One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. The first-ever UN technical-assistance mission was to Haiti in 1949, and its purpose was to prepare a comprehensive framework to advise the government to promote economic development and fight poverty. Sixty-two years later, after hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, Haiti remains one of the poorest countries on Earth. Haiti has been receiving food aid from the international community for fifty-five years. It is time to try a new approach. We recommend putting human rights at the center of all efforts to help Haiti help itself.

A human rights–based approach rejects the notion of charity and focuses on how best to help the state meet its obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights to shelter, food, water, education, and access to health care and other basic rights essential to leading a dignified life. Framing reconstruction and development in Haiti as a human rights issue will:

• support efforts to strengthen the Haitian state;
• enhance accountability and transparency;
• fight corruption;
• synchronize donor and NGO efforts;
• promote decentralization;
• create greater understanding of the root causes of poverty/underdevelopment; and
• encourage the active participation of Haitians, especially those in rural areas and in the vast urban slums who have literally gone unrecognized by the state, the moun andeyò, “outside people.”

Put simply, adopting a rights-based approach will help the government of Haiti and the IHRC address multiple priorities simultaneously. Moreover, the UN has adopted a rights-based approach for all UN agencies and funds, as have most of the major international development NGOs and bilateral aid agencies. A rights-based approach will also support the “Rule of Law Compact” currently being developed by MINUSTAH (the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti) and the government of Haiti.

The Haitian Constitution and international law require the Haitian state to guarantee fundamental economic, social, and cultural rights. The Haitian state, as the primary “duty bearer,” must develop laws, regulatory frameworks, oversight bodies, and policies to provide education, shelter, access to health care, and social security to Haitians. The state must also dedicate its maximum available resources to realize rights. The Haitian state, however, has not fulfilled these obligations for many decades. It has “outsourced” its duties to the private sector, which goes largely unregulated, with predictable results. For example, the collapse of the private school La Promesse in Pétionville in November 2008, fourteen months before the earthquake, killed over eighty children. La Promesse and many other schools were built in dangerous areas because zoning regulations were not enforced, building codes were not applied, and inspections or oversight by relevant ministries (Education, Public Works) was totally absent. This must end.

A rights-based approach focuses on increasing the capacity of the Haitian state to deliver public services and oversee those actors, state or private, who are engaged in their delivery. The goal should be to responsabiliser l’état: enable the state to take up its essential responsibilities toward citizens and do its job. This means providing resources, expertise, and advice to state officials, helping them to establish systems that deliver public goods and services. Increasing state capacity also means ensuring that laws and regulations are enforced and that agencies are held accountable for their performance, with sanctions for those who do not meet required standards.

The state is primarily responsible to Haitians, who are the primary “rights holders.” Accountability is a means, not an end in itself, however, and greater accountability will generate increased transparency and decreased corruption. Since corruption has been the main impediment for donors to provide funds directly to the Haitian state, a rights-based approach will help break the vicious cycle of diverting support from the state to NGOs, which only keeps the Haitian state weak and at the mercy of the “Republic of NGOs.” The state, however, must show results: greater enjoyment of rights, as a quid pro quo for receiving this support.

A rights-based approach to reconstruction and development means that the citizens of Haiti will have a voice in reconstruction and development at every stage. For too long, most Haitians have been ignored, overlooked, and even discouraged or prohibited from participating in governance. Their desire to be heard came through loud and clear in last year’s nationwide consultation that resulted in the Voix des Sans Voix survey, whose results Michèle Montas eloquently presented to the donors conference held in New York on March 31, 2010. “Listen to us for once,” Haitians from all walks of life pleaded.

Protesting and criticizing are not enough, however, and a rights-based approach will improve the quality of the demands made by Haitians so that their claims yield positive results. The capacity of the Haitian state to respond to these demands must also be enhanced: this is the essence of rights-based reconstruction and development.

Let’s take access to clean, safe water as an example. The right to water is recognized under international law and is directly related to the right to life, food, shelter, and education. On September 30, 2010, the UN Human Rights Council recognized the right to water and sanitation as legally binding in international law on all nation-states. This affirmation followed the July 2010 UN General Assembly Resolution (A/RES/64/292), where 120 countries found that “the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living.”

In Haiti, 20% of school-age children are prevented or impeded from attending school because of the time and energy they must spend every day fetching water, often unclean and unsafe, for their households. Girls, once they reach puberty, often stop attending school for lack of access to clean and safe sanitation facilities. Even before the quake, access to water was on the decline in Haiti; one study showed that the decrease was 7% from 1990 to 2005.  This is a grave violation of international human rights laws, which require the state to show that it is making progress in guaranteeing rights instead of regressing.

The state is the primary duty bearer to guarantee the right to water, but in Haiti the relationship between the state and the private sector is completely upside down. NGOs and private companies dominate distribution and access, and they are largely unregulated and uninspected by the state. This is literally a deadly combination: outsourcing responsibility without oversight. The state exerts limited oversight over the many private water companies whose large delivery trucks ply the crowded streets of Port-au-Prince and other cities. The government’s Service Nationale d’Eau Potable (SNEP—National PotableWater Service) is so weak and underfunded that it actually turns to NGOs for help, and the NGOs decide whether or not they want to help SNEP. NGOs even occasionally donate some of their funds to SNEP in places like Port-de-Paix.

The quality of the water sold is dubious. Haitians have a saying: “Nou achte dlo pou lajan, men se maladi nou achte.” (“We pay for water but all we buy is disease.”) Yet access to clean, affordable potable water is a state responsibility under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 24(2), which Haiti has ratified. Eighteen out of nineteen water sources tested in Port-de-Paix were selling contaminated water. The poor in Haiti—meaning the overwhelming majority of the population—pay more in both absolute and relative terms for water.

The Haitian state must have a legal framework, regulatory bodies, and a strategy with goals, timelines, and benchmarks to increase the accessibility, affordability, and acceptability of water. All relevant international development and reconstruction projects should focus on how to increase the capacity of the state to achieve this goal. Data on access, costs, and water purity must be gathered and analyzed and form the basis for government action. Reliable data is a cornerstone of a rights-based approach because you cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Since NGOs and private companies will remain engaged, they must be licensed and inspected and penalized if they fail to meet minimum standards. Like the state, these entities are “duty bearers,” with international legal obligations to protect, respect, and fulfill the right to clean water. The population must be consulted regularly to ensure that their views and concerns are taken into account. The IHRC, international financial institutions (World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank), and bilateral donors must coordinate their assistance and ensure that their support generates greater enjoyment of the right to water.

Donors also have a responsibility under international law to help Haitians enjoy their rights. This duty is enshrined under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Haiti has not yet ratified but whose ratification should be a priority for the new government. Since Haiti remains so dependent on foreign aid, the duties of donors and NGOs, in general, and the IHRC, in particular, to help achieve the progressive realization of rights, are pronounced.

As former president Bill Clinton said in a speech to aid groups in Haiti on March 25, 2010, “Every time we spend a dollar in Haiti from now on we have to ask ourselves, ‘Does this have a long-term return? Are we helping them become more self-sufficient? . . . Are we serious about working ourselves out of a job?’” These are the right questions, and a rights-based approach will help provide the right answers. By focusing on strengthening both the Haitian state’s capacity to deliver and the Haitian citizen’s capacity to demand, the international community will help end the over sixty years of dependence that has prevented Haiti from developing a true democracy, a vibrant economy, and a society that enjoys all its human rights.

^*This section draws on an excellent study completed before the earthquake entitled Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti, by the New York University School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Partners In Health, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Zanmi Lasante (2008).

Street level view of the heavy earthquake damage suffered at the Haitian National Palace. UN Photo/Logan Abass

Haitians carry coffins near the Haitian National Palace. An earthquake rocked Port au Prince on January 12, 2010. UN Photo/ Marco Dormino

Haiti has been this hemisphere’s hard case for centuries. Colonialism and slavery were particularly brutal there. When Haitians took the French declaration of the Rights of Man seriously in 1792, their revolution was crushed by Republican France. When Haiti did attain national independence, it was governed by rapacious dictators. Papa Doc Duvalier was one of the most celebrated of the type, sustained in power by the infamous Tonton Macoutes, a cross between gangsters and secret police. Violent though they were, they could only sustain Papa’s son Baby Doc for a few years before he retired in luxury to the South of France. Democratic elections brought Jean-Bertrand Aristede to power. A former priest and author of the compelling memoir, In the Parish of the Poor, Aristede rode mass enthusiasm to power, raised ideals and hopes, only to see revolution crushed – this time under the weight of corruption inside, the resistance led by Haiti’s rich elite, and the resistance of the US to a revolution that called for social justice not just political reform. Aristede’s government made too little progress, and after he was ousted his supporters were unwilling to make peace until he eventual retired to his own exile, less luxurious than Baby Doc’s, in Africa. A UN peacekeeping force curtailed factional fighting but crime persisted with public order weakened by doubts about what side police were on. Governments shifted; some tried harder than others to help ordinary people as well as to ensure profits for the country’s cluster of wealthy families. The most recent struck many as a cause for hope. But meanwhile AIDS was devastating. Institutions were weak. Economic growth was slow before the global crisis and nonexistent after. And then an earthquake struck.

The earthquake struck very democratically. It killed the archbishop. It killed the head of the UN mission. It leveled poor neighborhoods but it hit rich ones hard too. It all but destroyed the government, the health care system, the water system, the food distribution system, daily life.

In the best of times it was hard to get around in Haiti. Roads were rough. There were thieves and bandits. Now moving food, water, and medicine are epic logistical challenges. It is easier to get supplies to Haiti than to move them inside the country. It is easier to fly planes into the airport than to fly them out. There is no fuel.

This is what humanitarian emergencies are like. They are reminders that modern life depends on an infrastructure of physical facilities and socio-technical systems. Electricity and working phones become scarce. It is hard to get accurate information. People are displaced. In Haiti their homes have been destroyed or become dangerous. Elsewhere they are driven from them by wars, oppression, hurricanes. People sleep in streets and in makeshift camps – which creates new vulnerabilities, especially for women. People sacrifice themselves to try to save their children. They cry because they’ve failed. They surprise by the generosity with which they help others. They also disappoint. Disaster makes many impressively altruistic and others desperate or selfish.

Everywhere the most important humanitarian assistance comes locally. It comes sometimes from local officials but mostly it comes unofficially. It comes from churches, from the boy scouts, from nurses working until they drop. It comes from friends and neighbors and from total strangers. The international organizations that can ramp up assistance best in emergencies are those that have been working in Haiti all along, and those that connect international support to the local service initiatives that Ferentz Lafargue describes in his essay. Partners in Health is a Boston-based NGO founded in connection with work in Haiti and made famous by Paul Farmer’s pioneering combination of medical care and anthropological fieldwork (and Tracy Kidder’s book about it, Mountains beyond Mountains). It runs clinics in Haiti and didn’t have to fly anyone in to start work (though it has increased its staff and material support). Médecins Sans Frontières and Care and Oxfam and the Red Cross and several UN agencies (among others) are all committed long-term. We’ve included links in this forum for those who wish to give. As many have mentioned, give money. Trying to send old clothes and canned goods imposes too big a burden of transportation and too much risk of bad fit to local circumstances.

It’s not too late to give because the emergency won’t last just a few days. It won’t last just the couple of weeks it will stay in the news. It is an illusion that we think of emergencies as completely unpredictable and essentially short-term. No one predicted the moment of the earthquake, but as Bill O’Neill notes in his essay there were predictions of an imminent quake along this fault line. And Haiti has faced recurrent disasters. In each, nature is part of the story but vulnerability is exacerbated by poverty and by weak infrastructure. The social institutions that should ensure security are undermined not so much by poverty as by extremes of inequality and the corruption and abuses of power that accompany them. And this emergency will be acute for weeks and it will persist for months and even years before all the displaced have homes again, before the collapsed hospital walls are rebuilt. The effects of the earthquake, and of the emergency for which the earthquake was only one contributing cause, will last longer.

And so there is the question that has to be asked in every humanitarian emergency: what next? We know in some loose sense the answer is “development.” We know the more likely reality is that global attention will move on. Haiti’s many migrants will continue to support their relatives at home, and their remittances will pay for some reconstruction. There will be loans and gifts and more international agencies, though as Robert Fatton notes in his essay, there were thousands already. If aid agencies alone made for development Haiti would be a very different place.

Reconstruction is an inadequate vision of the future. Putting a terrible pre-crisis reality back in place would be better than nothing perhaps, but hardly wonderful. And Haiti is a country of great potential: a beautiful landscape of green hills, vibrant and creative artists, eloquent writers, energetic people. But as Gregg Beckett suggests in his essay, crisis had become normal in Haiti. The reasons why economic growth was at best halting are still present.
Those reasons include weak export industries, underskilled workers, a shortage of capital, and a massive burden of international debt (at last decreasing somewhat, as Saskia Sassen discusses in her contribution). But the reasons centered – and still center – on the lack of a viable and effective state. There are no economic solutions that don’t include political solutions. There are no ways to redress the debilitating inequality when the state is captured or weak. As important as private action is, there are no ways to create effective educational and health institutions without strong public leadership.

In fact, the common opposition between state power and private business is misleading. Weak states commonly create circumstances in which corruption and efforts to manipulate state power are more profitable than businesses that create good jobs and bring long-term development. They allow violence and theft to continue. More effective states can create the conditions under which private business can thrive.

But a thriving future for Haiti also depends on a supportive rather than destructive international environment. The rich world is demonstrating compassion in the midst of this humanitarian crisis. It can continue to help Haiti with development assistance – grants not loans as Alex Dupuy stresses – targeted to rebuilding infrastructure but also building strong social institutions like schools. It can also help with stabilization of residency for Haitians in the US, favorable trade policies, capital for enterprises that will rebuild houses and create jobs.

Neither research nor practical experience has discovered recipes for certain economic development. The processes are complex, even if some of the conditions are clear. Perhaps the word development misleads, by implying that economic growth and improved social conditions somehow come as natural processes. Perhaps it also encourages pursuing growth without addressing environmental sustainability. Whatever we call it, though, Haiti needs roads, houses, clean water, food, and a chance for people to create better lives for themselves and their children.

After one of the worst humanitarian disasters ever, there is the opportunity to provide emergency relief in ways that not only save lives but help people restart lives and then to provide continued support so improvement becomes sustainable. The motivation can be just compassion, or a belief that a more prosperous and stable Haiti will be good for everyone, or a desire to redeem the ideals expressed in countless past promises and sacrificed to expediency. However we explain our desire to help, learning how to help better should be high on the agenda for social science.

On the second, seamlessly dark night after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010, I was lying against the unusually cold earth, and for the first time since that initial tremble, sleeping. Once packed into precarious dwellings of watery cement and leftover tin, the more than two million residents of Port-au-Prince found themselves living in the few spaces opened up between fallen and falling structures. A hundred neighbors and I sought rest in an open lot that on most days served as a car lot and auto-body shop. Located on the corner of a small side street and “Bois Verna,” one of the long, central avenues leading up from the central square of Champs Mars, this lot was one of the better places to take refuge. A bit farther up the hill, this street was home to several middle-class residents, who shared with us the provisions they had been keeping for those bouts of civil unrest (like the protest which claimed the life of a “conservative” professor that Tuesday morning), which tended to keep people indoors. I was huddled with a now fatherless mother, Françoise, and her husband, daughter, and two nephews under a thin bed-sheet, comforted by both the songs of faith and the jeering of those who preferred silence to the singing.

Jolting me from sleep, Françoise tugged the dusty backpack holding the last of my belongings from under my head, and told me we had to run. There was a tsunami coming, and we had to go higher. We hurried up Bois Verna, trying to pull the kids along, while tripping over our bags and bedding. As we reached the end of the road, we heard a mass of people approaching us, claiming another flood was heading down the mountains. We paused, apparently sandwiched between a tsunami and a flood. Having nowhere to go, everyone just stopped in the middle of the crossroads. Here, at this intersection—where not a single siren could be heard, where the only lights shone from the screens of cell phones—a young man’s voice began to blurt out from a megaphone. He called for us to stay clam and to go back to…well, where we had come from. He identified himself as a member of the Organization of Young People for the Development of Bois Verna and then later as a community police officer. He was certain that the dusty dryness meant no tsunami. With no other visible authority, we listened and returned to the car lot.

For the past two years, I have been researching the ways in which these forms of youth-based social organizations pair up with longstanding performance groups, known as “foot bands” (bann a pye), in order to construct an authority to govern in an emerging democracy wrought by extensive international intervention and weak state capacity: “We make the state” (Nou fè leta), as they say. Like the man with the megaphone leading us back to the shelter of huddles and song, Organization to Restore Bel Air (ORB), another youth organization headquartered closer to the site of my fieldwork, was also engaged in acts of policing and assistance, working to share with the homeless the meager supplies stored in a community restaurant and nearby warehouse. After I was evacuated to New York, they called me to fundraise on their behalf. They said they were unable to purchase the staples—such as, spaghetti and ketchup—to keep the Bel Air kitchen operating. They told me that aid was not being distributed in the area, but only to the masses at Champs Mars, and that they were overwhelmed by the demand. They stressed their attempts to fill the void left by the state, epitomized by their view from Bel Air’s hilltop setting of the gutted National Palace below. One week after the quake, Bernard, the group’s president, told me, “We don’t have security. We don’t have food or water. There is no government, no state, no NGOs. We only see their ashes. We are making the state for us.”

While much news and political commentary following the earthquake has focused on the palpable limitations of the Haitian state, few have carefully considered what the phrase “weak state” might even mean. I do take issue with the presumption of some form of assessment by which states might be placed on a scale of relative weakness. Yet I want to focus here on how this inadequate characterization is complicated by the divergent meanings of the word “state” that occur in various social settings. Consider the different meanings of the term which surface when we compare the perspective of international news correspondents with that of Haitians engaged in grassroots political organizing, like Bernard. Whereas foreign commentary tends to posit the state as a decidedly national and hierarchical entity that has “failed” the people it serves, the politically engaged (angaje) residents of Bel Air tend to posit the state as something to be done; that is, the actual execution of a set of particular acts—namely, the making of order and the provisioning of services. As an idea accomplished by acts of governance, the state that emerges in Haiti is essentially constituted by a continuum of structures that range from the extensive NGO and UN network and the national ministries. Take, for example, access to water in Bel Air. Viva Rio, a Brazilian NGO, who collaborates with MINUSTAH—the (also Brazilian-led) UN stabilization mission—to execute neighborhood security and development initiatives, financially and materially supports the state water-distribution agency, Central Autonome Métropolitaine d’Eau Portable. This agency’s administration of water at public fountains is then delegated to select community organizations whose local authority is seen as both a threat and an asset to the foreign-generated project.

For the residents of Bel Air, the idea of the state, as a governing structure, necessarily includes the work of such community organizations.  Bel Air alone is home to over one hundred community organizations—more than half of them are registered with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Together, they reflect the history of socio-political organizations, known as Popular Organizations (Òganizasyon Popilè), which were central to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s vast base of support. However, they have strategically evolved in recent times, becoming more skilled at managing national and international agents in order to solicit funds and resources for neighborhood initiatives. This is exemplified by ORB’s dual effort to solicit funds for its performances from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, while securing financing for their social projects from various NGOs and national ministries and offices (including the Presidential Palace and Prime Ministry). Performing an intermediate level of citizenship by brokering between the state and the “public” (pèp), these organizations constitute a civil society that refuses a subordinate status to the state. Rather, this sphere is made up of social actors who contribute to defining a social contract that realizes and signifies the fragmented power of the state and its relation to the populace. The legacy of state failure in Haiti made salient by the recent calamity results from the inability of governance structures to establish a certain sovereign power and clear parameters for how the Haitian people relate to this power. Both the consequence and the challenge of the concerted, yet disjointed Haitian civil society, this inability impedes performances of governance from effectively positing the state as national or hierarchical. Without dismissing the role or responsibility of national structures, I urge those of us committed to rebuilding a stronger political society in Haiti to heed the workings of these civic organizations when attempting to discern which state is failing, how it operates, and how it can be improved. Let us start by listening to the megaphones.

Over the past five decades Haiti has become terribly out-of-balance. Much of this revolves around the unnatural growth of its cities, especially Port-au-Prince, and the parallel ferocious neglect of the rest of the country, particularly its rural economy and people. Neoliberal investment and trade policies over the past 40 years that emphasized Haiti’s people as little more than a cheap, urban-based labor force and that concurrently starved the country’s traditional agrarian economy of the resources it needed, not only to support those living and working in rural areas but also to produce the food required to feed the nation, have resulted in man-made disasters that are easily compounded when the winds blow and the rain falls, or the earth shakes.ⁱ

Because of unmitigated off-the-land migration with poor people piling on top of each other on steep hillsides and in dangerous ravines, river flood plains and coastal mud flats – seeking opportunities that were mostly a mirage – Port-au-Prince had become a disaster waiting to happen.ⁱⁱ Those who perished on January 12th were mostly the poor crowded on hillsides and ravines, and into sub-standard housing. The vast majority of the thousands who died in the floods in Gonaives in 2004 and 2008 were poor people crowded on alluvial coastal mud flats and in river flood plains.

Haiti had also lost its balance in social and economic equity, and in the ability of the state to care for its citizens. By 2007, 68 percent of the total national income went to the wealthiest 20 percent of the population, while 78 percent of the population survived on $2.00 a day or less. Of all the world’s countries, by 2008 Haiti had the second largest overall income gap between the very rich and the very poor. Haitian state institutions had virtually collapsed under the weight of generations of bad governance since the Duvalier era when the state became the vessel for the sanctioned unfettered predation on Haiti’s population.

International balance was off, too. After lording money on the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier (1972-1986), donors have mostly chosen to bypass even democratically elected governments and funnel aid funds through foreign-based NGOs that enacted ‘projects’ drawn up outside of Haiti and that last only as long as the money does. By the 1990s, none other than the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, lamented the cacophony of “feel good, flag-draped projects” that had proven a vastly inadequate substitute for a coherent national development strategy.

In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy that visited Haiti on January 12, 2010 there is an opportunity to help Haitians restore their country’s balance. In that regard, here are five recommendations.

Encourage decentralization

At least 500,000 people have now fled Port-au-Prince, leaving behind a city representing death, loss and danger to return to towns and villages from which they had migrated or where they have family. This flight can be a silver lining in today’s very dark cloud, but international actors and the government of Haiti must catch up with and get ahead of it. If conditions in the countryside, already poor, 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 exodus, an idea proffered by the Haitian Government – to reinforce 200 decentralized communities – merits immediate and robust support. Decentralized “Welcome Centers” in these towns and villages can offer relief in the short term, and cluster health, education, job-creation and investment services that will help the rural economy grow. Such state services as agronomic assistance, rarely offered to small farmers, can also operate out of these multifunctional facilities. Throughout Haiti infrastructure can be built or upgraded. Hillsides can be rehabilitated; farmland enriched. Investing in Haiti’s towns and villages will also help to repair a social fabric that has been ripped to shreds by decades of neglect and resultant migration.

Support the creation of a National Civic Service Corps

The institutional piece of decentralization can be a National Civic Service Corps.  Since 2007 Haitian authorities have been working on the prospect for such an entity. Now is the time for it to take off. A 700,000-strong corps, composed mostly of young men and women, will rapidly harness untapped labor in both rural and urban settings to rebuild Haiti’s infrastructure; undertake environmental rehabilitation; increase productivity; and restore dignity and pride through meaningful work. It will also form a natural disaster response mechanism. The corps can start modestly, and grow – but start it must.

If this sounds familiar to Americans, it should. This Haitian thinking parallels American thinking when such New Deal programs as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were created in the 1930’s. We have seen what these ‘cash-for-work’ programs did to help the United States and its people stand up during a difficult time.

Strengthen Haitian state institutions through accompaniment, cooperation and partnership

The aftermath of the earthquake offers an opportunity to help strengthen Haiti’s public institutions, not to bypass or replace them. The capacity of the Haitian state has deteriorated progressively over the past 50 years, from the time of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s (1956 – 1972) rabid policies to centralize everything in Port-au-Prince and prey off of or neglect everything else. International development policies of recent years in favor of non-governmental or private organizations have left the resource-strapped government virtually absent in the lives of its citizens. The already weak state has been further set back by the death of civil servants and the loss of facilities and physical resources.

It is easy to kick someone already on the mat in the teeth. Rather than swinging our foot, we should offer our hand. This is the time of the Haitian government’s greatest need. Over the past four years, that government led by President Rene Preval has won praise internationally – and among most in Haiti – over its improved management of the affairs of the state. Partnership to strengthen the Haitian state was on the horizon following 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.

Get money into the hands of poor people

A key to Haiti’s recovery is to get capital into the hands of the country’s grassroots entrepreneurs. Supporting bottom-up capitalism includes:

• Small loans to entrepreneurs, particularly farmers who will not just produce more food, but also increase employment. Government studies indicate that a 10% increase in man-hours on farms will create 40,000 new jobs. FONKOZE, a Haitian ‘bank for the poor,’ offers a dynamic, functioning example of how this can be done.
• Implementing a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program that puts money in the hands of poor families as long as their children attend quality schools and clinics. CCT programs in Mexico and Brazil have succeeded in assisting millions of poor families improve living standards while investing in the next generation of human resources. Such a program in Haiti could accomplish these goals, but only if educational and health systems are extended into rural areas and upgraded in existing locations. Importantly, CCT programs provide governments the challenge and opportunity of being a positive presence in the lives of citizens. This is essential as a means of demonstrating to Haitian citizens that there are tangible fruits of democratic governance.

Support institutions and leaders who embrace greater inclusion and enact socially-responsible investment strategies.

Factory jobs, such as those promoted by the HOPE II preferential trade act between Haiti and the US, should be a part of Haiti’s future. However, three important points must be kept in mind if this assembly sector job creation strategy is to be a plus in helping Haiti ‘build back better.’

First, universal free education and robust rural investment must parallel factory investments. Also, decentralized agri-business possibilities and the jobs and the infusion of cash they bring to the Haitian economy cannot be ignored.

Second, assembly plants cannot be concentrated in Port-au-Prince. Haiti has at least a dozen coastal cities with functioning, albeit rudimentary, port infrastructures or where a port can be built. This decentralization will rebalance prospects for economic growth and infrastructure development to all of Haiti.

Third, investors, factory owners and managers must be mindful that Haitian workers are more than plentiful cheap labor. Secretary of State Clinton has stated that in Haiti “talent is universal; opportunity is not.” Haiti’s renaissance must improve the ‘opportunity environment’ for all. The country’s Diaspora offers bountiful evidence of what can be achieved when talent is twinned with opportunity.

An environment that will enable all Haitians – including the poor working in assembly plants – to better combine talents with opportunities will have a better chance to become a reality if four conditions are met. First, investors, factory owners and managers must recognize that Haiti’s workers have legitimate aspirations to improve their lives, and their honest days’ work should be a means for that. Survival wages that foster profit maximization at the expense of worker well-being do not enable this to happen. Second, this recognition must be followed with actions that demonstrate socially responsible investing and the creation of public-private partnerships that improve worker status and conditions. Third, the Haitian state must have the strength and resources to become and remain a positive presence in worker’s 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. Finally, the state must have the means at its disposal to make sure that international safety and worker well-being standards are enforced at the workplace, while also being able to enforce the collection of appropriate taxes from investors, owners, and mangers.

If there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of Haiti’s recent catastrophe, it is that it offers Haitians, ‘friends of Haiti’ and those whose connection may simply be as a bureaucrat or investor an opportunity to learn from mistakes made in the relatively recent past and take steps that will rebalance that country. If rebalanced, Haiti can move forward toward less poverty and inequity, diminished social and economic exclusion, greater human dignity, a rehabilitated environment, stronger public institutions, and a national infrastructure for economic growth and investment.

ⁱ Up to the 1970s, Haiti did not need to import food. By 2008, it imported 55% of what it ate.

ⁱⁱ The population of Port-au-Prince grew from 762,000 in 1982 to some 2.5 to 3 million at the end of 2009. Haiti’s rural to urban demographic ratio changed from 80 to 20 in the late 1970s to 55 to 45 by 2009.

When considering the much-needed financial help that will go into Haiti’s rebuild, one question is, simply, where will the money come from? Obviously, support needs to be available in the immediate and needs to stay consistent in order to maintain what will be a long and expensive process. International assistance from governments, multilateral institutions and private foundations is essential but tapping the wealth and goodwill of the people of the nation living abroad can also be very effective. In the near-term, the Haitian diaspora might contribute to both humanitarian relief and development through increased remittances to families. In the medium-term, it might contribute to larger infrastructural and commercial projects through investment in reconstruction “diaspora” bonds.

According to official statistics about a million Haitians are living overseas, and about half of them are in the US. Newspapers often report that a million Haitians live in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Haiti receives between $1.5 and1.8 billion in remittances each year; some estimates are even larger – over a half of its national income.

In a laudable measure that will benefit Haitians more than any other aid and assistance, announced just three days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the United States granted temporary protected status (TPS) for 18 months to Haitians already in the US. The TPS allows over 200,000 Haitians currently residing in the US without proper documents to live and work in the US legally, without a fear of deportation. It also allows them to send money home quickly and efficiently through formal remittance channels.

If the TPS resulted in a 20 percent increase in the average remittance per migrant, we would expect an additional $360 million remittance flows to Haiti in 2010. What’s more, if the TPS were to be extended once beyond the currently stipulated 18 months (the extension is almost certain to happen, judging by the history of extensions of the TPS for immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan) additional fund flows to Haiti would exceed a billion dollars over three years. That would be a billion dollars of financial help coupled with goodwill and advice, tailored to the needs of the recipient. Financial help in the form of remittances from family members abroad is always the first to arrive in times of distress. Remittances to Haiti this year will surge, as they have done whenever and wherever there has been a crisis or natural disaster.

In the immediate term, there is a need to ensure that remittance flows to Haiti are not disrupted. Access to cash is essential for accessing food and shelter and other basic services. Long lines seen in front of money transfer companies have now become shorter, but the challenge of accessing remittances from overseas, especially from migrant relatives who lack proper immigration papers, remains. Under normal circumstances, the fees for sending $200 to Haiti through money transfer companies averaged $14 in the US, and almost double, $25, in the Dominican Republic. The fees are certainly higher now. (Although some money transfer companies have graciously waived fees, obtaining local currency at the right exchange rate remains costly.) In the medium-term, there is a need to leverage remittance inflows for local and national development, without directly interfering with them. The challenge for the government and the donor community would be to tame a temptation to treat remittances as a substitute for aid or public spending on rebuilding efforts, especially in communities where migrants’ relatives reside.

As I mentioned earlier, diaspora bonds can be issued (in addition to the TPS and facilitation of remittances) when government offices and banks resume functioning. By “diaspora bond,” I mean not only bonding between the diaspora and the homeland, but more specifically a financial instrument for attracting investment from the diaspora.

In the past, diaspora bonds have been used by Israel and India to raise over $35 billion of development financing. Several countries – for example, Ethiopia, Nepal, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka – are considering (or have issued) diaspora bonds recently to bridge financing gaps. Besides patriotism, diaspora members are usually more interested than foreign investors in investing in the home country. Not only Haitians abroad, but also foreign individuals interested in helping Haiti, even charitable institutions, are likely to be interested in these bonds. Offering a reasonable interest rate – a 5% tax-free dollar interest rate, for example – could attract a large number of Haitian investors who are getting close to zero interest rate on their deposits.

If 200,000 Haitians in the US, Canada and France were to invest $1,000 each in diaspora bonds, it would add up to $200 million. If these bonds were opened to friends of Haiti, including private charitable organizations, much larger sums could be raised. If the bond rating were enhanced to investment grade rating via guarantees from the multilateral and bilateral donors, then such bonds would even attract institutional investors.

Regarding the question of whether Haitian immigrants are too poor to invest, consider this fact from the Current Population Survey of the US: nearly one-third of Haitian immigrants in the US belong to households that earned more than $60,000 in 2009. In comparison, less than 15% of the immigrants from Mexico, Dominican Republic and El Salvador in the US had that level of household income. A quarter of Haitian immigrants, especially women, are reportedly in the relatively higher paying health care and education sectors and only a small number of them are in the construction sector.

Given a high degree of political risk, credit enhancement from creditworthy donors would be necessary for Haitian diaspora bonds. My preliminary calculation suggests that a $100 million grant from official or private donors to guarantee such bonds (say, for 10 years, on an annual rolling basis) could actually generate $600 million of additional funding for Haiti. Such a guarantee structure could reduce interest rates on these bonds from over 15% to below 5% at the going rates. Also marketing diaspora bonds in the US would require a temporary exemption from SEC regulations. Perhaps a tough sell, but well worth it under these extraordinary circumstances.

There is now a fear of mass migration from Haiti to the US and to the Dominican Republic and both countries are now tightening borders to prevent an influx of Haitians. This is not surprising, but it is paradoxical (like the proverbial giving-with-one-hand-and-taking-it-away-with-the-other). I should think the short-term surge in migration would subside rather quickly when Haiti begins to recover and rebuild itself.

Haiti’s diaspora provides a significant resource that should absolutely be utilized right now. In addition to the extension of the TPS, facilitation of remittances and the issuing of diaspora bonds are added ways that they can get the support they need to assist them through this rebuilding.

Humanitarian crises usually have calamitous gender-specific results that disproportionately affect women and girls.  Natural disasters are certainly no exception.  In the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010, hundreds of thousands of people were left dead, injured, homeless and jobless.  The circumstances under which many Haitians in Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Jacmel, Petit Goave and surrounding areas have been living since the earthquake present unique challenges to women and girls that must be addressed in relief efforts, recovery programs, and the re-construction of the state.

Over 200,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake, including four significant fanm poto mitan, pillars of the Haitian women’s movement.  These feminist activists were Myriam Merlet, Chief of Cabinet of the Ministry of Women’s Condition and Rights and founder of the umbrella National Coordination for Advocacy on Women’s Rights (CONAP); Magalie Marcelin, founder of KayFamn, the only shelter for victims of gender-based violence; Anne-Marie Coriolan, founder of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA), one of the country’s largest women’s advocacy groups; and Myrna Narcisse, Director General of the Ministry of Women’s Condition and Rights.  The loss of these women, each one a champion of human rights and fiercely committed to the equality and protection of Haiti’s female population will be felt strongly by the feminist activist community.  The loss should prompt us to consider how gender inequalities are playing out in the wake of the earthquake, as they certainly would have.

Studies have demonstrated that disaster significantly exacerbates existing inequalities, which is why women and girls are particularly vulnerable right now.  Take for example, how gender introduces distinct health related needs.  According to the United Nations about 63,000 women are currently pregnant in Haiti, which, prior to the earthquake had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.  These women and the children they bear will require prenatal, labor and delivery, and postnatal care in the imminent future.  How will such care be distributed?  Will these women’s concerns be taken into consideration in all of the pressing medical needs of the country?  Likewise nursing mothers are particularly susceptible to malnutrition and dehydration that could lead to further mortalities.  What other public health issues with gender ramifications are still emerging as a result of the earthquake?

In the immediate rescue period, or first phase of the earthquake response, women and girls were quite visible, being pulled out of rubble, proclaiming faith that helped them through, and flashing smiles of survival in the face of international news agency cameras that seemed to be omnipresent.  They were seen in captivating scenes of hope, marching through the street singing songs of encouragement. Disparities in the distribution of aid are another reason why women and girls are more at risk during humanitarian crises.  While the remarkable patience of the Haitian community, many of whom have gone days without food or water, must be noted, in the event of food riots women and girls are more likely to suffer.  In those situations, the dominant rule is survival of the fittest; the stronger and faster you are the more likely you are to get food.  What will happen to the women and girls scrambling for sustenance in uncontrolled crowds?

Following the rescue, homelessness resulting from the earthquake poses unique challenges to women, exposed under tents that afford little protection for vulnerable populations. There is a dire need for protection and security for those sleeping in the open whose gender puts them more at risk for sexual assault and predatory advances. The high rates of violence against women that activists such as Merlet and Marcelin worked assiduously to address, prevent and reduce, further underscore these security risks. In one study conducted by Kay Fanm it was estimated that 72% of Haitian girls have been raped and 40% of women were victims of domestic violence.  How many can we add to this number since January 12th? How can Haitians, who have exhibited solidarity and organized mobility in response to the catastrophic circumstances surrounding them, effectively tackle gender inequality in a manner worthy of the Merlet, Marcelin, Narcisse, and Coriolan legacy?

A few programs have begun to meet some of these needs.  The United Nations Population Fund very recently implemented the distribution of emergency medical packs for pregnant women.  Likewise the establishment of a coupon system for food that specifically targets women has been created by a coalition that includes the World Food Program and World Vision.  The Haitian Minister of Women’s Affairs Marjorie Michèle also recently announced a “cash for work” program that 100,000 women living in camps will participate in.  While we have yet to see the results from these new measures, they do point to the possibility for positive transformation. The next step must be assistance programs that not only meet their needs, but also provide opportunities for advancement and self-empowerment.

It is true that the earthquake in Haiti did not discriminate based on class, race, gender or ethnicity.  Members of the MINUSTAH perished alongside those who worked for meager wages in the Hotel Montana. However, the realities of class and gender inequality make it such that women, and especially poor women, will have to go longer strides and a further distance to be brought back to where they were prior to the earthquake.  When we consider where they actually were, troubling to begin with, there is far more work to be done. Furthermore, given the link between violence against women and poverty, there should be increased concern for women in Haiti whose race, class and gender situate them at the nexus of multiple oppressions.  Supporting women’s organizations and increasing educational opportunities for girls are two important areas that should come with the reconstruction of the Haitian state and will help to begin to address gender equality.

The magnitude of brutalities against women and girls all over the globe reveals that this facet of life is not only particular to Haiti.  While in recent years strides have been made in acknowledging that women’s rights are in fact human rights, and that gender based violence be considered a human rights violation, the statistics of violence against women in developing and developed countries remains staggering.  One out of every three women in the world will be sexually or physically assaulted in her lifetime.  The global response to this far-flung devastation in Haiti presents an opportunity to include gender specific analysis and application to humanitarian projects.

Placing women at the center of rebuilding programs will offer opportunities to address the oppression of women in the developing nation.  Rebuilding should draw upon successful endeavors that concentrate on women and girls, such as microfinance loan opportunities or environmental tree planting movements, both models that speak to the significance of gender in sustainable development.  Relief organizations have to take gender into account as they assess the immediate needs, as must Haitians themselves.  They can begin to do so by taking on the causes that were so dear to Merlet and her colleagues as well as championing education for girls, gender equity at all levels of society, and refusing to accept gender violence as a quotidian way of life.

The introduction of I-VAWA, the International Violence Against Women Act, into both the United States House and Senate this week, suggests that this is also an apt time to consider how US involvement in humanitarian relief organizing can make inroads into addressing and eventually ending violence against women.  I-VAWA includes strategies for how international assistance programs can be used to address the needs of women in general and violence against women in particular.  The humanitarian agenda in Haiti must include similar attention and sensitivity to the particular needs of women and girls.

The best way to honor the legacy of our fallen Haitian feminist trailblazers will be to rebuild in a way that includes gender equity, to reconstruct institutions that assist the development of women and girls, and to provide more educational opportunities and resources for women and girls to become agents of transformation.  Girls like one mentioned in a recent Miami Herald article, stating that she was eager to get back to school and when asked why responded, “…because my country is broke and I want to fix it.” Indeed, investing in the potential and the projects of girls and women will have longstanding beneficial effects for the entire country. “Only a mountain can crush a Haitian woman,” asserts the protagonist of Edwidge Danticat’s award winning novel Breath, Eyes, Memory. Applying the perspective of gender to rebuilding efforts would mean not allowing Haitian women to fall in the earthquake’s cracks, and empowering them to be instrumental in rebuilding the country as they have been in various points of history as fanm poto mitan.

As we near the three week mark of the earthquake in Haiti several themes have emerged.

First, the international outpouring of support for the victims is unprecedented.  One news outlet reports that more then 50% of US households have made some kind of contribution to the relief effort.  Fundraisers in Africa, Asia and Europe have raised money from all classes of society.  Private businesses are involved.  Ralph Lauren, for example, has a full-page ad in this past Sunday’s New York Times that features a shirt in the colors of Haiti with the Haitian coat of arms, all proceeds going to the relief effort.  Universities, high schools and grade schools have been holding “Haiti teach-ins” where the history, culture and now even the geology of Haiti are discussed and students engage with experts on how best to help Haiti.

Second, the need is also on a scale and level of complexity that has challenged even the most seasoned rescue and relief teams.  Port-au-Prince was vastly overcrowded, the most densely populated slums built precisely in the most precarious zones.  How to bring, literally, life’s necessities to such an already poor population with an infrastructure that was overburdened even before the quake has proven to be much more difficult than previous disasters in Asia or Africa.

Third, the huge amount of assistance pouring into Port-au-Prince severely strains not only the weak pre-existing physical infrastructure.  Haiti’s government had limited capacity before the quake and has much less now.  Some key officials were killed and many official buildings, including the Presidential Palace, the Parliament and the Supreme Court – all three branches of government –  have been damaged or destroyed.

Fourth, there has been a massive flight from Port-au-Prince to the countryside.  While this will help relieve the congestion of the capital, the capacity of the rural countryside and provincial towns to support a sudden increase in desperately needy people is nearly non-existent.  For example, the city of Hinche in the Central Plateau of Haiti received approximately 30,000 people and food was virtually running out.  It took an emergency convoy led by the World Food Program accompanied by the French Ambassador on Friday, Jan. 29 to temporarily relieve the crisis.

As we look forward beyond the immediate emergency phase, the list of priorities is staggering.

1. Coordination of assistance must improve.  The UN cluster program is a good start with relevant agencies taking the lead, but not exclusive, role on protection, water, food, sanitation and health care.
2. Aid must reach rural Haiti and provincial towns so that the host population is not driven to desperation and those arriving from the capital have an incentive to stay put and not return.  This means quick impact projects in agriculture, road-building, tree planting and clearing irrigation canals that also create jobs and put cash in  people’s pockets.  Schools must reopen and teachers found.
3. Access to credit, seeds and fertilizers must be increased; tanker loads of rich alluvium topsoil from several dredging projects in the US should be delivered to Haiti. Wind and sun, which Haiti has in abundance, should be harvested using increasingly cheaper technology.  Just as Haiti jumped the” land-line” phase of telecommunications and went right to the cell phone, it could skip the fixed power-grid phase and go right to the more nimble and green emerging power generation systems, including bio-fuel.
4. Haitian National Police should be deployed to Internally Displaced Person’s camps, accompanied by UN police, to provide protection and security to their residents, especially women and children.
5. Seasoned managers and technocrats from Haiti’s large Diaspora should be enlisted to return for six months to one year to work alongside Haitian counterparts in key government Ministries like Finance, Planning, Agriculture, Education, Health, Interior and Justice. This will help manage the need to absorb and use effectively the massive flow of aid.  Introducing a new culture of public service, accountability and oversight will take time where government all too often was either absent or preying on the population. The time to start is now.
6. A Civilian Protection Corps (which is called for by Article 52 of the Haitian Constitution of 1987) should be created.  The Corps would employ a large chunk of Haiti’s youth,  especially those in the poorer sections of Port-au-Prince.  It is crucial to give them a chance to make a positive contribution to rebuilding Haiti and to draw them away from the gangs who are reconstituting themselves after the escape from the National Penitentiary of several convicted gang leaders.
7. The ports of Cap-Haitien, Miragoane, Jeremie, Port-de-Paix, Les Cayes, St. Marc, Jacmel and Gonaives should be repaired, expanded and reopened, as necessary.  These were at one time viable port cities with decent jobs and commercial links with the US, Europe and the Caribbean.  The need for shipping clerks, stevedores, accountants, lawyers, and export-import businesses would expand and attract talent from the capital while allowing for a better dispersion of jobs and opportunities across the country.
8. Urban planners, especially from the Diaspora, should start now a plan for “Port-au-Prince: the next 250 years.” Zoning regulations, building codes, traffic engineering, new affordable housing, sewer and sanitation systems (especially the delivery of potable water), child-friendly schools (with a focus on safe latrines for girls), all need to be designed and construction started once the rubble is cleared.  Again, this is also a job-creation tool.
9. The Haitian justice system should establish an emergency panel to resolve any property disputes/claims.

The list could undoubtedly double, but an already overwhelmed population, government and international donor community should not try to do everything at once. Rebuilding Haiti out of the ashes and debris of Port-au-Prince will be a marathon, not a sprint;  Haiti will need substantial support and attention for years.  Yet it is crucial that decisions made now be the best ones possible, otherwise the risk is that Haiti slides back into its former dysfunctional self with dire results for its people.

William G. O’Neill
En route to Haiti
1 Feb 2010

The catastrophic earthquake in Haiti has, quite literally, turned many of the buildings of the Haitian state into rubble. As several colleagues on this forum have already suggested, re-constructing the Haitian state, and doing so in a way that helps assure that the state will be able to address the serious problems in Haiti, is clearly a priority. The current political order in Haiti, with it’s dispersed power that resides in various poles – the U.N. mission, the “Republic of the NGOs,” foreign governments and their representatives, the different ministries and poles of authority in the Haitian state, and a wide range of civic and religious institutions – has shown its limits in many ways during the past years, and during the recent catastrophe.

At the same time, of course, Haitian society has remained remarkably organized in the face of the magnitude of the catastrophe. People have mobilized, often quite effectively given the limited resources at their disposal, to rescue neighbors and friends, to find solace, and to gather together to begin to plan for the future, while others have left the city to seek solidarity and assistance and family in the countryside. If a similarly catastrophic event – resulting in no state infrastructure, no communication, no active security forces, and overwhelming destruction of the built environment – took place in a North American city, the level of social chaos would likely have been, it seems to us, much greater than it has been in Haiti. That is probably in part because of the ways Haitian society is largely independent from, and indeed in some ways in opposition to, the state.

This is a moment of reckoning for the Haitian state, but it should also force us to grapple with the longer history of state and society in Haiti. For we need to both admit and think about the fact that state-building has in fact been a focus of a great deal of effort and attention in Haiti for many decades, indeed longer than that. The calls for reform and reconstruction, in other words, have been part of Haitian politics for much of the 20th century. And yet the Haitian state continues to operate in a very problematic way within society. How might today’s calls find a different outcome, and create a different future, than others that have come before? And how can history inform our understanding of what should happen next?

It is, we would submit, useful to go back to the beginning. From the moment of its official creation with independence in 1804, those who have embodied and spoken for the Haitian state have confronted a very particular set of circumstances. On the one hand, the existence of Haiti was predicated on a radical refusal, and a radical break, with French colonial control, and with slavery. That refusal of control is the bedrock, the foundational “social contract” of Haitian political life, and one that no Haitian politician has ever been able to truly reject, at least openly.

At the same time, however, the Haitian Revolution brought together, and at times powerfully unified, very different currents of political aspiration. The motor of the revolution throughout its history was the resistance of the enslaved, a majority of them African-born, who drew on their own experiences on both sides of the Atlantic in developing and struggling to create a “counter-plantation” system. This was a refusal not just of French control and chattel slavery, but also of the plantation system itself, and involved the creation of a very different way of living, one focused on production for oneself and for surplus within a local market.

But within the leadership of the revolution, which was composed both of individuals who were already free from slavery before it took place and of formerly enslaved individuals who rose into the high ranks of the military, many were committed to the maintenance of the plantation economy, and focused on the need for Haiti to continue to have outlets in the global market. While they refused French control and colonial racial hierarchy, they also believed it was necessary for independent Haiti to occupy an economic niche that represented continuity with colonial Saint-Domingue.

Both groups developed their political projects and their vision for the future in a context deeply constrained by the situation within Haiti and beyond it. In a sense, they had no option but to pursue the approaches they did. And both approaches were driven by very strong, and quite justifiable, fears and hopes. Those who refused the plantation model and created something else in its place did so because they rightly understood that any form of plantation labor, even paid, would be exploitative and deeply constrain their autonomy in ways they found unacceptable, especially given the recent memory of slavery. Those who wanted to maintain the plantation system, though, saw that if Haiti did not have a source of foreign exchange it would be deeply weakened. If they had in mind their own profits, they also had a serious and well-justified concern about defending Haiti from the prospect of invasion and developing a strong state in the face of such a possibility. Although these fears might seem, in retrospect, unfounded, in fact the early 19th century saw an outpouring of pamphlets and proposals in France from individuals convinced that the nation could re-conquer its former colony and return it to its previous state as a productive plantation colony.

The contrasting and indeed contradictory social and economic visions which shaped Haiti’s nineteenth century are best understood when situated within the broader story of post-emancipation societies in the Americas. In all the societies where plantation slavery existed, emancipation failed to fully deliver on its promises. In the U.S., Brazil, and in the Caribbean, the abolition of slavery didn’t bring full equality and dignity to former slaves and their descendants, who continued for generations to face extreme forms of political, social and economic exclusion, as well as structural inequalities that shape these societies to this day. In some ways the situation in Haiti paralleled the broader failures of post-emancipation societies in the Americas. Elites in Haiti, like elites in other countries, marginalized the majority of descendants of slaves and continued to exploit their labor when possible and to exclude them from political and economic control.

The descendants of slaves, however, struggled in many ways successfully to refuse the forms of economic exploitation the elite sought to carry out, insisting on and constructing in their own communities a social order predicated and passionately insistent upon equality. And they were able to construct a social order in the countryside in which their quality of life was in fact significantly better than that of descendants of slaves in other societies. They owned land, produced for internal and external markets, and experienced a cultural autonomy and social dignity largely refused people of African descent in other societies in the nineteenth century.

But Haiti’s elite also faced a particularly challenging set of circumstances, one that distinguished their situation from that of other elites in the Americas. First of all, while all of the difficulties and challenges of creating a post-emancipation society burdened post-independence Haiti, most of the capital accumulated through a century of extremely profitable plantation agriculture ended up outside of the nation, in France as well as North America, which profited enormously from trade with the colony. In most other societies, the economic inequalities that shaped the lives of the formerly enslaved and their descendants existed within a broader economic matrix that encompassed the fortune of their former owners. In Haiti, while there were some former plantation owners of African descent among the post-independence population, for the most part the planters and merchants who had profited from slavery had either died or fled, and much of the capital produced by the plantation complex had in any case accumulated in French port towns and in Paris among merchant and planter families. The Haitian Revolution also destroyed towns and plantations and left perhaps 100,000 residents of Saint-Domingue dead. The nation not only faced the challenge of building a new order on the ashes of a plantation system, but did so in a context in which they inherited the legacies of massive and violent labor extraction without inheriting any of the capital that this extraction had produced.

Haitian leaders also had to deal with the fact the very existence of their nation was seen by many foreign leaders as a serious, and seditious, threat. Although responses were far from uniform – some British abolitionists championed Haiti and worked with Henri Christophe to set up schools in the country – no nation acknowledged Haitian independence for two decades after its independence. Haiti’s early regimes, meanwhile, poured a great deal of money into the construction of an impressive series of forts built along the spines of the mountains of the country, meant to assure that the Haitian army could withstand and ultimately repel a new invasion on the part of the French. This sapped the already limited resources of the new state. After a series of unsuccessful negotiations between Haiti and France, during which the French proposed on several occasions that they actually retake some form of control over their former colony, in 1825 the leaders of a the Haitian government proposed a deal in which they would pay an indemnity of 150 million francs (later reduced to 60 million) in return for recognition from France. They were, with some reason, optimistic about the potential productivity especially of the coffee economy in Haiti, and saw the deal as a way of securing better access to the global market for plantation products.

Because of this deal, Haiti not only inherited the burdens of a century long process of extraction, but actually had to then pay their former colonizer for the right to be recognized as independent. This money went to placate former planters, who had long lobbied the French government for a reconquest of Saint-Domingue, and instead received payments from the French government for what they claimed to have lost during the revolution. What they had lost, of course, most of all – what comprised the greatest part of their investment in Saint-Domingue – were human beings who, now citizens of an independent nation, were made to bear the burden of paying an indemnity to the French.

Since the Haitian government could not pay at the time, they took out loans – helpfully offered by French banks – and entered into the spiral of debt so familiar to post-colonial nations in the 20th century, which has continued to this day. Combined with the fact that economic elites were, not surprisingly and certainly not uniquely, focused on extracting the maximum profit from their own holdings, this created a situation in which state institutions and the elites who controlled them heavily taxed rural production as well as coffee exports produced largely through peasant agriculture, with much of this money going to service the debt for the indemnity rather than going into the construction of infrastructure within Haiti itself. While coffee production in fact thrived impressively during the 19th century – St. Marc coffee was the high-end gourmet coffee of its day – the profits from that production were sapped and diverted from projects within Haiti itself.

This story is important not simply because it illuminates some of the reasons for poverty in Haiti, but also because it helps us understand what the state has been, and perhaps might become, in Haiti. Both the functioning of the colonial state and that of different regimes in post-independence Haiti gave many in the country good reasons to see that state mainly as a source of actual or potential exploitation rather than as a source of support or a site of actual representation. Twentieth century experiences in Haiti, notably the U.S. military occupation of 1915 to 1934, tended to confirm the suspicion that in many ways it was best to avoid the state. Though politics in Haiti have long been predicated upon appeals by political leaders to represent and speak for the masses, the conduits through which the demands of the population could actually profoundly shape the functioning of the state remained relatively limited, and popular demands often found themselves thwarted or expressed in uprisings rather than through procedural processes. None of this, of course, was particularly unique to Haiti, but it took on a particular form there with important consequences.

Why tell this story now? It is, it seems to us, crucial that we begin to think in a very historical way about the Haitian state, and see to what extent that can help us think about what it actually is and how it functions. Whatever will be built in Haiti will have to be built from its existing institutions, governmental and civic, and will have to be rooted in and make sense within the political landscape and vision of Haitians, which has been shaped and refined through their historical experience. The experience includes, we would argue, all that is necessary for the construction of a better future, so history can be both an inspiration and a caution. The remarkable social organization demonstrated in the wake of the earthquake suggests one of the impacts of the history of the Haitian state, which is that Haitians have largely become extremely adept at functioning without its assistance, even in times of catastrophe and crisis. Obviously, it would be better if they didn’t have to. But the fact that they do, and in some ways prefer to in the actually existing situation, is telling.

In a sense, the argument about how aid should be deployed and channeled in Haiti will very likely follow the two paths it has long followed. While many advocate forcefully, and for good reason, that the major effort should be in the establishment of a functioning Haitian state that could most effectively deliver necessary services, many others are skeptical that this can be accomplished. In the meantime, the “Republic of NGOs” is driven by the idea that people desperately need certain services – health care, nutrition, legal representation, agricultural assistance – and that in the absence of a Haitian state capable of delivering these services it is a moral responsibility to deliver them. Each approach is, in its way, completely logical and completely correct. They are also, theoretically and practically, incompatible. But we live right now, and what we face now is a massive crisis, a toll of suffering that is difficult to even know how to count, or name.

As we try to grapple with the overwhelming disaster and what looms ahead, with the many mountains to climb in the coming years, we’ll need historical clarity and imagination. How can we assure that Haiti can rebuild both as quickly and as effectively as possible? Whatever the approaches taken, whether they are channeled through the Haitian state or through NGOs, they will only be successful in the long term if they are predicated upon the empowerment of the Haitian people to reconstruct their world in ways that promise to respond to their pressing and long-deferred aspirations. This empowerment could take different forms. One crucial zone of action is in the area of language. Notwithstanding the Constitution, which acknowledges Kreyòl as an official language, French is and will likely remain for some time the primary language of the state, as the language of education and the judiciary system in Haiti. While the expanded use of Kreyòl in official contexts is unavoidable and necessary, it is also true that spreading mastery of French will expand access to power and institutions in Haiti, and therefore the enfranchisement of the population.

Giving people more access to communication will also assist the recovery effort. Projects to distribute cell phones and make their use affordable would, in fact, have an immediate and useful impact on reconstruction efforts, allowing people to communicate, strategize, and act. And the more reconstruction efforts can depend on and draw on the knowledge and skills of a broad swath of the population, the better they will work. If there were some way, for instance, to funnel building materials into the market in Haiti at affordable prices, not precisely as donations but as a heavily subsidized infusion of such materials, particularly lumber, this would allow the many who are skilled carpenters and builders to provide shelter for the many who have lost it. These structures would be built much more quickly, and perhaps more effectively, than might be done otherwise, and with the benefit of allowing people to do paid work and participate directly in the reconstruction of their neighborhoods.

A new kind of state and political order will emerge in Haiti only if the people are empowered. And they need to be empowered as they are. If far too many are poor and illiterate, they are no less ready to think and act for the future, just as their ancestors did during the Haitian Revolution. That revolution began an irreversible process that has constituted the political and social organization of Haiti today, which is the only foundation for the future.

(Laurent Dubois)

I have written a good bit recently about the intense religious responses to the Haiti earthquake, as congregations regroup in public spaces in search of meaning and mutual support. To approach such events from the vantage point of religious studies is to attend to how groups engage with powers in an unseen cosmic realm that they themselves have constructed. Now I find myself thinking about how crucial it is to engage in frank analysis about rebuilding Haiti in terms of the unseen world of hidden, covert, and sometimes illegal political and economic deals between both Haitians and Americans (and others) that have been instrumental in shaping the overlapping crises that Haitians confront. So far, many social scientists and policy commentators have written about rebuilding as if other countries, international organizations, and the Haitian government itself relate to the Haitian nation in public, official, legal, and traceable ways, when this is often simply not the case.

Click here to read the full article at The Immanent Frame.

Since the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti, I have been asked by many of my colleagues how I think Haiti should “rebuild.”  My immediate response is that this is Haiti’s project and best left to the imagination and aspirations of Haitians.  Still, standing farther back from the question, I have been thinking about our general approach as we engage with Haiti.  I think that the policy lens we have been employing – the fragile state policy framework – could use some “rebuilding” itself.

Prior to the 1990s, most of our aid to Haiti had been humanitarian in nature, aimed at material sufficiency and basic needs (food, education, shelter, health, etc.).  Since the mid-1990s, we began to think more expansively; the goal of building peace started to frame our interventions.  Still, more recently, since 2004, we have been focused on reducing Haiti’s so-called “fragility.”  My concern is that while there is still a forceful discourse about poverty reduction, democracy building, and development framing our interventions, it is now intertwined with more explicit security (ours and the world’s) and stability considerations.  This is something that deserves some careful consideration.

We have designated Haiti as “fragile” because of its poor governance, weak economy, the presence of armed groups that occupied parts of the country in 2004, episodes of public insecurity due to gang violence and kidnappings, and concern that uncontrolled migration and other cross-border threats such as drug trafficking could affect its neighbours. We don’t view Haiti as a likely host for terrorists, still we view its poor governance and development malaise as threats to its citizens, neighbouring countries, and the broader international community.

Even though the fragile state concept is used by all OECD countries, some scholars and practitioners have found fault with it. One critique that we should heed, for instance, is that much of the West’s capacity building is aimed at fulfilling the tasks that we as outsiders consider important because they happen to relate to our own national interests and to international order more generally. Other scholars and practioners, particularly those from the global South, have suggested that, when using this lens, donors tend to focus on Haiti’s internal characteristics and dynamics rather than international factors that have caused or exacerbated the country’s so-called fragility.

One of my own concerns has been that by adopting a fragile state lens, we have made our overriding objective to make Haiti less conflict-vulnerable, rather than less poor.  Of course, addressing the country’s vulnerablilty to conflict entails a commitment to poverty reduction.  Still, it’s no longer the overarching objective. Moreover, I think that the distinction between poverty reduction for humanitarian reasons versus poverty reduction to allay instability or prevent conflict needs to be highlighted. For instance, if we are endeavouring to reduce poverty because it contributes to conflict, rather than for strictly humanitarian reasons, our aid is more likely to flow to localities and social groups that we view as predisposed to conflict or unrest, rather than to the poorest.  While the two groups often overlap, this is not always the case. Indeed, in Haiti, the poorest are not necessarily the most conflict vulnerable.  The rural poor suffer and die very quietly, often without breaking shop windows, burning cars, and blocking roads.

A fragile state lens still accommodates an ethical responsibility to those beyond our borders but it also places international security considerations at the forefront of our interventions. Labelling Haiti a fragile state may accord it strategic relevance but it can also lead to targeted aid that may very well overlook the most vulnerable and marginalized – the rural poor for instance.

Mark Duffield has astutely observed that the fragile state “is used as a generic expression of concern” – concern for the citizens of fragile states, but also for outsiders. As a policy lens, I believe it tells us a lot about our own fears – our alarm about countries like Haiti that seem perpetually at the threshold of emergency.  Our decision to view Haiti through the fragile state policy lens signifies that our own national strategic interests – national, regional, and global security – have become more prominent.  More ethically-inspired motives are still present but are now intermingled with apprehension, that is, concern about the potential ripple effects of Haiti’s ineffective state and its vulnerable peoples.

As we assist Haiti in its efforts to rebuild its infrastructure, state, economy, and society, we need to ensure that our own objectives are simplified, aimed at a single security referent, the most vulnerable Haitians.  Regarding poverty reduction, we should be focused on reducing poverty by helping Haiti’s poorest, that is, those most in need of our assistance.  As soon as we try to reduce poverty AND contribute to a more secure Caribbean neighbourhood and a less strife-riven world, we are muddying the waters. When dealing with the poorest country in the hemisphere, we should adopt a policy lens that focuses squarely on the security of Haitians. Not on global, regional, or national security considerations.  Simply put, our interventions are unlikely to yield long-term benefits for Haitians if our own well-being and security – let alone global order and the world’s security – form part of the equation.  The competing rationales will inevitably collide, as they have in the past, leaving Haitians by the wayside yet again.