How Humanitarian Aid Weakened Post-Earthquake Haiti
Disaster capitalism in action
http://www.thenation.com/blog/181424/haiti-still-buried-disaster-and-history
In an interview with The Nation, Mortime, executive secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations (POHDH), described the social disaster that had unfolded under the banner of humanitarian aid.
The money that has trickled down has been absorbed in large part by a phalanx of NGOs jostling chaotically for international grant money. Despite some good intentions, many of these groups, Mortime argues, have funneled money into ill-planned projects with little oversight or accountability, leading to waste and profiteering that have likely impeded the countrys long-term development.
For many of the countless NGOs that have mushroomed post-disaster, Mortime says, I think it was important for them to go and help Haiti. But the way they went about it was not the right way. Because some NGOs had haphazardly delivered services in a way that displaced indigenous institutions and local services, he adds, humanitarian aid actually contributed to a weakening of the state and also to the weakening of local organizations.
Independent audits have revealed that the groundswell of international assistance efforts, ranging from missionary aid enterprises to ad hoc home building projects, have operated with little coordination, despite efforts by the United Nations OCHR, along with an international coordinating body, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by Bill Clinton, to centralize the distribution and deployment of recovery funds. The international partnerships have unraveled amid cost overruns and massive mismanagement. And Haitis government, historically tethered to streams of foreign aid and debt and cheap export trades, remains saddled with a shattered infrastructure and tattered public services. Today, 100,000 remain internally displaced, with ramshackle shanties standing as a sad epitaph to false promises.