Basic Needs in Haiti: Why They Are Still a Challenge

A recent commenter on our blog asked me why so few people in Haiti have the basics they need (food, shelter, clean water, etc.) six months into the earthquake response.

The situation in Haiti is truly difficult. Early on, there seemed to be countless problems with logistics, beginning with getting aid materials into a country with poor and very damaged infrastructure. Many nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations lost a lot of their experienced staff in the earthquake. The U.N. agency organizing the response was not the most experienced, the damage was terrible, and the trauma from so many deaths and grave injuries clearly affected everyone.

However, now months into the quake response, the reasons for lack of coherent, efficient response are different.

1. The Haitian government's lack of vision, coherence, and understanding
   
   The Haitian government inexplicably decided not to distribute food aid beyond March, although there were hundreds of thousands of people who needed it. They decided to do cash-for-work or food-for-work programs, which in themselves are not bad programs by any means, but they were offered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.N. World Food Program to only 75,000 people (heads of households). There are more than 500,000 people in the countryside and over 2,300,000 people total in need of support. If you use the standard marker of five people per household, the World Food Program only reaches 375,000 people, when over 2,300,000 need some help in food aid. So the official response is terribly inadequate.
   
   UUSC's response to this has been to provide temporary work to displaced people in the countryside through three peasant organizations in different parts of Haiti where there are large concentrations of internally displaced. UUSC has also supported market women in recapitalizing in Port-au-Prince through two Haitian organizations working in the marginal slum neighborhoods where there has been far less support to earthquake survivors.
   
   
2. The lack of trust and support in the Haitian organizations
   
   Many of the international organizations have bypassed the highly organized Haitian community structures and run their own distribution systems without understanding the culture or the makeup of the communities they work with. Haitian civil society is highly organized. Even a poor community has a parent-teacher association or a neighborhood organization. These groups would have made good distribution networks for aid since there is some accountability. Instead aid groups actually threw food off trucks, set up distribution points far away from camps, etc. — or simply ignored existing Haitian organization.
   
   UUSC's response has been to research and work through Haitian organizations, thereby benefiting from their experience and insights. We have found that the Haitian organizations have proved to be exceptional, creating innovative ways of responding to the crisis with the few resources they have available to them.
   
   
3. Inability to access goods
   
   A lot of donated goods and food is still locked up in the warehouses and is hard to access either because of bureaucracy or corruption. Although the world has given so generously, goods and food are still on shelves while people go hungry.
   
   UUSC has given money to peasant organizations and community organizations to buy food from Haitian farmers for local distribution. All the funds we gave for emergency food distribution were spent locally in Haiti, buying Haitian food.

I cannot emphasize enough how well most Haitian organizations have responded to the crisis with far fewer resources than the international organizations. We are working very closely with nine Haitian organizations to date.