Don’t Blame Haiti for Failed Aid
Abbey Gardner and Jéhane Sedky
Co-Directors, Science of Implementation Initiative
NEW YORK, 12 July 2021 — Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse two weeks ago, the world’s attention has turned to Haiti. The media has been filled with news analyses and opinion pieces outlining what Haiti does or does not need from donor nations during this crisis. The overwhelming take-away is that aid to Haiti has never worked in the past, and thus cannot be fixed.
We have spent the past twelve years tracking and analyzing foreign aid to Haiti, beginning in 2009 while at the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti working for President Clinton and Harvard University’s Paul Farmer. It is our team’s data that is used and quoted in reference to the $13 billion pledged to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. We feel it is important to set the record straight based on the facts regarding that aid, and hope that in doing so we will correct a number of dangerous myths and false narratives:
Myth #1: There is clarity about how much of the $13 billion promised to Haiti was actually spent and where it went.
Fact: The truth is that no one knows how much of the $13 billion was paid out. We tracked these funds from 2010-2012 during which time $6.4 billion was disbursed. After our UN office sunsetted, no other entity tracked disbursements. When we reconvened in 2020 to do a 10 year final spending report with the support of the UN in Haiti, most donors did not respond to our request for data. Donor aid pledges following crises are rarely tracked over time and recipient countries often have no way of knowing how much aid has actually been spent, let alone where it has gone.
Myth #2: $13 billion dollars was more than sufficient funding to address the destruction in Haiti caused by the earthquake.
Fact: The needs assessment that was created in the weeks following the earthquake calling for $11.5 billion for recovery efforts was heavily influenced by donor institutions and was never an accurate assessment of what was needed to rebuild after the complete destruction of every major piece of infrastructure in Haiti’s capital city and beyond. In comparison, relief and recovery efforts to rebuild New Orleans (with one third of Port-au-Prince’s population) after Hurricane Katrina are estimated at $120 billion.
Myth #3: Haitian leadership mismanaged or embezzled $13 billion.
Fact: The Haitian authorities could not have mismanaged or embezzled $13 billion because less than 10% of the funds disbursed were channeled through Haitian institutions. Ninety nine percent of the humanitarian aid and 90% of the recovery aid that our UN office tracked went directly to international non-profits or consultants and bypassed Haitian organizations and the Haitian government.
Myth #4: It is impossible to work with the Haitian government and build world class public institutions.
Fact: Our colleagues at Harvard University and the NGO, Partners In Health (PIH), have shown that it is indeed possible to do so. In the year following the earthquake, at the request of and in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, PIH built a 300 bed teaching hospital — Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais – that has provided top quality care to hundreds of thousands of Haitians, trained the next generation of physicians and health care workers and improved the economy in the area where the hospital is based in Haiti’s central plateau. In 2020, the hospital was accredited by the US Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. This accreditation was the first of its kind in Haiti and shows that the teaching hospital meets the same exacting global standards of its US counterparts. And it was completed for $25 million (by comparison, building a teaching hospital in the US today would cost on the order of $500 million.)
Myth #5: The only effective way to tackle poverty and disease in Haiti is to channel funds through international institutions.
Fact: While working at the UN, our team conducted an analysis of the most effective use of foreign aid to reduce poverty and disease in the poorest settings. Contrary to popular belief, the countries that made the most progress toward human development (as measured by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Harvard University’s Social Progress Index) were the ones with the highest percentage of their foreign aid channeled through their national government’s institutions, such as the treasury and various ministries and agencies. Those countries with higher percentages of their development aid going to international NGOs and private sector entities made measurably less progress toward the MDGs.
There is a way to provide aid to Haiti and other impoverished countries that can have a positive impact on poverty and disease. It requires a rethinking and revamping of aid deployment using an approach that is based on evidence, which our Harvard colleagues have termed “the science of implementation.” The science of implementation requires a mindset that donor nations and their aid apparatuses are not there to provide the answers and do the work themselves, but rather that they are there to accompany their Haitian partners as they build durable public institutions that serve their populations, especially the poorest. We can see from the weaknesses of Haiti’s public sector ten years after the earthquake that the donors have not done their job. The roadmap for getting aid right based on decade old agreements between donor and recipient nations exists; it is long past time to start using it.
About the Science of Implementation Initiative:
The Science of Implementation Initiative (SII) was established by Dr. Paul Farmer to build upon the work of his team at the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti (2009-2012) and the United Nations Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Community Based Health and Aid Delivery (2013-2019). SII gathers data, conducts research, tracks funding, and provides analysis with the goal of making official development assistance more effective, equitable, transparent, and accountable from the perspective of partner countries. SII is supported by private foundation grants.
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