British charity Oxfam released a report slamming the reconstruction effort and the recovery commission, Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, headed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. According to Oxfam, not all pledged funds have been received and only a fraction of the money received has been used to provide temporary housing and water and sanitation facilities.
The U.S. government, for one, has pledged $1.15 billion to reconstruction. Mother Jones reported that though the government has spent more than a billion on emergency aid for Haiti, only $120 million of the funding it pledged for reconstruction has arrived.
Many large U.S. corporations also pledged funds to Haiti after the quake. While some of that money has been sent, a few companies haven’t yet made good on their promises. Here’s Mother Jones’ tally from last week:
GE has sent the $5.6 million it promised. Google has delivered the $1 million it pledged, Citi has sent $1.5 million out of $2 million and says the rest is on the way, and Wal-Mart [9] committed $500,000—but then forked over $1.5 million, plus food and blankets.
… Bank of America has donated only a third of its promised $1.5 million, and MasterCard has given only $250,000 of the $4.75 million it pledged to give.
We’ve called a few of the companies and will update if anything has changed.
A year later and only 5% of the rubble has been cleared.
On the anniversary of the Haitian quake Democracy Now speaks with Alex Dupuy of Wesleyan University. Dupuy had this to say about the problems befalling the reconstruction of Haiti. Read his piece for the Washington Post here
Haitians have, in fact, openly complained that they are being excluded from meetings and from decision-making processes. Moreover, when the commission was being set up and the Action Plan for Reconstruction of Haiti was being developed, Haitian grassroots organizations, organizations from civil society that represented a cross-section of the Haitian population, were systematically sidelined. They were ignored. Their voices were ignored. And yet, they are the ones who have been proposing meaningful alternatives for a more progressive, more just, more equal reconstruction of Haiti. So the point that I was trying to make in the op-ed in the Washington Post was precisely that the objectives of the foreign community, so to speak, the international community, is not so much about Haiti as it is about helping their own firms, their own farmers, their own—you know, their own exporters and their own economies, rather than that of Haiti and the Haitian—and the needs, meeting the needs of the Haitian people.
