The Haiti Earthquake Response: A view from the trenches

Will we just rebuild the chaos in Haiti?

 

I went to the Jacmel area last week and came back both very impressed with what is happening in the Southeast Department and even more worried about what is happening in Port-au-Prince. We had sponsored a two-day workshop to bring together the local authorities and the international organizations to discuss the next steps for rebuilding the Southeast. There was some squabbling about where to have the tent cities and what the priorities should be. However, the authorities also had a clear idea of the work that needed to be done and the reconstruction was straight forward. They knew how many houses needed to be fixed and how much support the rural areas needed to support the influx of the population. It is easy to imagine a large reconstruction program in the Southeast that succeeds in building back better.

I can't say the same for the Port-au-Prince area. Port-au-Prince was a chaotic nightmare before the earthquake hit. of the four main roads connecting Port-au-Prince and Petionville, only one is four-lane. All four are basically parking lots during the morning and evening commute. Poor housing are consisted of houses frequently built on top of each other. There were no roads between the houses and frequently no sanitation or running water. 

 
Google Earth images of a neighborhood just off of Canape Verte before and after the earthquake.

Today, I see people rebuilding their houses right where they collapsed. Some argue that it is too early to talk about longer term issues. I fear instead that the window of opportunity is closing. Yes, we need to focus on relief and temporary housing. However, if Port-au_prince is to be rebuilt better, drastic action is needed. Haiti needs strong leadership to clearly state that a new urbanization plan will be imposed on Port-au-Prince. Any houses that do not conform to that plan will be demolished. In the Southeast, people can rebuild where they lived. In Port-au-Prince, they should not. that change will require strong leadership and the order needs to come soon.

In terms of basic reorganization, I would love to see the following:

• A commitment to widen the other three main arteries connecting Petionville and Port-au-Prince: Panamerican, Canape Vert, and Route Frere. This would involve demolishing houses on either side of the road.
• Rehabilitation of the main artery through downtown (Blvd Harry Truman) including limiting access to the road.
• Completion of the bypass through Carrefour (currently blocked since the road passes through the country's fuel depot.
• Widening of the Grand Rue to allow it to take the local traffic that can no longer pass through Blvd. Harry Truman.
• Standardization of the roads through town to allow for parking on the sides of the road and for trucks to pass in Carrefour, Cite Soliel, and the other areas that have grown rapidly.

This would require relocating tens of thousands of people--not an easy or cheap decision. To make this work, neighborhoods would need to be more dense than they are today. Currently, most neighborhoods are still single-family homes (or shacks). Instead, Port-au-Prince needs low rise apartment buildings--five to eight stories. This is a far more efficient way to house city populations and is the solution in nearly every city in the world. I realize that people will not be eager to move into apartments and that it will be critical to build the apartments well. However, the two most seismically active cities in the world are Tokyo and San Fransisco. How many poor people in these cities live in single family houses?

At the same time, there should be a large program to improve the infrastructure in the other main towns in Haiti. We don't want to suck everyone back into Port-au-Prince.

It will take strong leadership to bring about these changes. I believe that it is easier to force changes through during a crisis, as President Obama did, than to wait for the dust to settle and calmly talk about it. I worry that by the time the leadership in Haiti is ready to talk about these changes, it will be too late and we will have rebuilt the chaos.

A personal account of the response to the earthquake in Haiti.

Every now and then, life hands you a chance to make a difference. I am fortunate to be in the right place at the right time  I used to run the Pan American Development's Haiti disaster program before I moved to the Dominican Republic to run the border program. Therefore, when the earthquake hit, I was already in place to respond. With all telephone communication cut off in Haiti, we had no idea what had happened to our staff. Wednesday morning, I was able to get some cash and supplies together and drove from Santo Domingo to Haiti.

It is a seven hour drive and I spent the whole drive talking on the phone and getting updates on the situation. We received a message from our office that our staff was safe, but we were unable to talk directly with anyone. I crossed the border around 6pm and made to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince around 7pm. As I drove into town, I began seeing the first impacts--a cinder block wall that fell here or a damaged wall there. A bit further in, I saw whole walls down, then began seeing collapsed roofs. We made it to our safe house around 7:30pm and settled in for the night.

Everyone in the area was still very shaken. Even though the house was completely intact, the Haitians were sleeping outside in fear of another quake. During the night I felt two strong aftershocks.

In the morning, we headed into town. The damage was amazing. I didn't go near the epicenter, but the damage was everywhere. Many of the buildings that were damaged had been badly built, but others seemed quite solid. We touched base with the Direction de Protection Civile (the Haitian government agency charged with managing the disaster). They had no resources and were beyond swamped. We found some of our staff and began organizing our office again. By this point, I had distributed all of the resources that I had brought and used up a third a tank of gas--their is little fuel available and I knew I could not run out. With no means of communication, I headed back to the Dominican Republic to get more supplies and to get back in touch with my Dominican and Washington offices.

It is a crazy time. We are getting lots of support (www.panamericanrelief.org) both in cash and in supplies. However logistics are such a mess that it is hard to do much. Tomorrow I hope to get our office in Haiti up and running to make it easier to provide supplies. There is so much to be done that the little that we can do seems insignificant. Yet, everyone needs to do their part.

I try to avoid thinking of reconstruction. So little was done after the four hurricanes hit Haiti in 2007. So little was done after the hurricane hit Gonaives in 2005. How will Haiti ever get back on its feet.

 

A new, excellent primer on poverty

A friend of mine, Rahul Deodhar, has just put out an excellent primer on poverty. He explains beautifully the concepts that I touched on in one of my early posts "The New Thinking on Poverty." The basic idea is that people move in and out of poverty based on what Rahul calls "Snakes" (pitfalls and bad habits that pull them down) and ladders (good habits and actions that pull them out). Rahul provides clear illustrations of how people can cycle in and out of poverty and the high cost of being poor. It's a free ebook and well worth the read. You can learn more about Rahul through his website: http://www.rahuldeodhar.com/

Macroeconomics versus antipoverty projects

I am coming to the conclusion that poverty is influenced far more by macro economic policy than by antipoverty projects. I've just read Philip D Osei's 2001 critique of the antipoverty programs in Jamaica. He asserts that although poverty did drop significantly during the implementation of this program, it was more the result of macroeconomic improvements than the specific antipoverty projects. This fits well with the idea that people move into and out of poverty depending on a variety of circumstances as described in my previous post. It also matches the experience of the Dominican Republic when poverty rates doubled as a result of macroeconomic problems (as described in my post on the DR). It also matches the Haiti experience where despite excellent antipoverty projects, bad macroeconomic policy has led to terrible poverty rates (the IMF put out a paper comparing macroeconomic policies of Haiti and the DR entitled "Growth in the Dominican Republic and Haiti: Why has the Grass Been Greener on One Side of Hispaniola". The current global financial mess will probably increase poverty rates far faster than antipoverty projects can protect people.

Therefore, we cannot end poverty in the Caribbean by mobilizing support for antipoverty projects--we could never mobilize enough energy and resources to overcome bad policies.

I'm not sure where to go now with this blog. I'm not ready to give up on the idea of working to end poverty in the Caribbean, I'm just not sure where to go. Any ideas?

"New Thinking on Poverty"

I've just read Paul Shaffer's excellent article “New Thinking on Poverty: Implications for Globalisation and Poverty Reduction Strategies” (Real-world Economics Review, Issue no. 47, 3 October 2008, pp. 192-231). It is a great overview of the current thinking on poverty reduction and clarified a number of issues that have been bugging me. One of the most important ones relates to Friday's post, "How many people line in Poverty in the Caribbean." Shaffer's article points out the there is a significant difference between those who are impoverished--living chronically in extreme poverty--and those who pass cyclically into and out of extreme poverty. He cites a studies showing that the number of people that pass through poverty is much higher than those that are chronically poor. If we switch our focus from a "stock of poverty" (as per my previous entry) to one of poverty flows, the programmatic focus switches from providing assistance to escape poverty to helping prevent people from falling into poverty. I don't think this invalidates the idea of tracking the number of people living in extreme poverty, but means that the programs should focus also on helping people above the line to not fall below it.

Equally interesting in Shaffer's article is a very thorough catalog of the different anti-poverty program and approaches. He lists seven types of capital (p. 200: Economic, Human, Social, Political, Cultural, Coercive, and Natural capital) and then describes how the different anti-poverty programs tackle each one. This is a nice catalog of interventions and best practices.

So what does this mean for our movement to end poverty in the Caribbean?

First of all, I suggest that we keep the "stock of poverty" banner as a useful oversimplification. Although it is certainly true that the list of individuals in extreme poverty today will be different than those in a list compiled in three months, the overall number is a useful motivational tool.

However, we need to keep in mind that people do not graduate out of poverty. Instead, people naturally move into and out of poverty. Therefore, the program must have the twin goals of raising people out of poverty and of keeping them out.

Finally, the Shaffer article includes a useful framework for tracking progress in building the different types of capital and for classifying the different interventions. In subsequent blogs, I will try to look at these different type of interventions.

How many people live in extreme poverty in the Caribbean?

One of the intriguing aspects of working on a movement to end extreme poverty is that we should be able to quantify the progress. It should be possible to come up with a good estimate of the number of people living in extreme poverty in the Caribbean and track changes to it. The World Bank puts out detailed poverty estimates for each country. At least the Dominican Republic has a detailed poverty census that lists how many people are living in houses without paved floors and other indicators. What if we pulled all of this data together, validated with local surveys, and came up with a good estimate for the number of extremely poor people? This could be a banner on our website. We could then try to track changes to this number--estimating the number of people helped in different areas by the different programs and those hurt by changes (storms, bank failures, etc.). We could then show the world the magnitude of the problem, but more importantly the progress that we are making. Does anyone want to help come up with the first estimate?

Poverty in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is a fascinating country, full of amazing contrasts. On one hand, it is a modern country with good roads, a modern skyline (photo Miguel Calzada, Diario Libre). The new Metro train system is almost working and there are an incredible number of modern, luxury hotels and resorts. Yet at the same time, the poverty rate is very high. According to the World Bank's 2006 poverty report, extreme poverty rose from 8.7% of the population in 2001 to 15.7% in 2004, following the banking scandal (table 1.2, page 17). There are clearly opportunities for work in the Dominican Republic--the same report goes on to state that "the low incomes of the poor are a reflection of their low productivity and do not come from barriers to enter the labor market" (translated from the Spanish version of the executive summary, paragraph 23). So why is poverty so bad?

There are some easy over simplifications--the education system if very weak in the DR, the large number of low-skilled Haitians keeps wages low, government investments in the rural areas are quite weak, there are serious problems with political cronyism and corruption.

I would guess that the strong economy since 2004 has improved the situation already, but people still seem to be poorer than they were before the crisis. So what should be done? Is the answer to strengthen the micro-credit work of groups like the Dominican Development Foundation ? Should the focus be more on education like the work being done by Aide et Action and Educa? Would it be possible to measure the impact of the different organizations work against an actual number of poor people?

Poverty in Haiti

One of the biggest questions for ending poverty in the Caribbean is whether or not it could be done in Haiti. I've lived in Haiti for six years and have worked with Haiti for twelve. I love the people and love the country and it is constantly breaking my heart. 2008 was a rough year. Although things had started off well, the country fell apart first with the riots in March that led to the collapse of the Alexis government, the debacle over the naming of the new Prime Minister, the four storms that devastated the country, and now the collapse of the school in Petionville. Things continually seem to go wrong for Haiti. Would it be possible to end extreme poverty in Haiti?

Despite all of these problems, there is some progress being made and a lot of good work is being done. My organization has been working with the rural poor for twenty five years. We've helped plant millions of trees, repaired countless kilometers of roads, trained numerous farmers, and helped the government to establish their disaster response strategy (despite the very high level of flooding, the number of deaths this year was dramatically less than in 2004!). There are other great organizations like Fonkoze, CARE, ORE. and World Vision to name just a few.

The government is also trying hard. We work closely with the national offices for disaster preparedness and for border development as well as with the parliament. There are a lot of people within the government that are trying hard to make the country work.

Yet the situation in Haiti is not improving. In a talk that Anne Hastings of Fonkoze gave in September, she stated that half of all Haitians live in extreme poverty (the citation comes from a nice presentation that you can download). What would it take to pull these 4.3 million people up to poverty? Given the weak physical and governmental infrastructure, it is possible?

Conversely, if Haiti is not brought out of extreme poverty, what happens to all the Haitians that continue to flee Haiti in search of a better life? How could extreme poverty be ended in the Dominican Republic when thousands of Haitians continue to move to the DR in search of a better life?

It seems that one of the challenges of this movement will be to figure out how to balance Haiti's extremely high needs with the easier challenges of reducing poverty in the rest of the Caribbean. What do you think? How could we do this?

Would it be possible to end poverty in the Caribbean?

A few months ago, I read Dr. Sach's book, The End of Poverty. Whereas, I was quite taken by the beauty of the idea that the world has enough resources to end extreme poverty, I could never imagine it succeeding on a global scale. I've worked in international development for over 20 years, much of that spent in Africa and Haiti. Although I agree with Dr. Sach's that the assistance has always been extremely limited, I don't agree that money alone could solve the problem.

But what if we didn't focus on the whole world, but just the Caribbean? Poverty is a serious problem--extremely so for Haiti, but a problem for every country. However, the region itself isn't poor. There is a lot of money here in the Caribbean, lots of people love the region, and there are lots of great people and great organizations working towards eliminating poverty.

What would happen if we all got together and fought for this goal? Could we generate enough noise to attract enough people, resources, and political will to eliminate extreme poverty from this corner of the world?

Postscript:
I started this blog as to document my investigation into this question. Although I later decided that ending poverty (versus alleviating poverty) was not possible, I found that I liked blogging and decided to keep going with this blog. I changed the focus from just ending poverty in the Caribbean to an investigation of development issues in general. Please let me know what you think.