The InterDependent

The two-year anniversary of an earthquake that devastated Haiti passed solemnly on the island nation this weekend. Haiti has seen incredible progress in the last two years, under trying conditions. But the challenges ahead are equally daunting. In a state of the Union address on January 9, Michel Martelly, beseeched Haitians to come together and change. “The Haiti that was the sum of internal strife, murder, kidnapping, embargo, anarchy, chaos, environmental destruction, selfishness, greed: This is Haiti, it is necessary that it changes!” he told parliamentarians. “It is this quest for a better Haiti for her children, that today we must mold.”

UN Photo/Logan Abassi

A boy jump ropes at a camp for persons displaced by the January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. April, 2011.

Looking in from outside, it would be easy to critique the recovery—it has gone too slowly and not far enough to relieve all the human suffering that the earthquake begot. Roughly half a million Haitians—out of a population of just 10 million—are still living in tent camps. There are still 200 new cases of cholera every day. Only half of the debris has been cleared from roads and neighborhoods. Elections were held, but they were flawed and violent. It took six months for the newly elected president’s appointed prime minister to win the parliament’s approval and form a government. Haiti is still the poorest country in the Western hemisphere by leaps and bounds. And after pledging more than $5 billion in aid, international donors stalled for months in actually handing out the cash. To this day, only $3.5 billion has been received, and even less has been spent.

Yet stark as the numbers may be, there’s another way of looking at them: in flux. Since the earthquake hit, UN agencies and the United States State Department insisted in a conference call on Friday, incredible progress has been made. The number of people living in tent camps is down by two-thirds, from 1.5 million at its peak. Cholera infections are also decreasing thanks to work in the health and sanitation sectors. And 75 percent of the children still displaced are going to school—more than the national average. The debris that has been cleared is indeed only half—but it’s also five million cubic meters, much of it cleared from areas that heavy machinery couldn’t reach. Yes, the elections that brought to power President Martelly were imperfect. But this is also the first time in 25 years, according to the U.S. State Department, that Haiti will have all three of its branches of government in office.

“It was a year of transitions,” said Rebeca Grynspan, UN Under-Secretary-General and associate administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP).

The progress is most evident politically. When Haiti elected a new president, it marked the first time in that country’s history that one democratic regime transferred power peacefully to a member of the opposition, notes Eileen Wickstrom Smith, deputy coordinator for assistance in the Office of the Haiti Special Coordinator at the State Department. The new president, a former pop music star, has his hands full, and there have been clear growing pains. But on January 9, Martelly admitted as much, lamenting mistakes made in the early days of his term. Smith says that the international community has seen positive signs, such as a program to build shelters for the displaced. The new president is serious about speeding up recovery.

The humanitarian situation is also improving, if slowly. When UN resident coordinator Nigel Fisher addressed journalists in November, he reported that 650 schools have been rebuilt and more than one million children attending were receiving a midday meal. Some houses have also been rebuilt, and the international community is planning to build more new, temporary shelters in the coming year.

Donors such as UNDP are now focusing their efforts on making those gains sustainable, in part by helping get Haitians back to work. “We have created 300,000 temporary jobs since the earthquake” in sectors such as construction and garbage collection, said Grynson. “Forty percent of these jobs have gone to women…it’s the largest job creation program we have in the world.”

More investment may also be on the way. An industrial park is under construction and will create at least 20,000 jobs and as many as 60,000, says Beth Hogan, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Haiti Task Team.

Of course, Haiti still has a long way to go. And donors are taking stock of how their own assistance has performed. When the relief operations began, the aid was infamously poorly coordinated, not least because of the flood of NGOs and other organizations rushing in, many of whom had little experience in Haiti. “There was a coordination challenge,” recalls Vincent Cochetel, regional representative for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “You had a lot of private organizations who [sic] came to Haiti and refused any form of cooperation with the Haitian authorities.”

Another lesson, according to Grynspan, was that the recovery should have begun long ago to give Haitians confidence in aid efforts—and help them get working again. “Usually we think about this as a linear process: first humanitarian [assistance], then recovery, then development. Haiti showed us that we have to be ready to do the humanitarian first, but [also] start with recovery efforts from the beginning.”

Critics also point out that many of the humanitarian gains boasted by the aid community may appear misleadingly hopeful. The International Crisis Group’s Mark Schneider lamented in the Miami Herald, for example, that most of those who have left the tent camps have done so of their own accord, not because of international or government help.

Another immediate challenge awaits the country, says Dr. Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan-American Health Organization. Haiti’s cholera outbreak—one of the largest in history—grinds on. “Despite intensified efforts, we continue to encounter 200 new cholera cases a day in Haiti and this number will certainly go up in rainy season.”

The hope for 2012 is that the momentum that has been gained over the last 12 months can continue—and even accelerate. To be sure, it can’t come quickly enough.