to be a magnet for self-assured mission groups all clad in the same bright t-shirt who still had trouble navigating foreign waters.

Given my appearance they, and many in Haiti, pegged me as one of them, as a blan misyonè.

Not today.

Most blan at this gate are equipped with I-phones or Blackberries, talking in a staccato that betrays the pace and self-absorption one would expect on the subways in Manhattan or Washington.

Development jargon of "RFPs" and "deliverables" pepper the loud conversation of mostly thirtysomethings.

They are blan devlopman or blan ONG, "development" or "NGO foreigners."

Maybe these are some of the 300 experts that are assembling Haiti's next blueprint for development.

Maybe they are just trying to plant themselves and write a proposal for their agency to get their portion of the windfall.

This world - and the hundreds of thousands of survivors still not having their daily needs met, most notably 600,000 who don't have a dry place to sleep, still - are waiting for the donor's conference at the end of this month to see who will be pledging what, for what.

Some still hold out hope that this plan will seize an opportunity and finally do right by the majority of Haitian people.

The waiting, and not participating or even knowing about the plan, is making many people nervous.

On March 16 there was a conference in the Dominican Republic to present donors with the draft Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) and the beginning of this week, UNESCO held a meeting in Paris to outline specifics.

Most people I know expect that the donors' conference hosted by the United Nations on March 31 will not be a deliberative space but a ritualistic one.

True, there is a new team in Washington.

True also, the severity of the earthquake has triggered rumblings of new thinking: even former President Bill Clinton apologized this past weekend for his promotion of subsidized rice in the 1990s that destroyed Haiti's peasant economy while being a boon for Arkansas agribusiness.

But this donor conference bears too close a resemblance to those before it, which basically rubber-stamped an assemblage of policies hurriedly culled together and imposed by international institutions.

After the 2004 coup, and after the U.S. passed the baton onto Brazil, was a conference hosted in Washington by the World Bank called in French Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire (CCI), or Interim Cooperation Framework in English.

The CCI began with a three-week "participation" period wherein 200 experts, most of them foreign, consulted large NGOs and members of "civil society," particularly leaders within the Group of 184, the bourgeois opposition to Aristide.

"Participation" also included merely an invitation letter to other groups who boycotted the process.

A network of progressive groups in Haiti published three scathing critiques of the CCI, particularly the rushed, top-down approach and the neoliberal plan that came out of it.

The donors' conference, on July 19-20, 2004, was a ritual of approval and support for the de-facto regime of U.N. retiree Gérard Latortue.

Donor groups like the U.S., E.U., U.N., IDB, and World Bank pledged $1.4 billion to rebuild Haiti torn apart by the coup, which the international community blamed solely on Aristide. 

A closer look at these pledges revealed that these agencies were "double-dipping," counting funds that they had withheld from the elected government pending resolution of the "crisis" - but still, some $900 million new funds were promised.

As of October 2005, 15 months after the conference, only 30 percent of pledged funds were released. 

The plan itself set into motion the privatization of public utilities in electricity (EDH) and the phone company (Teleco) and further pushed Haiti into neoliberal globalization in agriculture and industry.

This same ritual of rubber stamping a rushed, foreign-led, top-down process occurred with the new elected government and its first donor conference, with a little different ambiance as President Préval defended his support of Cuban doctors and Venezuela's Petro Caribé.

The World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper was more of the same.

The most recent plan, however, did away with even the pretense of participation.

Famed British economist Paul Collier, not having even visited Haiti, proposed the same boilerplate strategies he proposed for many other countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

This contrasts with the work that a partnership of universities called INURED is doing in Cité Soleil.

A detailed, well-conceived and executed, and ambitious plan to assess local needs in both quantitative and qualitative terms, a report called "Voices from the Shanties" voices some concerns about security and trauma that are going under the radar.

It also uncovers some practices from individual families to abuse the system by fanning out into many camps (which if neighborhood groups were organizing the distribution would be much more difficult - not to mention less likely for corruption or violence - as grassroots groups constantly point out).

Primary concerns remain sanitation - literally shit - and its health consequences in the U.N. run camps.

As almost every report from the field has shown, Haitian survivors are doing an amazing job of working together, of building solidarity, of organizing neighborhood-level committees.

This comes as no surprise to those who know the Haitian people, but apparently this knowledge seems not to trickle up to mainstream foreign media, policymakers, donors, and large NGOs.

Survivors are excluded from the process.

The U.N. cluster meetings exclude Haitian survivors and even government officials, as Reed Lindsay reported.

Meetings are held in French, a language that 90 percent of the population does not speak and cannot write.

Even progressive solidarity organizations are having conversations in English.

A network of 47 progressive groups in Haiti and other countries met to critique the exclusion of Haitian civil society from this plan, publishing a statement on March 18 signed by 26 groups.

The plan does appear to be more of the same.

Despite Clinton's apology for the rice subsidies and destroying Haiti's national production, he is as wedded as ever to the Collier Report and the reliance on Haiti's "cheap labor" in offshore apparel factories.

Lindsay reported that for all the promotion of decentralization and national production, only four percent of the funds are going to agricultural production.

The funds going through the elected government of Haiti are at an all-time low, less than one percent, at the same moment when donor groups discuss the importance of building up state capacity and systems.

Solutions are many.

My hometown of Chicago was rebuilt better than the old city following a great fire. How Chicago rose from the ashes a better city might offer lessons for my new "Second City" of Port-au-Prince.

Chicago used the opportunity to plan, employing public works master Daniel Burnham and architects Sullivan and the great Frank Lloyd Wright.

Careful thought and planning went into accommodating density, separating work and home life, and adequate space for recreation.

A document called "Haïti Demain" coming out of an inter-ministerial team of the Haitian government presents several forward-thinking proposals, the first of which is rehabilitating a network of roads that connect Haiti's provincial towns to another so that local development can be a virtuous cycle.

Other specific suggestions include a fund for local development, real decentralization and better coordination from Haiti's central government.

I do hope that a better Port-au-Prince will emerge from the rubble, a Port-au-Prince that offers running water and toilet facilities for all, regular access to electricity for all, safe neighborhoods and well-maintained streets for all. It is possible.

It will require a plan.

This planning process cannot move forward without the survivors, while their urgent needs are not yet met.

This planning process should include real participation, a tèt ansanm (coming together) of all emergent and old neighborhood groups that are pulling together for their own collective survival.

Survivors in Port-au-Prince do not need luxury hotels or casinos, for example.

The apparel industry has provided needed jobs but their high social costs - and extremely low wages - played a heavy role in creating the violent shantytowns in the first place.

Another silver lining might present itself in that many people are moving back to their hometowns in the provinces, estimated at 600,000 people.

This could present an opportunity to rebuild Haiti's national production and peasant economy, systematically ruined by neoliberalism.

In the mean time the problems that donors refer to as a lack of social capital - violence, anonymity, scale - of the crowding of the capital will have already been eased.

What's more, aid agencies, the Haitian government, and Haitian civil society alike all have stated a desire for decentralization in addition to national production that remains a stated goal of the Préval government.

As Lindsay pointed out, this discourse is not new.

The irony is not lost on Haitian people now.

There used to be a proverb said a long time ago, si peyizan pa desann mòn, moun lavil pa manje (If the peasants didn't descend the mountain, city people wouldn't eat).

This hasn't been true for quite some time.

This earthquake may have provided the opportunity to rebuild.

There is an important caveat.

Some groups have advocated the wholesale exodus of Port-au-Prince.

This is irresponsible for a couple of reasons.

First, many Port-au-Prince residents, particularly the youth in the shantytowns, grew up in Port-au-Prince. Half of the country's population is 15 or younger.

Secondly, without quick and sustainable job creation, this migration simply displaces the problem of food security into the remote rural areas, already marginalized because of communications and physical infrastructure.

Already people are moving back.

One long-term model would be to rebuild the support economy to transform crops grown by a self-sufficient peasantry.

Land reform has never been more urgent, but especially with the city cousins coming back home from Port-au-Prince, the need to create jobs processing the rice, the corn, the sugar, the mangos, the tomatoes, has never been greater.

Women's activist JoAnna plead with me in an interview: "We used to have factories that used to make tomato paste, they destroyed that. We had factories that used to make milk, they destroyed that. Well, we used to have factories that made sugar, they destroyed that."

A sugar mill formerly owned by the American agribusiness HASCO was taken over by local ownership in Léogâne, in the neighborhood of Darbonne.

This area was as close to the epicenter as Port-au-Prince.

Rebuilding it - and the tens of factories that used to produce tomato paste like just outside of Cavaillon - not to mention building new factories to transform corn into corn oil, syrup, etc. is now no longer a wistful symbol of Latin American development (ECLAC and Import Substitution Industrialization) before the wave of coups but an urgent priority.

These jobs will go to local residents who will likely spend their money on services (hopefully not those like education or health care, but that is another conversation) which should in turn energize the local economy.

In the mean time, Haiti has 565 sections communals (hamlets or villages), each with an elected "mayor" and city council. 

Plans are being drawn up for town hall meetings. 

In the mean time, $1000 can be sent to every elected government to do something that is concrete, real, and a felt priority for their neighbors, fellow church members, peasant association members, and cousins and it would only cost donors half a million dollars, less than a planning process with international experts. 

And at this level, the social control works to keep leaders honest. 

And if this doesn't work, the village wouldn't get further funding and donors are only out 1000 bucks. 

There has never been a better time - or better symbol - for the international community to support the constitutional government of Haiti, at all levels.

Agencies' end-run around it and the steady NGOization of Haiti has played a significant role in creating this disaster.

There are plans in the works for a comprehensive rural development.

Now, more than ever, they need to include real citizen participation.

Haiti has experienced several other development frameworks (e.g. Interim Cooperation Framework, Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) that look good on paper but have been top-down, exclusionary, and have yielded little results other than official government approval for donors' plans for Haiti.

This process must include real participation in all levels - including peasants associations and local governments - in order to make this useful.

The materials must be in Haitian Creole, but it would be useful to be as simple and direct as possible.

Who sets the agenda for these planning meetings?

Can local leaders amend the pre-established agendas?

Who sets the priorities, and how?

In the context of the camps they need to be at the very least designing how the limited goods are distributed fairly in the community.

It says a lot that Haiti's survivors aren't being entrusted with this bare minimum of participation.

There are many other good ideas floating around, such as cash grants to teachers to provide free schooling to children.

Without genuine participation from the survivors, real decentralization, and respect for the elected government of Haiti, will only remain good ideas.

What is needed is a tectonic shift, a radical rupture from the neoliberal economic model and the top-down institutional process that got us here in the process.

This tectonic shift has been called for in many ways recently.

Haitian American activist and Deputy Director of Lambi Fund wrote an op-ed in the Miami Herald outlining a bottom-up strategy.

A letter to the U.N. was signed by 300 NGOs and circulated on March 18, the same day as the Haitian civil society coalition.

This Monday, a coalition of human rights groups (Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, Zanmi Lasante/Partners in Health, RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Bureau des Avocats Internationaux) testified before Inter-American Commission.

Tellingly, many of the principles are the same. They are:

• Fix the still-urgent problem of shelter and sanitation for the hundreds of thousands of survivors in Port-au-Prince
  
• Provide immediate job creation and economic development to the provinces
  
• Respect for the survivors - who need to participate in the reconstruction planning process in real ways
  
• Respect for the elected government of Haiti playing a coordinating role and defining the framework for NGO action
  
• A focus on human rights needs to replace a profit-seeking model that has dominated development in Haiti for years
  
• Build up local capacity and local expertise, including the State University of Haiti

Haiti's earthquake shook up and exposed donors' model for Haiti as the failure it was.

Hopefully there is still time to move the earth and build a new one from the ground up.

Mark Schuller is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at York College, the City University of New York. In addition to studying NGOs in Port-au-Prince since 2001, he is the co-editor of Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction.
 

To rebuild Haiti, start with its young people

Go to Original (Los Angeles Times) >

A 700,000-strong national civic service corps would harness untapped labor rapidly and instill national pride and confidence.

Opinion

January 31, 2010 | By Robert Muggah and Robert Maguire

Haiti will need big ideas to recover and rebuild in the aftermath of the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake this month.

The reported death toll has topped 150,000, and the reconstruction needs are incalculable.

How about starting with a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth?

There are many reasons why such an entity makes a lot of sense.

Haiti is a young country. 

An estimated 70% of the population is under 30; the 15-to-29 segment alone makes up 50% of the population.

Demographers have long cautioned how excessively youthful populations can potentially exacerbate underdevelopment and accentuate political instability.

Although Haiti registers among the lowest levels of education in the Western Hemisphere, Haitian youth are a wellspring of creativity, talent and potential. 

You don't need to be a community-development specialist to know that they are stifled by a lack of meaningful opportunities.

Fortunately, Haiti has an enabling environment to set up a civic service corps.

Article 52 of the Haitian Constitution commits citizens to national service, though it has never been activated.

What is more, there are many Haitian and international organizations mobilized and ready to help the government get this going.

A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work.

They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside.

At a minimum, this would reverse generations of unfair stigmatizing of the youth there.

This plan would also harness untapped labor rapidly.

Before the Jan. 12 earthquake, 50% of youth in their 20s were out of work.

Putting them in service toward rebuilding the capital and outlying areas would be a first step to restoring their and their country's pride and dignity.

A civic service corps would also multiply international efforts to promote recovery after the world moves on to the next crisis. 

Hundreds of humanitarian agencies, donor governments and nongovernmental organizations are facing monumental challenges in coordinating relief assistance.

Although everyone involved is committed to rapid disbursement, transaction costs are monumental.

A civic service corps would allow for a more rapid form of transferring capital.

Direct support to such a corps would inject serious liquidity into the Haitian economy and stimulate recovery from the bottom up.

Rather than food-for-work schemes, international best practice recommends proposals that promote direct monetary transfers to beneficiaries.

Haitian youth and their families have urgent needs and don't need paternalistic programs that curb their choices.

With proper oversight and financial safeguards, a civic service corps would circumvent unnecessary administrative costs.

Further, a civic service corps would restore national pride and confidence in Haitian public institutions. 

During past decades, the state provided relatively few services to Haitians, particularly outside the capital.

In some cases, state entities were downright predatory.

As a result, nonstate providers, including gangs and shady middlemen, filled the gap.

A civic service corps -- wearing the Haitian colors and acting as first responders or organizations demonstrating the government's presence on the ground -- would show that the government is serious about supporting citizens. 

It would be a symbolic first step toward renewing the social contract with the people.

A civic service corps also makes sense for long-term risk and emergency planning.

Haiti is situated in the path of hurricanes and on a fault line, and can expect more disasters.

Training 700,000 young people -- especially young women -- in the basics of first aid, emergency response, community policing and other skills would greatly mitigate the consequences of future calamities.

With disciplined training and management, the corps could provide more intensive training in specialized areas -- engineering, telecommunications and public health.

An initial step to getting Haiti's youth to work could include the preparation of a road map for future meetings on Haiti, including the U.N. donor conference scheduled for March.

Any final plan would need to draw on the invaluable experiences of ongoing efforts to mobilize youth in Haiti. 

These include the work of the Brazilian nongovernmental organization Viva Rio and its supporters. 

Before the earthquake, Viva Rio and Brazilian peacekeepers had recruited and trained hundreds of Haitian youth, including former gang members, to provide relief services in Haiti's slums. 

This program could be reactivated and scaled up quickly.

A civic service corps could draw on the lessons from such groups to target and recruit youths for, say, up to two years.

The Haitian government would, of course, need to be the one to manage the undertaking, with direct oversight from the president's office and the Interior Ministry.

And there are many countries that could provide advice and support.

Nongovernmental groups and private donors could also play a key role in mobilizing support and transferring essential skills.

Haiti's youth are the future of the nation, and they are central to Haiti's recovery.

A civic service corps is a large-scale way to quickly mobilize them to act as catalyst for long-term, progressive changes.

Robert Muggah, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, is a principal of the SecDev Group and is currently advising multilateral and bilateral organizations on Haiti's recovery. 

Robert Maguire is on the faculty of Trinity Washington University and chairs the Haiti Working Group of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.