Helping Haiti the Right Way

(Published @ RealClearWorld. January 31, 2010)

Martha Mendoza of AP writes:

Only 1 cent of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government...Less than two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has tripled to $317 million at latest count. That's just over $1 each from everyone in the United States. Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which is in disarray and has a history of failure and corruption.

I’m not sure how smart it is to completely subvert whatever remains of the Haitian state. Even in the cases of failed states like Haiti, landmark work by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart proves rather definitively that the most effective, long-term foreign assistance policies are directed through a state apparatus.

Also, whatever “experts” are being referenced here, I doubt that their argument was that U.S. AID should subsume the entire role of aid distributor and implementer. Preeminent development economists Paul Collier and Jeffrey Sachs and former economic adviser to Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Louis Warnholz each argue that aid should be distributed through a transparent international bank.

Sachs provides the most specific plan:

I want the money to come from the US, but not to go through the US government. What I'd like is for US and other donor money to be put into a multi-donor trust fund (MDTF). My specific recommendation is that the MDTF should be located at the Inter-American Development bank. There are a lot of reasons for that. In essence the IADB is a development-finance institution that works well, has a long-term commitment to Haiti, has a lot of expertise, and is competent in handling money and organising projects with the proper monitoring, auditing and evaluation. And so I think that when you scan the institutional environment, the IADB seems the best place to do this. I think that relatively little of the aid should go through the bilateral development agencies of any of the major donor countries.

Either way, the U.S. maintaining a monopoly on nation-building initiatives in Haiti seems the far less sensible and sustainable policy choice.

(AP Photo)