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Earlier this year, the Caribbean nation of Haiti celebrated Flag Day, marking the first flying of its national symbol of independence. Despite its poverty, Haiti is a vibrant, passionate nation with a great sense of cultural pride. It’s well deserved; the revolution which overthrew the French colonial power remains to this day the only truly successful slave revolution in history.
This success was short-lived. Two hundred years of political instability, corruption and natural disasters have left Haiti broken, a country where infrastructure is almost non-existent, poverty is not only widespread but the norm, and AIDS is endemic. But Haiti is not entirely to blame for its own failings. It has never been given the chance to become a full and functioning member of the international community.
In the 19th century, the colonial powers of Europe shunned Haiti, fearing that its revolution would inspire rebellion in other colonies. The country was not officially recognised by France until 1833. As the price of diplomatic recognition, it was forced to pay 150 million francs in gold, an unthinkable amount at the time, the payments of which sent the country into a debt spiral that lasted until the 1940s. Economically, it has never really recovered.
While Haiti must take responsibility for some of its own problems, the sad fact is that unless a democratic seed is planted in nourishing soil, it can never fully grow or bear fruit. Or as the Haitian proverb has it – ‘pagen bwa sans racine’, a tree can’t exist without its roots.
Fortunately, the world now recognises that we have both a political and humanitarian duty to Haiti. So, how can the international community help Haiti to help itself? A seemingly obvious but incorrect answer might be for the West to simply provide more financial help, but Haiti makes a poor model for the results of foreign aid in its current form.
Let me be clear – I make a distinction here between the ongoing foreign aid which now makes up one third of Haiti’s national budget and the overwhelming charitable compassion demonstrated by the international public after the earthquake of 2010. In the face of such immediate and horrifying disaster, long-term strategy perhaps rightly took a secondary role to providing emergency medical care, food and shelter. I focus instead on Haiti’s long term relationship with the international donor community, and the failure of this aid to effect real change.
Money alone cannot solve Haiti’s problems. Canada, for example, gives more to Haiti in international aid than to any other country except Afghanistan, yet Canada has also been identified in a paper from the European Institute for Security Studies as being the country most directly responsible for Haiti’s brain drain.
Today, up to two thirds of Haitians are unemployed, and the majority of those with jobs are employed in small-scale subsistence level farming. Only 1% of young people attend university, leading to a massive skills gap and a desperate lack of professionals such as doctors and teachers. How much more effective would it be for Canada to channel its aid into projects like the HELP foundation, which funds scholarships in order to create a new generation of young Haitian professionals and leaders?
Deforestation, too, has been a key factor in Haiti’s continuing poverty and vulnerability. The vast majority of the tropical forests have been stripped and burnt as charcoal, causing the rich top-soil to wash away and become useless for arable farming. Projects like the Lambi fund work to replenish the soil and replant trees which both protect against erosion and provide a food source. Long-term programmes such as these help the people of Haiti learn to care for both the land and their own communities, offering a way out of the toxic poverty which has crippled the nation for so long.
Clearly, the world’s relationship with Haiti needs to change. We must overhaul our financial aid into a system of delivery at community level, funnelling and targeting the aid we give, helping the Haitian people to gain the skills and knowledge that they have been denied through two centuries of domestic economic mismanagement and international negligence. There must be a long-term commitment on the part of NGOs and donors to working from the ground up rather than the top down. Without this fundamental change, the people of this impoverished nation will remain vulnerable to disasters both natural and manmade.
We should not assume that Haiti has nothing to give back to the world. Sadly, public perception of Haiti in the West is a uniformly negative one; coloured by memories of the murderous reign of the Duvaliers and media misrepresentation of Haiti’s traditional religion. It’s all too rare to see the nation represented as being culturally vibrant or with much to offer the outside world. This too needs to change. The long-term rebuilding efforts in some parts of the country have focused on the potential for tourism, which Haitian president Michel Martelly hopes could become an economic driver and offer employment to potentially thousands of people.
The long-term hope is that the international community can one day form a different relationship with Haiti. Only with a new relationship can Haiti begin to change, and only when it changes can the deep-rooted problems of this troubled nation begin to be resolved.
Rebecca Malings works for Visit Wales. She presented this
paper at a Young UK and Ireland Programme event organised
by the Scottish Review team.
