If you work in development, you probably wonder sometimes whether what you're doing is actually having a positive impact. If your work has never caused such an existential crisis, you should try working in Haiti.
Haiti is often cited as having more NGOs per capita than any country in the world. After the earthquake, one percent of the billions of dollars pledged went to the Haitian government, which lost 16,000 employees and all but one government building in Port au Prince during the earthquake. Less than one half of one percent went to Haitian NGOs. That leaves billions of dollars going to international NGOs, who are now basically running the country.
What happens when NGOs run your country? Well, to start, the government stays weak and ineffective. Instead of investing in building up a functional public sector that could respond to the needs of its people, the global aid community has decided, for the most part, to skip over the government altogether. As a result, NGOs are creating a system of permanent NGO dependence rather than working towards a Haiti that can someday function without them. (The problems with the Haitian government are a whole other story... but I don't think the solution is just to pretend it doesn't exist.)
NGOs are generally full of do-gooders who sincerely want to help people. But NGOs are accountable to their boards and funders in the US and Europe, rather than to the Haitian people themselves. After the earthquake, they built tens of thousands of "temporary" shelters, while very little attention has been paid to repairing housing or providing rental support, much less any kind of permanent government housing agency. A picture of thousands of shelters for people made homeless by the earthquake looks good in your fundraising brochures, but the picture three and a half years later is bleak. Driving around Port au Prince, you can see people adding little bits of permanence to their tents: a wooden door here, a solar panel there, signs of acceptance that the "temporary" shelters are all they are going to get.
Does that mean the NGOs aren't doing anything good here? I don't think so. I think there are good examples of NGOs doing positive work. But there are also a lot of examples of work that fails to look far enough into the future, that destroys rather than encourages the development of the local economy, and that reinforces permanent dependence on outside aid. I don't think an NGO-free Haiti is anywhere in the near future, but it needs to be part of the vision, however distant.
More here: on Haiti's NGO Republic and on the problem more generally.
Haiti is often cited as having more NGOs per capita than any country in the world. After the earthquake, one percent of the billions of dollars pledged went to the Haitian government, which lost 16,000 employees and all but one government building in Port au Prince during the earthquake. Less than one half of one percent went to Haitian NGOs. That leaves billions of dollars going to international NGOs, who are now basically running the country.
What happens when NGOs run your country? Well, to start, the government stays weak and ineffective. Instead of investing in building up a functional public sector that could respond to the needs of its people, the global aid community has decided, for the most part, to skip over the government altogether. As a result, NGOs are creating a system of permanent NGO dependence rather than working towards a Haiti that can someday function without them. (The problems with the Haitian government are a whole other story... but I don't think the solution is just to pretend it doesn't exist.)
NGOs are generally full of do-gooders who sincerely want to help people. But NGOs are accountable to their boards and funders in the US and Europe, rather than to the Haitian people themselves. After the earthquake, they built tens of thousands of "temporary" shelters, while very little attention has been paid to repairing housing or providing rental support, much less any kind of permanent government housing agency. A picture of thousands of shelters for people made homeless by the earthquake looks good in your fundraising brochures, but the picture three and a half years later is bleak. Driving around Port au Prince, you can see people adding little bits of permanence to their tents: a wooden door here, a solar panel there, signs of acceptance that the "temporary" shelters are all they are going to get.
Does that mean the NGOs aren't doing anything good here? I don't think so. I think there are good examples of NGOs doing positive work. But there are also a lot of examples of work that fails to look far enough into the future, that destroys rather than encourages the development of the local economy, and that reinforces permanent dependence on outside aid. I don't think an NGO-free Haiti is anywhere in the near future, but it needs to be part of the vision, however distant.
More here: on Haiti's NGO Republic and on the problem more generally.
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