Rebuilding Haiti - obstacles and options

As many as one million people are still without a proper roof over their heads almost one year after a deadly quake struck Haiti. Journalists and VIPs will be arriving en masse over the next weeks to make their assessments and publish their opinions. They will see hundreds of thousands still under tarpaulins and makeshift shelters and wonder why all the money that has been raised - literally billions - has not been able to achieve more. It is a valid question, easy to ask but complex to answer.


Challenges to finding real shelter solutions have been many and are mostly linked to:

• the fact that shelter is not just about structures, it encompasses important legal, economic and social aspects that must also be taken into consideration
• the urgent priority and demands to continue delivering life-sustaining emergency services, including shelter, before proper reconstruction can start
• land tenure and informal system of property rights (it is said that some 80% of Haiti's property is based on verbal contracts)
• even when tenure issues are resolved the availability of adequate parcels of land is rare
• sourcing sites to rebuild that are considered appropriate by the community especially in terms of access to local economy, schools and healthcare (the vast majority understandably do not want to move and prefer to stay in or around their destroyed homes - and forcible displacement to 'new' shelters is clearly not an option for humanitarian organizations)
• the metropolitan sized task of rapidly removing rubble created from the destruction of an estimated 200'000 homes and buildings has been simply beyond the means of national and international agencies
• the dilemma faced by aid agencies who despite being flexible are understandably reluctant to rebuild vulnerability i.e. returning people to known vulnerable areas (flood plains, seismic zones etc.) in structures that are are not resistant to hurricanes / earthquakes etc.

The video below, just released, attempts to provide some additional background to the shelter challenges and options.

Haiti, is yet another context which demonstrates, if need be, the limitations of aid. The generous billions donated by ordinary people and communities around the world have been, and will continue to be critical in providing life-saving care and support, restoring livelihoods and delivering numerous other humanitarian services to the people of Haiti. The shelter component however is a challenge of such enormous magnitude that it necessitates long-term and well-financed developmental solutions driven by serious political will, both nationally and internationally. 

The destruction wrought upon Haiti, and especially its capital Port-au-Prince, has left unprecedented challenges for the humanitarian, development and political communities. An entire capital city and all the basic services and infrastructure that its citizens expect and deserve, needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch - and to a standard that will resist future threats. This cannot happen overnight.

One year on, we cannot lose sight of the huge amount that has been achieved but we also know only too well all that remains to be done. In addition to the shelter challenges listed above, the seriously complicating factors of political turmoil, cholera outbreaks, floods and hurricanes have all conspired to stall Haiti's much-needed progress, but nevertheless progressed it has. The serious business of humanitarian aid will continue, and continue for the long haul. Patience and perseverance will be needed as ever. Indeed, the people of Haiti know this more than any of us - already from the first weeks the phrase I most recall was: C'est l'heure de la patience!

/PC

The Ship is Sinking

Transatlantically yours part 2 - leaving New York

I am winding up a week or so of hectic meeting and greeting Stateside. Yesterday, I had my first visit to the UN headquarters on the banks of the east river. My guide, a veteran of the aid world and our head man in New York, regaled me with tales from the diplomatic frontlines. The president of the UN General Assembly had just declared starkly that "the ship is sinking" because of the financial crisis. There is a palpable feeling here that Europeans are not fully awake to the depth and danger that lies ahead on a global scale.

The latest assessments, pulling together data from a number of sources including the authoritative World Bank, estimate that we now have an incredible three billion people living in poverty. That's more or less half the world's population and it has more than doubled in recent years. The current crisis was of course preceded by a sudden soaring of food and fuel prices, to the extent that people rioted and died in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the UN and a man with an acute understanding of the financial world, has called for a major international conference this coming June in order to have a global approach to minimize the humanitarian consequences that we know are certainly happening and will only escalate. World leaders like Moon are worried that the reality of domestic economic concerns will lead to a blinkered neglect of the big picture. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank is echoing similar concerns fearing that as developed countries focus on stimulus packages for their own economies and withdraw capital from foreign markets they may neglect to understand that developing countries also need to be protected so that we can work towards a complete global recovery.

Zoellick's World Bank report warns that 129 developing countries are facing an investment shortfall of 270 to 700 billion U.S. dollars this year and international institutions alone can not fill the gap. "This global crisis needs a global solution and preventing an economic catastrophe in developing countries is important for global efforts to overcome this crisis," he said. The fundamental lessons may be slowly learned as economists now believe that economic catastrophe may have yet to reach the developing world since the waves of the crisis have not entirely hit ashore from where they were generated. One to watch in this regard, among several vulnerable economies, is Ukraine.

The UN, in my opinion, is best placed to lead and partner on a global solution - especially in humanitarian terms - to the current crisis. Their June conference on the East River in New York will be a key moment in defining whether or not the community of states -- many of whom are genuinely reeling from financial woes at home -- can pull together for a global good. In the halls of the UN hq I took note of a quote from one of the more famous UN Secretary Generals, Dag Hammarskjold, who died tragically in a plane crash before he could complete his work. The quote resonates as much today as it did when he first uttered it at the dawn of the sixties: "Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves." If Hammarskjold's committment and faith in UN institutions holds true in June maybe, just maybe, with all hands on deck, we can stop this ship from sinking.

(written in a real rush - plane boarding - in JFK NY).

/PC