Business
Haiti update: Pace of reconstruction slow
Seeking US$79.6 million, a national food program sought to provide a hot meal to 2.2 million students in 6,000 schools in Port-au-Prince and the countryside. In the end, the meals only reached half that number because only US$44 million was raised, said Myrta Kaulard, Haiti director of the World Food Program and one of the architects of the proposal.
Why did the Haiti Reconstruction Fund not contribute to the program? I cannot really tell you,” said Kaulard, WFP’s Haiti director since 2008. “Perhaps there were other priorities.”
Clinton thought the program significant enough last year to tour the dusty grounds of a school that had received the meals. But even with his star power, the endorsement did little to bring donors to cough up money.
Another major holdup has been the dilemma of land ownership. The country’s land registry is in disarray, and title disputes are sometimes settled with guns or bribes.
Plans to build a US$200 million wastewater treatment plant north of Port-au-Prince nearly collapsed last year when a powerful businessman claimed he owned a parcel of land on which the Spanish government and Inter-American Development Bank were building. The dispute was solved only after eight senior diplomats and heads of development groups appealed to then-Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. The plant is scheduled to open in 2015.
Clinton said that though the going is slow, reconstruction is now gaining momentum.
“I think that there’s a real chance that in five years they’ll be far better off than they were before the earthquake,” he said.
Carpenter Kesnel Joselus hopes that’s true. On a mountainside above Port-au-Prince, the US$500-million school project is coming to life. Joselus is laying the foundation for a 14-classroom school that will spare children a two-hour hike and allow their parents to harvest crops instead.
“If there are more educated children here,” Joselus said, “the community will be able to make progress.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
