Amid the maze of ruins that is now Port-au-Prince, two office workers arrive at their desks each morning to face a mammoth task: keep track of the thousands of development-aid groups that have recently rooted themselves in the country.
Haiti was already home to the highest number of non-government aid groups per capita in the world before January’s earthquake. The catastrophe pushed the number further skyward: Planeloads of new aid personnel touch down daily carrying teams of volunteers, including the requisite missionaries wearing specially screened fluorescent T-shirts in impossible-to-miss yellows and greens.
While some stay in Port-au-Prince, others fan out across the country to destinations of their choosing – to ruined churches, orphanages and various town sites – following aid plans they drew out at home in California, Massachusetts and New York.
Current estimates place the number of groups providing some form of development-related aid in the island nation at between 8,000 and 10,000.
Experts have to estimate that figure because there is no complete record of how many aid groups are in Haiti, or who there is doing what.
In the initial panic to pull the collapsed country out of the emergency state that claimed several hundred thousand lives, efforts to co-ordinate the disparate organizations that rushed to join the international move to rebuild were overwhelmed. Many groups clamouring to reach needy Haitians began circumventing both government officials and the bureaucratic United Nations “cluster” system designed to manage the flow of aid. The guerrilla trend continues – many groups prefer to reach out independently to the population regardless of whether their provisions overlap with those of other sanctioned groups.
While the cowboy-style aid is well-intentioned, paired with the broader deluge of aid providers, it’s creating a tidal effect that is particularly acute in regions outside Port-au-Prince. Beyond the reach of the two-person NGO co-ordination office, bewildered local government officials have been struggling to impress order on the influx of charity in an effort to optimize its impact on their communities.
If they don’t, leaders fear aid groups will pull out without having done much more than build temporary latrines and fix orphanages.
“There is a tendency not to work with the government because they say it’s corrupt … they’re going straight to the people,” said Frantz Magellan Pierre-Louis, a spokesman for the mayor of Jacmel. “But they don’t know the city as well as the mayor’s office. They don’t know every corner of town.”
Frantz Magellan Pierre-Louis, a spokesperson for the Mayor of Jacmel, during an interview outside the temporary City Hall in Jacmel, Haiti.
In an effort to keep track of the NGO projects in Jacmel, Mr. Pierre-Louis recently began compelling each group to attend one-on-one weekly update meetings. “We need better co-ordination to filter aid … but we don’t have the structures in place,” he said.
No one here does – not the massive United Nations apparatus in Port-au-Prince or the tiny, two-person NGO co-ordination office, a joint initiative between U.S.-based InterAction and the International Council of Volunteer Agencies, funded by USAID.
But with the emergency phase of the disaster now over, donor worries are mounting over the efficacy of the $2-billion in civil society dollars that have been channelled toward rebuilding Haiti. So is the in-country awareness among independent aid organizations – none of whom are legally compelled to co-ordinate with each other – that maintaining a spot on the international non-government aid radar and continuing to attract public donations will require a renewed commitment to spending efficiency.
In response to this, a host of efforts aimed at helping to corral the ongoing stampede of aid efforts in Haiti – and help organizations maximize their impact on the ground – are taking root.
One of the most promising is led by Tiffany Keenan, a Canadian-born medical doctor who set up a medical clinic in northern Haiti several years ago. Having expanded southward, she found herself co-ordinating all aid groups entering Jacmel via its tiny airport in the aftermath of the earthquake. In that role, she developed an understanding of how critical effective co-ordination – or lack of it – can be to the provision of aid.
