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Haiti update: Pace of reconstruction slow
“Martelly hasn’t sent the free buses here,” said Pierre. “We have to carry the children in the mud.”
The 10 biggest internationally funded projects approved by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), are ambitious and complicated. They involve multiple partners, require bids for contracts and address a range of needs from job creation and health to energy, sanitation and education. It will take years for them to reach completion.
“Reconstruction is not the same thing as humanitarian work; humanitarian work has to be done quickly,” said Diego Osorio, of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund, which helped finance IHRC-approved projects. “Reconstruction projects require planning, and there are not going to be visible accomplishments on a day-to-day basis.”
Yet even the planning has suffered. The recovery commission co-chaired by Clinton was set up to assure foreign donors that their money wouldn’t go wasted. The panel helped coordinate multi-million projects in a relatively transparent fashion and avoid duplication.
But in October the commission’s 18-month mandate ended, halting work on future projects, because opposition lawmakers took no action on a request by Martelly to renew the mandate for another 12 months.
So far, the biggest completed project is a US$30 million state-of-the-art university in northern Haiti built by the Dominicans. On Thursday, the day of the quake anniversary, Martelly and President Leonel Fernandez of the neighboring Dominican Republic are scheduled to inaugurate the campus, complete with 72 classrooms, science and computer labs and a library for as many as 10,000 students.
Another project under way is the United States’ most ambitious. Budgeted at US$224 million, the Caracol industrial park is taking shape as bulldozers clear a field for an industrial park run by South Korean garment manufacturer Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. The project is expected to bring 65,000 jobs to a remote area outside Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haitien, with the first batch of T-shirts scheduled for production by September.
But the majority of the projects have been delayed by an array of problems ranging from an inability to secure funding to land disputes.
