[CCIH-Haiti] Moving from a "Republic of NGOs" to long-term sustainable development in Haiti

[MartinRS at aol.com]

This article indicates that at today's international donor conference on  
Haiti, the U.S. Government is expected to announce new commitments to 
rebuilding  Haiti with a major emphasis on strengthening the fragile Haitian  
government.  Some development experts say that past approaches to well  meaning, 
outside support have resulted in a "Republic of NGOs," which has not  
produced sustainable development. The role of faith-based organizations in not  
only responding to immediate need but contributing to long-term development  
merits continued soul searching and dialogue.
 
 
In U.S. plan for Haiti, rebuilding  government is key
 
By Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, March 31,  
2010; A08 
 
An internal Obama administration assessment concludes that the U.S.  
government has provided $4 billion in aid to Haiti since 1990 but "struggled to  
demonstrate lasting impact," according to a summary of the review, which has 
not  been publicly released. 
 
On Wednesday, at an international donor conference, Secretary of State  
Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to outline U.S. plans to spend an additional 
 $1 billion or so to rebuild the earthquake-devastated nation. 
 
This time, U.S. officials say, they will do things  differently. 
 
The most dramatic change is an effort to build up Haiti's fragile  
government instead of working around it. In an emergency spending request sent  to 
Congress last week, the administration said it would pay for new ministry  
offices. More broadly, the goal is to develop the framework of a modern state 
--  spending money to help Haiti create building codes, regulatory systems 
and  anti-corruption standards. U.S. funds would be used to train and pay 
Haitian  officials. 
 
"We are completely focused on how to build the capacity of the Haitian  
government effectively," said Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff. "That is  
something everyone has recognized as being one of the failures of aid in 
the  past." 
 
For the U.S. government, which spent billions of dollars on nation-building 
 efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Haiti presents a new and complex test. 
Even  before the Jan. 12 earthquake, the country's government was 
dysfunctional and  notoriously corrupt. Now, all but one of its ministries are in ruins. 
Nearly 17  percent of Haiti's civil servants died in the disaster, 
including many senior  managers, according to the aid request to Congress. The Obama 
administration  insists that its plan will help the Haitian government with 
its own priorities  -- not impose a U.S. vision. Under the emerging plans, 
U.S. aid would be part of  a vast international effort to rebuild parts of 
the Haitian state. Canada and  France, for example, would help reconstruct 
the school system, officials said. 
 
'Republic of NGOs'
 
Foreign donors have tried to lift Haiti from poverty before, with paltry  
results. Even before the earthquake, which shattered the economy, about  
three-quarters of the people in the Maryland-sized island country lived on less  
than $2 a day. Haiti has remained in poverty partly because of a history of 
 brutal rulers, foreign intervention and natural disasters. Equally 
important,  the country's economic and political elite have monopolized the 
resources of the  government. 
 
"It becomes a large cookie jar for people to benefit themselves. It doesn't 
 have this real sense of delivering public services," said Terry F. Buss, 
author  of "Haiti in the Balance," a book about the failure of foreign 
assistance. 
 
After large sums of aid money disappeared under dictator Jean-Claude "Baby  
Doc" Duvalier in the 1980s, foreign countries shifted their assistance to  
nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. That approach has backfired, 
development  experts say. Haiti has become known as the "Republic of NGOs," with an 
atrophied  central government and up to 10,000 private groups doling out 
medicine, food and  services. U.S. aid has gone to large contractors that 
manage budgets bigger than  those of Haitian ministries -- but they have 
produced "mixed results," according  to a summary of the U.S. policy review that 
was obtained by The Washington Post. 
 
Changing hands
 
In an interview, Mills, who led the review, said that past U.S. assistance  
to Haiti was dispersed over too many areas to have impact and that no 
strategy  was in place for transition to Haitian control. 
 
In contrast, the new U.S. plan focuses on four areas: health; agriculture;  
governance and security; and infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on  
energy. In each one, "we anticipate making investments that would 
strengthen the  ministries," Mills said. 
 
The plan includes several measures to keep aid from being wasted. It  
requests $1.5 million for an inspector general. And the U.S. government would  
funnel some of the money through the proposed Interim Haiti Recovery 
Commission,  made up of Haitian authorities and representatives of donor countries 
and  international institutions. Its projects would be overseen by an 
international  accounting firm. 
 
Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank, said 
 that the government of President René Préval had made enough progress 
fighting  corruption in recent years that the bank had tripled its direct 
assistance to  Haiti. 
 
De Falco, of the bank's Haiti task force, said that officials could monitor 
 foreign aid to prevent it from being stolen. But whether it produces real  
development depends on the Haitian government, he said. "You can go into a  
country, build all the roads, electricity," de Falco said, but "if the  
institutional framework is not there, the rules of the game are not clear,  
you're not going to get the bang for the buck." 
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