Politics
Haiti: Mixed record for President Michel Martelly after 1 year in office
Martelly condemned evictions, but they happened anyway. Yet Jean-Baptiste still holds out hope for the candidate who promised change. She offered this unsolicited message to the president: “I hope he can bring down the price of tap-taps,” the brightly colored pickups that transport people for about 40 cents.
The signature project of the Martelly administration has been the school program that aims to double the number of children in school. His plan to fund it through a tax on incoming international phone calls and wire transfers upset Haitians abroad who use such services. The US$22 million collected is on hold with the Central Bank until Parliament approves its release. The government paid for this year’s tuition by taking money from other parts of the budget, said Miloody Vincent, director of the education ministry’s press bureau.
Vincent acknowledges that the quality of the education may not have improved yet. “The most important thing is to put the kids in school,” he said. “We’re working later to improve the quality of the education.”
There are no independent studies of the program so far, but education specialist Mohamed Fall of UNICEF said he believed at least 70 percent of the targeted children had received their aid.
While the government of Haiti has still not completely funded the schools, the aid is a significant sum for many in Haiti, where about half the children didn’t go to school before the quake.
Take Dania Nerius, the 38-year-old mother of four children, ages 6 to 17. Her husband lost his right leg in the earthquake, and his job as a mechanic. They nearly had to pull their children from the school. But the tuition program helped her save US$360 a year, a lot in a country where most get by on US$2 a day, so she can pay rent and invest money in her business as a roadside peddler of minutes for a cellphone company.
“That helped me,” Nerius said one afternoon, “because the money would’ve otherwise come out of my pocket.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
