By Amy Lieber­man, World Pol­i­tics Review

Though for­eign aid to earthquake-stricken Haiti is reach­ing the gov­ern­ment at a slug­gish rate, waves of assis­tance to inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions work­ing there con­tinue to flow. The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has received just $90 mil­lion of the $5.3 bil­lion promised by the March U.N. donor con­fer­ence for the first 18 months post-earthquake, accord­ing to Alice Blanchet, spe­cial adviser to Haiti’s Prime Min­is­ter Jean-Max Bellerive.

By con­trast, Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders has received dona­tions of $112 mil­lion fol­low­ing the quake, while the Red Cross has brought in $468 mil­lion. Oxfam Inter­na­tional, which is pro­vid­ing aid to 440,000 peo­ple, or 20 per­cent of the earthquake-affected pop­u­la­tion, is work­ing with a post-earthquake bud­get of $90 million.

With the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment a reg­u­lar on Trans­parency International’s list of “Most Cor­rupt” coun­tries, the aid orga­ni­za­tions are deemed best-equipped to han­dle money and enable recov­ery. But a con­tin­ued reliance on them could place Haiti on an unsus­tain­able path — one that cir­cum­vents the bro­ken national gov­ern­ment and excludes the Hait­ian peo­ple from rebuild­ing their own country.

The Jan. 12 earth­quake lev­eled 60 per­cent of Hait­ian gov­ern­ment infra­struc­ture and killed 20 per­cent of its top civil ser­vants. But instead of jump­start­ing an influx of direct aid to a Hait­ian gov­ern­ment des­per­ate to rebuild, the destruc­tion resulted in human­i­tar­ian aid orga­ni­za­tions receiv­ing an upsurge in fund­ing from across the world.

Accord­ing to Julie Schin­dal, a media offi­cer for Oxfam Inter­na­tional in Haiti, dona­tions jumped in the after­math of the earth­quake. But Schin­dal says that even before Jan. 12, “the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment still did not pro­vide a lot of very basic ser­vices, and inter­na­tional aid as a result has long bypassed the government’s capacity.”

Melinda Miles, founder of the Haitian-based human­i­tar­ian non-governmental group Kon­pay, agreed that the gov­ern­ment has not ade­quately pro­vided for Hait­ian earth­quake sur­vivors. Yet Miles, who has lived in Haiti for 15 years, said the gov­ern­ment has taken own­er­ship over some aspects of the response effort, cit­ing its National Action Plan for Recon­struc­tion and Devel­op­ment. The plan, widely crit­i­cized as vague, has been for the most part ignored, but Miles insists that there are risks involved with dis­count­ing the Haitians’ own vision for development.

“There are more NGOs than ever before with even more bud­gets, and inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions cre­at­ing their own recon­struc­tion plans,” she said. “They don’t have native staff. Some don’t have a long his­tory of work­ing in Haiti. And they aren’t fol­low­ing the plans cre­ated by the Hait­ian government.”

She added that the sit­u­a­tion threat­ens to under­mine already weak coor­di­na­tion at the civil soci­ety and gov­ern­ment levels.

The recently estab­lished Interim Haiti Recov­ery Com­mis­sion (IHRC), chaired by U.N. Spe­cial Envoy to Haiti Bill Clin­ton and Prime Min­is­ter Bel­lerive, has been flagged as the best option for coor­di­nat­ing civil soci­ety efforts, while also ensur­ing gov­ern­ment account­abil­ity. The IHRC will approve indi­vid­ual aid projects in Haiti and will also track for­eign com­mit­ments. But the com­mis­sion has mate­ri­al­ized slowly. It approved its first two government-led recon­struc­tion projects in June, but still lacks a per­ma­nent exec­u­tive leadership.

A June report on Haiti by the U.S. Sen­ate Com­mit­tee on For­eign Rela­tions high­lighted the IHRC’s poten­tial in a coun­try where recon­struc­tion has largely stalled, due in part to a lack of vis­i­ble gov­ern­ment lead­er­ship. The find­ings could result in the diver­sion of the U.S. government’s pend­ing con­tri­bu­tion of $2 bil­lion — slated for immi­nent approval and allo­ca­tion over the next two years — away from the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment “that is way beyond capac­ity,” a com­mit­tee offi­cial said in a phone interview.

“We need to fig­ure out who is best in place to han­dle this money, and be less con­cerned about if it is the gov­ern­ment or not who can get this work done,” the offi­cial con­tin­ued. “The prob­lem is that there is a lot of cor­rup­tion and account­abil­ity that has yet to be resolved. We want to empower the gov­ern­ment and also spend the money in an effec­tive way, but the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has been very weak tra­di­tion­ally and we are see­ing that man­i­fested today.”

In a New York Times op-ed that appeared on the six-month anniver­sary of the earth­quake, Clin­ton and Bel­lerive wrote that the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has “done every­thing it’s been asked to do by inter­na­tional donors to inspire con­fi­dence, main­tain trans­parency and ensure that not one sin­gle cent is lost to corruption.”

Blanchet, Bellerive’s spe­cial adviser, fur­ther noted that the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment is not directly han­dling recon­struc­tion aid: The World Bank is over­see­ing the government-bound Haiti Recon­struc­tion Fund, and is jointly mon­i­tor­ing the money with the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank and the U.N. Devel­op­ment Group.

Still, the unprece­dented amount of fund­ing from indi­vid­u­als and foun­da­tions has been an “excep­tional fac­tor” in the Haiti emer­gency relief process, says Stephanie Bunker, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions offi­cer of the United Nations Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian and Affairs (OCHA).

Pri­vate indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions com­mit­ted 37 per­cent of OCHA’s Hait­ian emer­gency flash appeal of $1.5 bil­lion. To date, $907 mil­lion has been received and allo­cated to U.N. agen­cies work­ing directly with the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment as well as with large-scale inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions. That fund­ing, sep­a­rate from the money coun­tries have oth­er­wise pledged through the U.N., gives donors the free­dom to ear­mark dif­fer­ent projects they want their money to go toward — a secure choice in their eyes, but one that could deprive the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment of auton­omy in mak­ing those choices.

Mean­while, as inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions con­tinue to estab­lish their pres­ence and promi­nence in Haiti, there is a risk that Haitians will become increas­ingly depen­dent on their human­i­tar­ian ser­vices, micro-financing and cash-for-work pro­grams as alter­na­tives to the lack of basic resources and per­ma­nent jobs available.

Just six months after the quake that killed 230,000 and injured more than 300,000 peo­ple, Haitians need all the help they can get, regard­less of where it comes from. But as cur­rently con­sti­tuted, for­eign assis­tance could come with a sov­er­eignty set­back attached, mark­ing a steep — if per­haps unavoid­able — price for plac­ing Haiti on a sta­ble recon­struc­tion path.

Amy Lieber­man is a free­lance jour­nal­ist based in New York City. Her report­ing on sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and human rights has appeared in IRIN, Women’s eNews, Pol­icy Inno­va­tions and Devex.com, among other publications.

Photo: A Hait­ian earth­quake sur­vivor leaves a local Red Cross dis­tri­b­u­tion site (U.S. Navy photo by Joshua Lee Kelsey).

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/6089/haiti-relief-aid-comes-with-sovereignty-setback-attached