Because it’s remarkable bordering on absurd, let’s take a minute to walk through the past two months in Haitian democracy. On November 28th, 18 candidates lined up and the Haitian people were asked to choose who would succeed Mr. Preval as the country’s president. According to the Haitian electoral process, in order to win outright, one of the candidates would have had to win a majority vote, which – with that spread – was never going to happen. So, the top two vote-earning candidates were announced and would go on to a run-off election on January 16.

When the results of the first round were announced on Dec 7, the process suffered its first set-back (second if we’re including all the fraud on Nov 28, but that’s details, details). Mirlande Manigat, former first lady, won the plurality with 31% and so advanced to the runoff, which apparently no one was especially offended by. In second, Mr. Preval’s party’s candidate and son-in-law, Jude Celestin, provoked a significantly more heated reaction: Unité – Preval’s party – is unpopular these days, mostly because it has demonstrated little productivity in the twelve months since the earthquake and represents the status quo of a depressed economy, widespread sickness and abject poverty. Not an especially strong platform for Celestin to run on, and yet he found himself in the run-off as the second-most successful candidate. Michelle Martelly, a popular Haitian musician known for cross-dressing and exposing himself on stage, came in third by a 1% margin. This is the man most Haitians say they prefer to see in the runoff with Manigat. Take a leap of faith and just believe me on this.

In response to outrage about Celestin beating out Martelly, the OAS conducted a third-party evaluation of the results, somehow without actually doing a recount (I don’t portend to have all the answers. This makes as little sense to you as it does to me). Their recommendation was sent in something of a white paper to Mr. Preval last week and, in paraphrase: a change of position in the ranking of the second and third candidates in the list published during the preliminary results should be considered. In effect, they recommended that Preval pull his candidate from the race. Who wants to take the over-under on the odds of this working out (it’s a binary betting system…)?

The case now lies in the hands of the CEP – the Provisional Electoral Council (also appointed by Mr. Preval) – who will announce the path forward early next week.

Needless to say, the runoff election date – January 16 – came and went this weekend, and Haitians are no closer to a new regime. Meanwhile, Mr. Preval has announced he won’t abdicate on Feb 7, which he’s constitutionally required to do but admittedly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when there’s no successor. And, it gets better…

January 16 wasn’t a total wash. While Haiti didn’t get any closer to identifying the new head of state, it did welcome back an old favorite: Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier who ruled Haiti from 1971-86 as more of a playboy, profligate, and despot than as a man in any way concerned about Haitian development.. although- notably – he was a step up from his father’s (“Papa Doc”) legitimate insanity. Focus on the little victories.

So, Baby Doc showed up at the International Airport in Port-au-Prince on Sunday and told reporters that he’s come back after 25 years of exile in France to help his country through this especially difficult time. Whatever his actual reasons were for returning (perhaps penury after a divorce settlement left him posting employment ads in a local newspaper), it’s now clear that the Haitian government is taking the opportunity to question him and decide whether to move toward a trial that seeks justice for Baby Doc’s brutal and corrupt regime. Really? One could argue that there are a few too many crises in Haiti right now, and pursuing a man for crimes committed over 25 years ago – no matter how egregious – isn’t really on what we’ll call “the critical path”. Counterpoint: some justice is better than no justice at all. Maybe, but I’m not convinced.

There’s no more closure around the Baby Doc drama than about the next steps of the electoral process, but one thing’s for sure – there’s a lot of irony flying around here. Out of the ruins of the old Duvalier torture prison, Fort Dimanche, now abandoned, grew a slum. Its residents called it Village Demokrasi. Democracy Village.

Interview Episode Here

Nearly one year after the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti, aid organizations and donors find progress continuously slow, if at all.  The complexity of Haiti’s problems has humbled the international aid apparatus and sobered expectations for near-term progress. Having experienced first-hand Haiti’s slow road to recovery, C2C is more convinced today than ever that we must re-focus the world’s attention on our neighbor’s struggles. As we approach the disaster’s anniversary, rather than make excuses for our fatigue, it is the responsibility of those in the aid community to recommit to hope for Haiti and the possibility for improvement.

In Port-au-Prince, we’re working hand-in-hand with local institutions to provide health care to vulnerable women. We’re providing a clinical platform that has treated over 1,000 women in just several months, and we’re on track to provide treatment to over 12,000 additional patients in 2011.

And while our immediate priorities focus on Haiti, the C2C model is poised to scale to dozens of communities in multiple countries. Above all, the C2C clinical model is agile: a modular clinical facility, paired with robust capacity-building support, training for clinicians, and essential health education for patients. This is a model that works in Port-au-Prince and can work in other under-resourced areas of the world.

As an organization, we owe our successes to all those who have believed in and invested in this idea. C2C “champions” have brought their energy and creativity to bear on our growth. There are so many ways that you can continue to provide your invaluable support to C2C. Let’s begin 2011 with an optimistic and supportive eye towards Haiti.

Uncertainty around the presidential election and the pace of reconstruction is valid reason for concern. But we’re focusing our efforts on our patients and on our support for the Haitian clinicians who provide them with high-quality care.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Haitian people on this anniversary; and, for C2C, we will continue our work in Haiti by mobilizing additional clinic units in the months ahead. Please stay tuned to our website and blog – we’re keeping our content dynamic and it is the best source of news on our deployment of more C2C clinics.

Warmly,

Liz

This is stirring up a bit of heat in the green building and Haiti city planning blogospheres. From architect E. Kevin Schopfer and Tangram 3DS, this plan envisions a new Haiti to have a floating city on which people could “produce food and promote industry”. I don’t know what that last part means, but they call it Harvest City – a collection of islands for 30,000 residents based on the principle of Arcology (a mix of architecture and ecology), and “could be a key player in Haiti’s recovery”.

This seems impractical, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it.

Actually, yeah, it does. First of all: hurricane proof? I’m not convinced. Second of all, there already are islands in the Gulfe de la Gonâve. And thirdly, I’m going out on a limb here to say a community for 30,000 doesn’t even begin to respond to the critical issues of overpopulation and severely sub-standard living conditions threatening to exist in perpetuity in Port-au-Prince, with or without arcology.

Love the portmanteau, though. (Fun fact: a portmanteau is a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes and their meanings into one new word, usually combining specifically the beginning syllables of one word with the end syllables of another. e.g. arcology.)

As we near the one year anniversary since the Haiti quake (which, initial estimates suggest, racked up a solid $8 billion in losses and damages or 120% of Haiti’s 2009 GDP), there’s a somber tone to the news coverage. There’s nothing even a little bit surprising about this; we’ve seen scarce tangible progress in the past year. In fact, the stability and absence of public health crises touted at the six-month mark have been blown to smithereens by cholera and silly-fraudulent elections, but let’s not eclipse the arguably more important long-term projections. Let’s feel perfectly at ease with our displeasure at the current situation (a woman next to me on the train the other day asked if anyone had seriously considered just “canceling” Haiti as a country, and since neither of us knew who to talk to about that, I suggested we table the idea), and then, with a bit more wind in our sails, move further out in our projections. Charles Kenny makes an interesting case for this in Foreign Policy, reprinted by NPR today:

In the long term, this economic impact could be far more muted, if history is any guide. Analysis of previous catastrophes suggests that economic performance of countries in the decade after a natural disaster is indistinguishable from that of countries that didn’t suffer comparable misfortunes. Even for countries suffering the largest earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, GDP per capita was the same three, five or 10 years after the disaster — as it would had there been no disaster at all.

[A study financed by the IADB] jibes with what we know about the long-term impact of wars on economic performance. For example, by 1960 Germany was back to where you’d expect its income to be based on long-term growth trends from 1850 to 1910 — two World Wars and the Great Depression notwithstanding. All the bombing that the United States carried out on Japan in World War II didn’t alter city growth in the country over the medium run. And University of California, Berkeley, economists Edward Miguel and Gerard Roland argue that the American bombing of Vietnam — which totaled 7.5 million tons of explosives — hasn’t impacted long-run performance in that country, either.

So, the good news for Haiti is that:

…the things that determine long-term growth can’t be blown up. It isn’t factories or schools, or even individual people. Mounting cross-country evidence suggests that what separates poor countries from rich is differing paths of institutional development.

The bad news, then:

…The country’s history involves virtually all the features that economists have correlated with weak institutions and slow growth over the long term, from its history of slavery and colonial rule to its post-independence succession of coups, U.S. invasion, and some of the Americas’ worst dictatorial misrule under “Papa” and “Bebe Doc” Duvalier. The country’s weak institutions were tragically on display in the aftermath of the earthquake. One reason the death toll was so high was that building and land-use codes were patchily written and almost completely unenforced — so when the earthquake struck, buildings collapsed and slid down hillsides, trapping or killing those inside. In 2006, Transparency International declared Haiti the world’s most corrupt country. Poor institutions of governance help to explain why, between 1950 and 2002, Haiti’s average income actually fell, from $1,051 to $752 per capita. If, as it recovers from the earthquake, Haiti merely manages to stay as poor as it is today, that would count as an improvement.

Ok, so not a totally bright picture, but at least we know where to set the bar. Onward:

Still, there is some real good news to report regarding the benighted country’s broader development prospects. While Haiti’s income per capita dropped over the second half of the last century, infant mortality also fell dramatically, dropping from 22 percent to 8 percent of children under age 1. Meanwhile, life expectancy climbed from 42 to 61 years between 1960 and 2008. The progress in health in the country over the last 20 years is one reason why in the post-quake period, epidemics of infectious disease were limited to a cholera outbreak that was reasonably quickly contained. Similarly, adult literacy increased from 11 percent to 50 percent, and the primary school completion rate from 27 to 47 percent, between 1980 and 1997.

That progress reflects a considerable rollout of services central to the quality of life in Haiti over the last 30 years. For example, immunization rates against diphtheria, tuberculosis, and whooping cough climbed from 3 to 59 percent between 1980 and 2006. Schools were built and staffed. Children turned up. Some of them even managed to learn something.

This performance is particularly impressive given that Haiti has a central government that only spent around $530 million a year for 9 million people before the quake, or less than $60 per citizen. This is a little less than 1 percent of what New York City spends per capita on city services alone. Even though the general quality of the country’s governance could only be described as grim and the record of donor assistance mixed at best, Haiti has seen some innovative approaches to providing for basic needs.

Mixed bag, but let’s be honest: state-building isn’t easy work, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Hi Everybody,

It’s a pleasure for me to join you today and go together with you on this trip, where we are going to look back on the year 2010 events in Haiti – that poor and small piece of earth with an amazing history that has been occupying the news since the beginning of the year.

I just turned 30 years old a few days ago and the milestone fills me with dreams for my country. Dreams powered by strength and hope – this is precisely what you need to live and survive here.

2010 will always remain in Haitians’ minds and hearts.  On January 12th a terrible earthquake of 7.3 magnitude hit Haiti and destroyed our main infrastructure, a country that was already plagued with deep struggles.  At that moment, all the world’s attention turned to us. Some of you discovered for the first time a country were people were living like fighters, like heroes.

We had to adapt to an even more complex and difficult situation than we’d been living in before, and, notably, we are dealing with it. Before that quake I had a video studio. It is gone, so you can imagine like thousands of other haitians I had to adapt my life and career to survive. Survival is a key word in Haiti, and this year revealed the true meaning and test of it.

The January disaster killed about 300 000 people and left 1.5 million homeless living in tent camps.  We topped that off with a Hurricane, cholera outbreak and fraudulent elections.

The hurricane came as little surprise: we are used to these, though perhaps I can say that we could have avoided having too much victims. But as usual, our leaders are unprepared for good decision-making.  The cholera outbreak should also shock no one: who doesn’t know that when you are living in bad sanitary conditions, you are exposed to the worst diseases? We can spend days and months saying and giving proof that the United Nations Nepalese soldiers imported the cholera. But, tell me why in 2010, in this century, people still have to drink dirty river water?  It has already killed upwards of 3000 people and 50,000 have been treated in hospital. It has reached all 10 departments in Haiti. And nobody can predict when we’ll be able to contain this epidemic.  Is this not enough to wake up the conscious of our public servants? No, not in Haiti because then came the fraudulent elections:  who can remind me of the last time we had good and supposedly democratic elections here?  Is a poor democratic record any reason to maintain old bad habits and fight at any price for power? Meanwhile, your people die in the tent camps and streets…

Life in Haiti is uncertain.  Still, there is hope and progress, and as we welcome 2011 we have to believe that 2011 will be better.  2010 was violent. 2010 was crazy. The time has come for us to seriously think about a mentality change – some habit changes, some radical turn around to definitely look and work for the best of our society, our country. If not our kids will receive a poisonous heritage and will have to fight and relive our struggles. Remember, the most popular heroes are the ones who fought for a collective cause.

Happy New Year to All!

Cheers,

Handy

It’s amazing how much more “accessible” data feels through visual representation. Hans Gosling’s trend-revealing software (visit Gapminder.org) animates global health and economic trends over the last several centuries and digests an extraordinary amount of data. Bringing statistics to life and pitting them against broader trends, economic and health bull and bear markets, reframes an awesome macro-level view of human progress indicators.

I hit upon this discussion while perusing the Huffpost this morning, and it’s a solid follow-up to what we talked about on this blog a few months ago about metrics for non-profit progress evaluation and efficiency in our social capital markets. Let’s organize their conversation with three questions: why do non-profits exist in perpetuity; how do we know that the ones surviving (i.e. the ones with high fundraising success) are the best solutions; and how can we leverage their dependence on donors to increase efficiency? I’m inclined to say that the most important of these questions is the last, since (I think) it represents a significant part of the demand for social solutions: non-profits are responsive to the strings attached to their grants, so let’s throw the onus on the informed philanthropist who wants to invest confidently in social improvement:

However, the largest funders in the nonprofit sector (government and foundations), have no appetite for risk, and individual donors generally invest in known brands regardless of impact. Therefore, an organization must be an institution before it can attract significant investment. These funders generally come in when the organization does not NEED the money anymore. Money follows money and ends up creating large organizations with more money than they know what to do with – and that leads to mission creep. The organizations who achieve some great feat are then rewarded to hang around and burn up money just to exist.

This is what’s keeping the “vampires” (as Lublin calls them) alive — they’re organizations with compelling images and anecdotal evidence of success, good branding and name recognition. Meanwhile, innovative approaches to social improvement are eclipsed because funders are risk adverse and won’t back new projects. Now, what if funders set up performance financing plans and hedged their investments by investing in first-round activity and progress reports (with pre-finance agreed upon metrics) before committing to longer-term investment? Also, funders need to be more informed of the management and program staff as well as of the problem and project nature, so that they can critically assess the odds of a new project’s success.

Read the discussion; it’s good food for thought and hits on a central fact of life in the non-profit sector: we’re money driven (not greedy, but dependent), so let’s get the money to flow more intelligently and maybe the sector will fall into step.

The day has come: the first results of the presidential election in Haiti will be announced.

Some of us had so much “HOPE” about these elections.  We always thought that after all the problems and disasters that hit Haiti these last months, the people in charge would be more conscious of our needs and what would work best for Haiti.

But once again – if the elections on Nov 28 serve as any indication – we are to be disappointed. Once again they pulled Haiti back on the road of uncertainty.  While this might seem predictable, the majority of Haitians really want change and are ready to work for it. These elections were a big chance for us to prove that we are still a proud people.  It was our chance to prove that we have learned from the past and that we don’t want to restart doing the same mistakes. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in the same cycle of selfishness, greed and lack of consciousness, which perpetuates the same old power struggle.

Today, December 7th, the CEP (Election council) will publish the results. The tension is very high in Port-au-Prince. The stress and fear of violence is increasing. The intimidation has started with gunshots last night and tires burning in Port-au-Prince. Regardless of the result, we will never find the peace that my young friends and I were expecting.  I am trying not to be pessimistic, but it’s a fact.  I am trying not to be angry, but my anger is overloaded. My shame of what they are making of the country is terrible.  I hoped that this election would support my peace of mind and that I would start really thinking about a bright future for my kids.  What I forgot was that the problem isn’t solvable by the elections – the problem is Haitians themselves. Our mentality is the thing to change. We don’t need any election for that.  We don’t need any money for that. No international observers or advisers are going to change our mentality for the better.

Now what is going to happen? Today the CEP will publish the results of the last “Masquerade,” and then we’ll move deeper into the crisis.  A lot of my friends are cursing on 2010, saying that this year carries very bad luck for Haiti; earthquake, Hurricane, Cholera and they add the “Masquerade” they call election. But, if it hadn’t been for all those problems, all those disasters and emergency situations, would things be better now?  I DON ‘T THINK SO!  In this exceptional time, we are still fighting each other for power instead of fighting for the best of Haiti – what does that say about our mentality?

The future of Haiti is uncertain.  It is truly dark.  I implore everyone not to forget Haiti in their thoughts and prayers, but I hope it will go beyond that and into activity – not money, but activity.  Focus on efforts of education and health, and drive your support and enthusiasm with whatever resources you have.

My fight for the best of Haiti will never stop, and I hope your interest in its improvement is also enduring.  I’ll be 30 years old in two weeks and I don’t want my kids to spend another 30 years in that situation.  It’s my duty to fight and prepare a brighter future for them.  As you can see, i didn’t take the time to remind you of the actual situation here. Because i am pretty sure that the main words that will come to your mouth is: “HAITI AGAIN!”  My young friends and I, organizations like C2C and those focused on educational opportunities are working to make sure that the next big time you’ll pronounce an interjection about Haiti it will be happily: “HAITI FINALLY!”