Not-So-Useful Advice for Haiti Donors

Pulitzer Prize-winner and former NYT foreign correspondent Joel Brinkley has some advice for governments planning to attend a donor's conference for Haiti this month: don't bother.

But hey -- Brinkley, why such a gloomy Gus? It's true that over the past two decades, donors have spent nearly $5 billion -- and yet as he's at pains to note, Haiti remains poor. Really, really poor. Meanwhile, he argues, Haiti "has no government to speak off [sic]." (Or okay, he concedes that maybe it does, but what exists is totally corrupt.) And yet -- as Brinkley avers, you can't do anything without the government! Ergo, his conclusion: Let's just dump some tarps on Haiti's doorstep, fix up some schools and buildings and get the hell out of there.

To grease his case, Brinkley quotes liberally from the preface and conclusion of the 2006 report, Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed. It's a good read. I'd recommend it to Brinkley, who appears to have skipped over the middle -- not to mention the full title, which includes a key parenthetical: (and How to Do It Better Next Time). I'll spare you the 53-page review, but even getting as far as just the title page wouldn't lead to Brinkley's conclusion (cut, paste & run).

What went wrong with past attempts to aid Haiti? Too many, obviously, to name here (and in all seriousness I'd definitely recommend the report if you get a chance). But here's one of its key insights, which the authors have even put in bold and underlined so it gets your attention: "Resolve governance issues as the top priority." Specifically, the authors note, aid failures are likely rooted in the fact that "donors collectively failed to address Haitian politics and governance as the important drivers of success, from which everything else would follow."

Instead, donors simply bypassed the Haitian government altogether, preferring to invest in a network of NGOs. It worked for the NGOs -- keeping them in healthily flush -- but deprived the state of any stake in or incentives to make such efforts work. (A trend that, unfortunately, doesn't seem like it's changed.) Donors also suffered from a chronic case of ADD, investing in programs in fitful bursts and abandoning them when attention withered. And once programs failed -- partly, the report notes, because they was driven by donor priorities, rather than Haitian needs -- donors got weary, decided to blame the Haitians and pulled out. (Sound familiar?)

Yes, government capacity-building efforts have been tried, but that phrase is itself deceptive -- more often than not, such efforts have been short-term, in the form of one-off workshops, seminars or conferences.

The report that Brinkley cites, then, actually has a quite different message for donors: be smart, but stick around. While aid flows come in annual appropriations, as the authors argue, creating good governance takes "probably years, maybe decades."

I don't have a morsel of Brinkley's credibility -- hey, the guy's reported from 50 countries, and one of them may very well be Haiti. And sure, he was working with under 800 words with his column, so maybe he's just pulling the op-ed thing and being (very) glib. In fact, though he opens his case with some arm-waving bluster, by the end, he's whittled his advice to donors down to something fairly tepid: Don't throw money at programs that have been proved to produce no useful results. Well, that's better (if not terribly specific) advice, but doing so requires something quite different than what Brinkley's doing in his piece: it means seriously engaging with questions of what works, and why.

Photo Credit: United Nations Development Programme