Essay: Five Steps Toward Repairing Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (March 31) -- Today world leaders gathered at the U.N. headquarters in New York to discuss the future of Haiti. Life remains difficult there almost three months after the earthquake. Streets are soaked in urine. Shacks and tents populate town squares and empty lots. Farmers cannot sell their produce, and thousands of small businesses are shuttered.

The Haitian government and the international community estimate the damage and losses caused by the Jan. 12 earthquake at $7.8 billion, including $4.3 billion of physical damage and $3.5 billion in economic losses. The total represents 120 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product in 2009.

It's the first time the cost of a disaster has been such a high percentage of GDP in the 35 years the international community has used this methodology. Money pays for important things: trucks, gas, seeds, tools, water, toilets and employment. The cost of reconstruction and recovery for Haiti will be more than $11 billion.

But it's worth remembering that the United Nations is a member organization. Its capacity to deliver aid and affect change depends on the commitment of its leaders, as well as the ordinary citizens they represent.

For Haiti to fully recover, the following steps must be addressed with urgency:

1. Demand transparency and accountability.

A major problem facing the U.N. coordination effort is a lack of e-mail response from aid organizations. The U.N. has created a structure of accountability and coordination through weekly meetings, information managers and useful GPS maps via Google Earth. This system has the potential to improve efficiency by sharing information and assessing how and when each community is served.

The problem? Aid organizations are too busy, too lazy or too territorial to tell the U.N. where they are going. The U.N. has tagged nearly every single refugee camp in Haiti in two ways -- with GPS coordinates and a P-Code. The P-Code stands for the camp itself. In case two organizations give different GPS codes, everyone knows to which camp they are referring.

With a tool like this, no community should be ignored. But right now the maps only show 30 percent of what's happening in the field. All aid organizations have to do is e-mail their GPS coordinates to the United Nations whenever they give out something like food, water or shelter.

Last week members of four aid organizations working on shelter issues ran out to the same orphanage because of one urgent e-mail, sent through the Shelter Google Group. Why didn't one of them send an e-mail to the group stating their plans? Time and money are wasted when organizations only respond to urgent e-mails, rumors and pet projects.

Professionalism, accountability and communications are urgent issues -- just as urgent as actual delivery of aid.

2. Create areas of geographic responsibility.

Traditionally, areas of geographic responsibility and accountability would fall to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), who often assigns field officers to different districts. But Haiti is a weird case for the United Nations, because it was dominated for so long by a military agenda led by MINUSTAH (the United Nation Stabilization Mission in Haiti). The past emphasis on security, over humanitarian aid, means OCHA does not have the human capital to create a footprint on the ground.

UN insiders complain that OCHA has been shut out by MINUSTAH and has never had the chance to actually coordinate aid in Haiti. Now is the time. Two weeks ago assessment teams discovered that the entire region of Carrefour, an area just outside of Port-au-Prince, was somehow "missed" by aid organizations giving out tarps. More than 30,000 families remain in need. Leogane, and other outlying areas, are also being perpetually underserved in numerous areas-healthcare, food, and sanitation.

Right now the response is organized into "cluster" areas of functional responsibility -- shelter, medicine, agriculture and education, for example. But adding a layer of geographic responsibility and expertise would help mitigate the gaps in vision, which seem to plague every cluster.

3. Mobilize Haitian civil society organizations and ease the barriers to entry.

As I've followed the post-earthquake response efforts, I continue to see the United Nations offer money to local charity organizations. The problem is that they do so very quietly and without offering any of the legal or financial support necessary to help people understand the process.

Getting money from emergency funds is sometimes as easy as filling out paperwork. But where can local organizations find the paperwork? And who will help them understand the jargon and technical parameters of the application?

The U.N. coordination and response effort has been dramatically global: It is working with aid organizations from around the world, which are its eyes and ears on the ground. But mostly, the U.N. seems to be working with the people who've already found their way to the money. Where are the Haitian organizations?

If organizations are already working the field, how can they be better integrated into the U.N. response coordination? Efforts to reach out to civil society organizations must be scaled up dramatically.

At its simplest level, this could involve liaisons, who call organizations to tell them what happened during meetings and discover what opportunities and challenges exist in the field.

4. Buy local.

As the international community ramps up to spend its money in Haiti, it is critical to consider the impact of aid on the local market. When goods and materials are simply handed to people, they have no ability to financially impact their own community. A study of the health of markets by the charity organization Oxfam International reveals that small and medium-sized traders in Haiti cannot compete with "free."

Many people, especially women, made their living before the earthquake through the sale of food. In addition, aid organizations will soon start giving away temporary shelter materials, like aluminum and wood. Hardware and material sellers are also struggling to find a market for their goods.

The international community must prioritize buying from existing sources over external ones. If not, the markets may be permanently decimated. Another solution is to give "vouchers" that can be traded with local food sellers and in markets, much the same way food stamps work in the United States. This multiplies the effect of aid money, by supporting an entire economic ecosystem instead of just one person.

5. Invest in people.

"Buying local" also applies to the labor market. After the earthquake, all four of the universities known for training engineers and many technical schools were destroyed. This further limits what was already a shallow market of professional, skilled and semiskilled workers.

According to estimates, 100,000 people will need to be trained in construction in order to ensure that these rebuilding jobs go to Haiti, and that Haitians are ultimately the ones who benefit from the new demand in labor.

Haiti would be well-served by the creation of a job-placement agency, which could help organizations find skilled workers in any field, not just construction. Today, many highly skilled Haitians, with foreign language skills, are knocking on the doors of charities and being politely escorted out.

Education -- in all its forms -- is widely considered by Haitians to be the key to Haiti's eventual recovery. People often speak about the need for a permanent and generational change in thinking to lift Haiti out of poverty. Children today will not remember Haiti before the quake. Today Haiti has a chance to tell its children what this country might be.

Emily Troutman is a U.N. citizen ambassador. She has been reporting on Haiti for AOL since the earthquake.