The Dominion - aid

Haiti Nine Months On

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 05:18:24 +0000

Donor money spent on a road map no-one can read

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—“Nothing! Nothing! We’ve seen nothing!” chanted the crowd of internally displaced people (IDP) in Port-au-Prince on October 6. They were pursuing former US president Bill Clinton after his photo-op in their squalid camp. Clinton was on his way to the third Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) meeting in downtown Port-au-Prince. Ironically, the camp is considered one of the capital's best, thanks to the attention brought to it by actor Sean Penn.

Similar chants were echoed at a demonstration of about 200 IDPs on October 12 in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive’s offices, where the IHRC is based. At that action, called exactly nine months after the quake, protesters delivered a letter demanding respect for their Constitutionally guaranteed right to housing, a moratorium on forced expulsions and an end to the “masquerade aid” of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The IHRC, co-chaired by Clinton and Bellerive, is the body that decides how to spend money donated to rebuilding Haiti after the January 12, 2010, earthquake. This month’s meeting took place by teleconference, and journalists were invited to follow it by calling a US-based number. This immediately excluded any Haitian who could not afford the three-hour-long international call.

Some journalists crowded into the PM’s press room to listen to the meeting over a small pod-like speaker that looked like an oversized video game joystick. The teleconference’s sound quality was poor, static-filled and at times unintelligible. I was sitting closest to the speaker and straining to make out what was being said. All seven of the foreign white journalists in the room were seated around the conference table where the mini-speaker sat. Only three of approximately 20 Haitians present were seated around the table; the rest were in chairs along the walls of the room, out of earshot of the muffled voices deciding their country’s fate.

As if to underscore this irony, most of the conference was conducted in English. French statements were translated into English, but not vice versa. Nothing was presented in or translated into Kreyol, the national language, making it even more difficult for Haitians to know where the millions of dollars are going. The whole exercise felt amateurish. The conference call plodded along, casual and faltering. The IHRC board did not seem bothered by frequent interruptions and confusion, as though voting on the investment of millions of dollars was a banal hobby.

Reginald Boulos, an industrialist from one of Haiti's most powerful families and a staunch backer of the 2004 coup d'etat against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, insisted that meetings should begin with a progress update on projects to ensure transparency and accountability, implying that even IHRC board members have little information on the whereabouts of previously approved money. His minor reservations and criticisms were later trumpeted by Clinton as "fierce debate and vigorous participation on the part of the Haitian members of the board."

The session took place during Haiti’s “back-to-school” week, and at the subsequent press conference Clinton claimed that 80 per cent of children who were in school before the earthquake are now back in class. It was unclear how he obtained that figure two days into the new term, and many schools didn’t resume class until the following week.

At its last meeting in August, the IHRC approved $94 million—a much needed investment— to prepare schools for the new academic year. Haiti ranks alongside Somalia and Eritrea as one of the worst places on the planet to be a schoolchild. Only half of Haiti’s children attended (mostly private) schools before January 12; the quake destroyed about 90 per cent of those schools. Only $26 million of the $94 million has been funded. Fewer kids are in class than ever before, and Haiti’s Ministry of Education says it still hasn’t seen any of the money allocated to schools.

The press release given to journalists after the IHRC meeting stated that UNICEF gave $100 million to “support the Haitian government and civil society in the fight against gender-based violence.” But during the meeting, there was no mention of the UNICEF money, only concerns that a $10.6 million UN population fund for women and girls’ “gender equality impact is not yet approved,” according to one of the board members.

It is unclear where UNICEF’s $100 million has gone. Merina Zuluanie of FAVILEK (Women Victims Stand Up), a grassroots organization that has been providing medical, legal, and moral support for women and children victims of sexual abuse and violence for over 15 years, said her group has not received any IHRC or UNICEF funding.

I spoke with Malia Villard Appolon, the coordinator of KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), a coalition of raped women. KOFAVIV members have taken charge of their own security in camps—organizing escorts to protect women going to the toilets, handing out whistles to women at risk, raising awareness of women's vulnerability and organizing groups of men to take shifts patrolling their areas of residence. Before the earthquake, KOFAVIV had an office with a clinic, doctor, nurse, psychologist, laboratory and everything in place to accommodate rape victims. That was all destroyed on January 12 but since then, Malia says, “we have received nothing from UNICEF.”

None of this might may come as a surprise, nine months on, if you consider that Haiti’s main national hospital in downtown Port-au-Prince looks much like it did in the aftermath of the quake: hallways and pharmacies full of rubble; people waiting outside for treatment; operations being conducted in tents; the pediatrics unit damaged beyond repair. Dr. Claude Surena, the head of the Haitian Medical Association, and regional health director, said he has an 18-month strategy to get the health sector back on its feet, but he can’t move ahead with anything until donor funds arrive. According to the IHRC website, $17 million was approved and funded on August 17. So why is the place still in shambles?

“I think we’re making progress with the road reconstruction and agriculture sectors,” said Clinton, without going into specifics. The IHRC website says $464.8 million in road construction and rehabilitation projects were funded back in August for some 389 kilometres of road. The site's sections on “Job Creation” and “Institutional” assessment of public buildings, indicate $0 funding has been provided. "Housing" has received $13.4 million and "Education," $26 million.

As a recent study by Oxfam (or a visit to any market) shows, Clinton has taken no measures to lobby for a reversal of his administration’s trade policies—policies for which he took personal responsibility back in March—which decimated Haiti’s rice crops by flooding the market with heavily subsidized Arkansas rice.

The Haitian elite on the IHRC has funded itself (thanks to the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank) with $24.5 million of $35 million over five years to “establish a partial credit guarantee fund for enterprise development,” according to the IHRC website. Meanwhile, the same IHRC board has released no funding for the $65 million earmarked over the next 12 months to “create 300,000 temporary jobs across the country, focusing on populations touched by the earthquake.” Neither has the project to “assess public buildings in the 10 departments”—$1 million over five months—been funded. A mere $13.4 million has been provided for housing, Haiti’s most critical need.

At the post-meeting press conference, when asked “what of the IHRC funding is being given to help people in the camps,” Clinton interrupted the journalist, dodged the question, and spoke of the need to implement a mortgage system. This exchange reveals why Clinton heads the IHRC. His priorities are to facilitate banks providing mortgages, the wealthy elite finding credit, and businesses having roads to bus in their workers and ship out their sweatshop assembled garments and electronics. Job-creation and housing for Haiti’s 1.5 million homeless people suffering in squalid camps will just have to wait.

Isabeau Doucet is an independent journalist, story-teller and artist based in Haiti. This article was originally published by Haiti Liberte.

Clinton in Port-au-Prince

The Cost of Free

Moira Peters — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:45:03 +0000

What does charity do for a local economy?

VANCOUVER—“Thirty years of development aid and the basic nature of poverty hasn’t changed,” said Pablo Recalde, the head of the United Nations World Food Program for Zambia, as we travelled the country’s sandy roads.

I was part of a press convoy hitching a ride in his decked-out UN land rover to a rural medical outpost called Makunka Health Centre. Only 30 kilometres from Livingstone, the third largest city in the country, the journey took over three hours over non-existent tracks.

My Zambian colleagues and I were covering a standard aid photo-op. Godfrey Mpende and Angela Mutale were two notable Livingstone journalists making the salary of a top reporter: US $150 per month.

Clinics serve as community centres in the bush. Makunk was the size of a small elementary school gymnasium with two wards—one for men and one for women—with a recent paint job. Two nurses worked on staff. At the medical station, toddlers had the fat of their arms measured with tailor’s tape to judge if their gaunt bodies qualified for emergency bags of pounded maize, the staple food in the country.

Sixty-five per cent of the country lives in rural areas like those surrounding Makunka. On this particular day about 30 mothers trickled in from surrounding areas to receive enough maize for two weeks, after which time, if available, they would return again to the clinic. Many of the mothers were farmers themselves and most were in their teens or early twenties. Only 10 years ago life expectancy in Zambia was a paltry 33 years of age and there is a noticeable lack of elders in the country. Grey hair is about as common as a paved road. HIV/AIDS nearly wiped out an entire generation.

Poised for success at independence in 1964, in 2006 Zambia was drowning in debt before the bulk of this crippling foreign debt was erased. Now Zambia is the poorest non-conflict country in the world.

The youthful mothers watched patiently as their children were measured and weighed, their names given a checkmark on a written ledger after which they received their share of nshima (pounded maize). Their share was calculated on the same scale that weighed the child. The absurd display of weights and balances is an unfortunate part of development projects ensuring that “aid” reaches the deserving and not swindlers.

As Dambisa Moyo’s groundbreaking 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa shows us, the international development industry has entrenched a destructive class in Sub-Saharan Africa, making close oversight one of the many strings attached to foreign aid.

Pablo Recalde oversaw the feeding of three million people each day and was in charge of yet another UN development scheme, this one called “Production for Progress.” The idea was to give small-scale farmers a guaranteed market for their crops and prevent the surplus production from rotting in isolated silos.

Encouraged to grow grain for profit, a guaranteed market for goods is an entrepreneur’s dream and can break the nightmare of poverty and aid dependency.

But it has achieved neither. Selling food to aid agencies is not a real economy. Where is the demand for local grain when everyone in the country is fed through aid handouts?

In the rural south of Zambia chronic malnutrition was rampant in 2008 when news broke that small land holders were selling all of their maize at the end of harvest season leaving no food for their own families through the arid months. The story made me chuckle since it was one of many constant and absurd experiences of the NGO world. As the hot season bleached their fields the farmers knew the aid agencies would feed them. They had become fluent in the economy of aid—the biggest employer in the country. Welfare fraud by any other name, you would be hard pressed to find a person anywhere in the world who would not do the same given the circumstances.

Other than copper exports for which multinationals pay almost zero tax to mine (companies use instability and unpredictable property rights in the region as a bargaining position), Zambia has no economy to speak of.

Nevertheless, I witnessed the greatest economic ingenuity I have ever seen: street kids pooling their pennies to purchase a single newspaper and rent it to readers; illegal gas stations selling watered-down fuel at a discount (gas was US $3 per litre in 2009); women buying up bread at the grocery store to re-sell it after hours on the same grocery store steps; little girls selling individual cigarettes for seven cents (a two-penny mark up); old men in “phone booths,” which consisted of a cell phone, a cardboard sign, and three minutes’ worth of talk time; farmers selling all of their maize on the presumption that aid agencies would give it all back.

To understand the nature of poverty in Zambia it is worth revisiting Pablo Recalde’s observations: 30 years of development aid had not changed the basic nature of poverty in the country. That aid is the problem in Zambia is the premise of Zambian economist Moyo’s bestseller Dead Aid.

“...Over $US 1 trillion of African aid, and not much good to show for it,” she writes.

How could good intentions go so wrong? Everyday community groups, governments, NGOs, rock stars, churches, school groups and others throughout the West raise dollar after dollar to send in response to the fetishization of aid in support of inflicted and uneducated and starving Africans as seen on TV. Without thinking about the consequences of charity glut few who donate their dollars ever realize that “free” can have disastrous and costly consequence.

Take clothing as an example. In Livingstone I saw a man wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey. If the consequences were not so dire such clothing might deserve a second smirk. But that hockey jersey under the hot sun bears no irony.

Having a shirt is a luxury in many parts of Zambia. Having a job is an even greater luxury. Unemployment in the formal sector is well above 50 per cent and those with an income have the incredible burden to provide for endless dependants. While a “free” shirt solves a short-term need the shadows cast by the shuttered doors of Livingstone’s former textile factories point to the real problem: a once vibrant, though small, fabric industry has gone bust. It cannot compete with free.

Donated clothing generally comes in massive containers shipped from rich countries. I once helped fill one of these containers. I have since seen several of these “donated” bins unloaded into massive piles in third world market squares thus squeezing out local textile producers. I have even seen Value Village tags still on the sleeves of clothing in Zambian bazaars. Moyo rightly notes that “free” comes at a cost since it disrupts nascent economic channels and keeps even the smallest of indigenous businesses from developing.

Moyo describes the eroding aspects of charitable mosquito nets which have the ultimate impact of putting local net makers out of business. She states:

Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed, and a "good" deed is done. With the markets flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business.

Moyo calls this the micro/macro paradox: the sacrifice of long-term growth for short-term gain. If local investment were supported instead of the guilt relieving cauldron of “free,” the village would be able to produce its own mosquito nets. That mosquito net maker would then earn enough money to feed his family and send his kids to school, rather than rely upon aid agencies for every aspect of his existence. This phenomenon is one of Moyo’s primary arguments against development aid. This view is compounded by her assertion that aid rarely, if ever, gets to those it is intended for.

More than 85 per cent of direct foreign aid is misallocated, says Moyo. What is worse, the most chronic offenders of misappropriation are never punished. In hopes of retaining past loans, donors re-finance loans to the worst offenders.

Although most African states claim to be democracies the reality is that rulers have very little need for the people other than as leverage to access more foreign aid. Leaders are more accountable to donors and companies because their budgets do not come from taxing the people, notably the middle class, which is scant in Zambia.

“Aid effectiveness should be measured against its contribution to long-term sustainable growth, and whether it moves the greatest number of people out of poverty in a sustainable way. When seen through this lens, aid is found to be wanting,” writes Moyo.

The nail in the coffin of her addicted-to-aid argument is the example of Chinese investment. Much to the chagrin of European states still basking in their colonial fiduciary ties as former empirical masters, Moyo has titled an entire chapter, “The Chinese are our Friends.”

Chinese investment will fill the hole that aid has been poorly filling since the 1950s and offer Africa what it most desperately needs: investment and employment. The reason, she says, is that China offers trade, not aid. Something the West has yet to do on such scale and without charity.

Darren Fleet is a master's candidate at the University of British Columbia. He has reported from Zambia and Thailand.

Cost of Free

Myths for Profit: Canada's Role in Industries of War and Peace

Amy Miller — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:22:02 +0000