Debate Grows Over Charities’ Role in Haiti Rebuilding

Tensions are building in Haiti between charities that are handling most of the promised $10-billion in international reconstruction help and officials who contend a lack of coordination among aid groups, and between those groups and the government, is hindering post-earthquake redevelopment, The Wall Street Journal writes.

Due largely to donor concerns over corruption, 70 percent of the pledged aid will flow through nonprofit organizations. But the groups’ plans for using the money often clash with those of the government, and some critics say charities are effectively creating a parallel state and force Haiti to continue to rely on outside aid.

“The system as it is guarantees its failure,” said Laura Zenotti, a Virginia Tech University political scientist who has studied nonprofits’ work in Haiti.

With reconstruction aid trickling in slowly, microlenders have become a lifeline for the tens of thousands of Haitians who run small businesses out of their homes, according to The New York Times.

Many of the small banks that make emergency loans are themselves in precarious financial straits, but their importance to borrowers and savers makes them “too big to fail,” said Greta Greathouse, a consultant with the United States Agency for International Development.

See this article on microlending effort’s in Haiti from The Chronicle’s July issue.