Video produced by Emily Judem for GlobalPost.

KOLWEZI, Congo — Patrick Bwana strains his body as he thrusts a full-sized shovel into a patch of rocky ground. He is 12 years old. He looks 9. He speaks with his eyes fixed on the ground. “I used to go to school, but my father died, and no one paid for my studies anymore,” he says.

Bwana works from around 6 in the morning to about 3 in the afternoon, lugging around bags of rock that seem to weigh as much as he does. He says he can earn $5,000 francs a day doing this. That’s about $5. He hopes he can save enough to pay his own school fees, and return to school.

Bwana is one of tens of thousands of child laborers estimated to work in Congo’s mineral sector. Most take to the work out of necessity, to help their parents earn enough to feed their family. Child labor is illegal in the Congo, as is much of the artisanal mining that takes place in and around Kolwezi on mineral reserves owned or leased by foreign or Congolese companies.

The forces that shape Congo’s artisanal mining sector are many: A worldwide demand for copper and other base minerals for manufacturing; the inability of many Congolese to find any other sort of lucrative work; the absence of government regulation. But ask any Kolwezi miner who’s responsible, and you’re likely to hear just one answer: “The Chinese.”

Read the full story at GlobalPost or NPR, or at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which provided funding for the project.

KINSHASA, Congo — On one side of the water, hand-carved wooden canoes navigate the marshy canals of a crowded fishing village. Unpainted cement houses line muddy dirt streets where women sit at stands, selling the day’s catch.

On the other side, where the fishermen used to cast their nets, a posh private city is being raised from the bottom of the Congo River. Pumping millions of cubic meters of sand, the British hedge fund Hawkwood Properties is developing 1600 acres of water to become a tranquil residential haven complete with swimming pools, schools, grocery stores and a sports complex.

A more striking portrayal of income disparity in Congo than Kinshasa’s Cite du Pecheur (Fisherman’s City) and the upcoming La Cite du Fleuve, (City of the River), would be difficult to come by. But Hawkwood’s private development is a logical progression of life in Africa’s fastest-growing city.

See the full story and video at GlobalPost. This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

But as reporter Jacob Kushner discovered, the quest to rebuild one woman’s life would take much more than that. Kushner followed Fabienne’s story for nearly a year, reporting from Port-au-Prince, Boston and New York. Listen to the five-part series and see photos by Nick Kozak at wlrn.org.

Fabienne Jean sits at home with her prosthetic leg propped up on a coffee table. -Nick Kozak

During an age in which nearly all clothing sold in the United States is made in developing countries by workers who are paid just pennies an hour, Alta Gracia Apparel is not your typical textile factory: its employees earn three times the nation’s minimum wage of $150 per month. They get health insurance, a pension, vacation days, and maternity leave. They sit in ergonomic chairs and drink water that they themselves have quality-tested for pathogens.

It’s hard to fathom that a decade ago, many of these same people produced hats for a company that paid them just eighty-four cents an hour, forced them to work overtime without extra pay, and sometimes verbally and physically abused them.

See the full article and photos that were published in the Winter 2012 edition of On Wisconsin Magazine.

CJR, in collaboration with Columbia’s Tow Center for digital journalism, covered the Nov. 6, 2012 election coverage. Seven student journalists from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism watched and read the coverage, working with CJR editors to report on digital innovation and integration of social media by news outlets as they presented election results. Their analysis ran in real-time on this live blog.

Jacob Kushner covered the cable TV networks and published these seven posts during election night.  

Get ready for Twitter-mania – But don’t be fooled [19:37]

A day after Fox News announced it will use exclusive, swing-state trending data from Twitter in its election-night coverage, social media geeks eagerly wait to see just how they’ll use it. But for for the sake of accuracy, they’d better not rely on Twitter to predict a winner.“Throughout the night on Tuesday, Twitter will keep track of breaking news, of the polls and candidates in swing states, and give much of that information exclusively to Fox,” Fox News anchor Jenna Lee told viewers yesterday.The election is by far the hottest topic on Twitter tonight, and some experts predict that users could overwhelm the network, causing a twitter ‘blackout’ that lasts through the evening. Traffic at the moment that networks call the election, or when the loser gives his concession speech, could break the record set during the first presidential debate that saw 10.3 million tweets.Earlier today, Yahoo! News published a story by a PR company that used Twitter trending data to predict Obama will take Ohio. And Mashable has a map that shows which candidate is favored by Twitter data in 12 swing states.

But here’s why you should be skeptical: During the primaries, Atlantic Contributor Alexander Furnas explained why “You Can’t Use Twitter to Predict Election Results.” For one, Twitter users don’t mirror the electorate. And whereas prolific tweeters will influence the data tremendously, in real life every American gets only one vote.”It may be possible to model public opinion with Twitter, but it would require a much more sophisticated understanding than we now have about who tweets about politics and why, how their tweets relate to their offline actions, and how they differ from the general voting population,” Furnas wrote.You can follow Fox’s live online election-night coverage beginning at 8pm Eastern at http://live.foxnews.com/. But don’t take Fox’s word for it: Follow Twitter trending yourself at http://trendsmap.com/-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

Cable news networks race [20:21]

All the nation’s major cable TV networks are working in close step with each other projecting wins in early states despite only small numbers of votes being counted.

CNN, Fox and ABC all called Georgia, South Carolina and Vermont for Romney with less than 3 percent of the total votes accounted for (and only one percent in South Carolina).

A New York Times article today reported that the networks are being particularly cautious tonight in their projections following some major screw-ups in recent months. Most notably last June, CNN and Fox came under fire after they incorrectly reported that the US Supreme Court struck down Obamacare when in fact the court upheld it. Just last week, CNN furthered a false rumor that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded with three feet of water in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. In fact, it remained perfectly dry.

And of course it’s impossible to forget the embarrassing screw ups during the 2000 election in which TV networks alternatively called Florida for Gore, then Bush before retracting their projections all together.

“In calling a state for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney, news organizations will consider several data sources, including exit poll results and raw vote totals — ‘a brain trust of data,’ said Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the vice president for news for CBS News.” -New York Times

All the networks say they’ll abide by the rules not to project any national winner until 11pm Eastern, when the polls close on the west coast. Stay tuned to see if they keep their promises this time.

-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

The Networks: What they’re saying at 9:35pm [21:45]

If you’re watching NBC, Obama’s on the verge of winning, so long as he gets Ohio, where so far he’s winning with 50 percent of the vote counted.

If you’re watching CNN, it’s far too close to call, but the key remains Florida.

Fox News was in the midst of a confusing panel discussion that ranged from the importance of Virginia as a state—generally—to the character of Bill Clinton.

-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

 

Fox News yells “fraud.” Its source? A conservative group with a history of false accusations [21:47]

“In Milwaukee, a federal van from the government taking people to the polls. That’s reported by a group called Media Trackers,” said Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn at around 8:40 pm Eastern. “This ‘potential fraud’ has to get hunted down by prosecutors and the authorities.”Media Trackers claimed earlier today that a federal Jobs Corps van reportedly carried as many as 125 voters to the polls in Milwaukee, Wis. during various trips.“Poll workers inside the location struggled to handle the extra traffic created by the Job Corps participants brought in from a nearby training facility,” according to the report.Perhaps the authorities will check this report out, but Media Trackers shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value.  According to PolitiFact the group is a conservative watchdog organization funded by American Majority, a Virginia organization founded by a leader of the Tea Party—and it has a history of making misleading or inflated claims about the electoral process. The factchecking site labeled a Media Tracker’s statement regarding the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as “Mostly False,” its second-worst rating.

Last month, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote about “The Voter Fraud Myth”—the myth being that America’s immigrants and convicts routinely vote even though they are ineligible to do so, and that liberals illegally use federal resources to help voters get to the polls. That hasn’t stopped conservative groups like Media Trackers and others from making many claims today of illegal voting.

-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

 

CNN goes county-by-county [22:53]

From Colorado to Florida and all the swing states in between, CNN is focusing its broadcast election-night coverage on the key counties that are expected to tip the race.It works like this: Wolf Blitzer announces breaking new results in from the latest swing state, then hands it over to John King who points to a county-by-county map of the state shaded in the familiar blue and red. King reads off the number of votes recorded in a handful of key counties, then tells us it’s still too close to call.The network has even gone a step further in states like Wisconsin, where a reporter spoke live from inside a Milwaukee County tallying center at around 10:30 pm. He described the results from specific, Republican-centric parts of the county to contrast them with those from the more liberal Milwaukee urban center.

CNN’s coverage is by no means unique this election. News media around the country presented their own analysis of the individual counties that were likely to ultimately decide the winner of tonight’s race. Most notably, The New York Times outlined how each campaign was courting voters in just a few dozen key counties across the nation during the final days before the election.But what sets CNN apart is that it seems to be the only TV network committed to continuing its ‘by-the-county’ focus right to the bitter end as election night heats up.CNN’s county-focused reporting may be a step in the right direction for the network that has made recent reporting errors and been called “boring” in comparison to Fox’s and MSNBC’s increasingly polarized reporting. The Economist wrote in September that CNN continues to lose ground to its network competitors just as it tries desperately to remain America’s principal, non-partisan TV news source.-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

 

Jon Stewart takes his turn [23:34]

“We are projecting Barack Obama is the President of the Unites States once again four years later,” broke in Jon Stewart during the third segment of his election-night show. Calling today’s election “Democalypse 2012,” The Daily Show went live at 11pm Eastern to give its take on the race.“Good news for Mitt Romney: He has won as we can report tonight most of the confederacy,” said Stewart, who began his coverage by announcing Obama’s wins in Pennsylvania and Elizabeth Warren’s Senate win in Massachusetts to loud cheers from his studio audience.
Calling Florida a state “where Cubans go to live and where Jews go to die” he announced it’s still too close to call.Correspondent John Oliver ridiculed the sensational rhetoric of other network coverage, strapping iPads to his elbows and drawing on a tweet from a guy who said “I voted for Mitt Romney” to predict a Romney win.“Don’t tell me that cable news is not alive and kicking,” he concluded.Another correspondent poked fun at Obama’s small-scale fundraising tactics by which his campaign sent emails and texts to supporters asking for donations as small as $5.

“They’re asking for 12 dollars. Wait actually that’s 15 dollars– apparently Biden ordered hot wings.”Looking ahead to 2016, one of the Show’s commentators declared: “The big winner tonight seems to be Hillary Clinton, who Nate Silver is now predicting a 63 percent win over Jeb Bush.”-Jacob Kushner (Twitter: @JacobKushner)

 

For thirty years almost without pause, governments in Khartoum – the capital of Sudan — have fought against their own people. The North-South civil war, which killed an estimated two million people and displaced four million more, ostensibly ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that allowed for the ethnically diverse South to succeed last year from the Arab-controlled North. But even if that conflict reignites as recent fighting indicates it might, the Sudanese government is now facing a new and even harder-to-combat opponent: its own people in the Northern cities which the government has long counted on for support.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Foreign Report.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir attends the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Sunday, July 15, 2012. Back in Khartoum, a rapidly deteriorating economy is leading to increasing calls for his ouster (AP Photo/Elias Asmare via Columbia University Library)

Residents in Khartoum and other cities demonstrated in the streets in January and again in June to protest government austerity measures that increased taxes, reduced subsidies on gas and laid off civil servants in an attempt to balance the $2.4 billion shortfall in Sudan’s national budget (already, Sudan’s rising national debt nearly equals its GDP). Police arrested as many as one hundred protestors in a single day of demonstrations. In July, eight people were killed and as many as 20 injured in the city of Nyala in Sudan’s western Darfur region during protests against a rise in transport costs. In June and again in August, students from the University of Khartoum demonstrated calling for the ouster of 23-year Arab President Omar al-Bashir, brandishing sticks that were met with tear gas.

The austerity measures have spurred severe inflation that is now approaching 45 percent. For the typical city dweller, this has meant a dramatic increase in the cost of living: Staple food prices throughout the country have risen between 43 and 137 percent in the past year and even educated, middle class citizens seem to be feeling the pressure.

“I went to get tomatoes last week, and I went this week and there was a three times price increase,” said Elfadil Ibrahim, a professor at the University of Medical Sciences and Technology in Khartoum. “It’s nearing the impossible.”

Sudan’s economic crisis comes near 18 months after the southern third of it’s territory split off to become an independent nation– taking 75 percent of the region’s oil reserves with it. Because the only port capable of exporting it is in Sudan, Southern officials continued to pump oil northward after the split, sustaining both nations’ economies. But things turned sour when Khartoum began siphoning nearly $1 billion worth of the oil to compensate for what it called unpaid “transit fees” from the South. In January, Southern officials responded by shutting off the pumps altogether, cutting the lifeline that both nations depend on. Under pressure to relieve Sudan’s deteriorating economy, al-Bashir joined South Sudan President Salva Kiir in September to announce they’d finally reached an agreement to resume oil production. But due to logistical reasons it will take months to do so, and in the interim both parties must weather a declining economy.

South Sudan is well accustomed to economic hardship, having endured centuries of neglect by Arab governments that is part of the reason why 99% of southerners voted to secede in 2011. But to residents of Sudan’s cities, the sudden economic crisis that resulted from the loss of oil revenue is a new phenomenon, and a staggering one. Just two years ago, Sudan placed in the top third of all nations for GDP growth, with oil accounting for more than half of its national budget. Now, that economic growth has turned negative, with Sudan posting the sixth largest economic decline in the world last year.

To salvage an economy that’s had it’s revenue cut in half will require al-Bashir to exercise an entirely different set of skills than those needed to put down an armed rebellion and survive international pressure. So far, there’s little evidence that his regime is capable of adapting.

Some point to what stalled oil negotiations in the first place as an example of how little Khartoum’s approach has changed from what kept its economy steady for years: Siphon off resources from the South and offer little or no political autonomy or economic development in return. Khartoum demanded that South Sudan pay upwards of $30 per barrel in transit fees to ship its crude north, despite that the international standard for such agreements hovers around $1.

When South Sudan stopped pumping oil, “The north reacted with outrage but in truth it had employed similar brinkmanship in the past,” Sudan scholar Alex de Waal told the Economist in February. “Both sides fight like alley cats in negotiations. They will risk annihilation to carry a point.”

Or, perhaps not quite — As economic pressure mounts, Sudan and South Sudan announced in September they reached an agreement on border security and trade that includes provisions for resuming oil production.

Neither nation has a track record for respecting such deals. And Ibrahim, the Professor in Khartoum who also holds a degree in oil and gas law from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says even if the agreement is respected, it will take at least six to 12 months to clean the pipes and conduct maintenance so that oil can again flow northward.

He says Khartoum may not have that much time: “A government that has no money can’t really last that long. It can’t buy patronage like it used to. It can’t buy the support of the people.”

While al-Bashir has long ignored the interests of rural populations hundreds of miles away, it may prove difficult to do the same within the city where he lives and operates. The hundreds of Sudanese who’ve been arrested and tear gassed during protests aren’t the traditional ethnic minorities, armed rebels or disgruntled politicians one’s come to expect in a country known for its government-induced violence, political exclusion and neglect of most of its territory.

Rather, the recent protests in Khartoum are a clear response to the tumultuous downturn in the nation’s GDP by members of an urban population that remained fairly supportive of al-Bashir but who now see their livelihoods threatened by a deteriorating economy. And it’s a population that’s growing at a tremendous rate, as urban dwellers increased from 20% of Sudan’s population in 1989 to 40 percent just before the split.

“Urban populations are very susceptible to inflation,” said Jack Goldstone, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, who studies how demographic changes affect politics. Goldstone. “They can’t grow their own food, so they’re at the mercy of what they can pay at the market. Your housing, your fuel, your clothing, everything – inflation undermines your standard of living immediately and drastically.”

Goldstone says many of the trends that fueled revolutions elsewhere in the region are also present in Sudan. Youth unemployment was already at 22 percent in 2009, and experts say it is surely rising as the economic crisis worsens.

“Youth unemployment is very high but what’s most disturbing for the people is ‘what’s going to make it better’,” said Goldstone. “You have young people in their twenties wondering, ‘Am I ever going to have the chance to get married and have a family?’ It becomes an existential issue for a lot young people.”

So far, al-Bashir has been able to hold on to power in part because he’s more politically tactical and in tune with his citizenry than were other leaders who fell. When the Southern part of his country voted overwhelmingly to secede in 2011, al-Bashir accepted the vote and even congratulated the new nation. When “Arab Spring” protests emerged in Sudan in January 2011, al-Bashir diffused tension by announcing he would not seek another term after his current one ends in 2015.

The fact that Khartoum has invested in its urban infrastructure, creating new highways between cities, means many urban residents have seen measurable improvements in their standard of living.

“Yes there’s corruption, but this government has done more for the people than any other regime,” said Ibrahim.

Perhaps more than anything else, al-Bashir’s tenure is secured by the fragmentation of his opponents among at least a dozen political parties and rebel groups that spend much of their time infighting, leaving no unified opposition to stand behind.

Benaiah Yongo-Bure, who researches Sudanese politics and economics from Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, suggests that many Sudanese who oppose the regime don’t feel as though they have outside support for their cause as did the oppositions in Syria, Egypt and Libya. He points to the UN’s hesitancy to intervene in Darfur as an example.

“They don’t like al-Bashir, but they don’t like the alternative from the opposition,” said Yongo-Bure. “If there was a unified group, the possibility of overthrowing al-Bashir would be high.”

After all, it was unity around a common cause—independence– that allowed many Southern Sudanese ethnic groups and rebel movements to shake themselves free of Khartoum’s control. If the recent are any indication, Sudan’s current economic crisis may be opponents’ most useful tool in drumming up resistance against the National Congress Party’s rule.

“Economic hardship is what brings people to the streets,” said Yongo-Bure. “So there are political activists who are taking advantage of the economic crisis to oppose the government.”

“And the economic crisis,” he says, “could get them that critical mass.”

That, combined with the fact that many Sudanese seem to be developing higher economic expectations of their government than ever.

“In countries where people know the government is collecting oil revenues, they expect those to trickle down to them,” said Goldstone. “For the Islamic population of the north, their expectations are in some ways higher in that, having lost part of the country, they’re expecting now some sort of peace dividend. A lot of ordinary Sudanese are saying, ‘Okay, the war is over, now what do we get out of this? Are we better off?’”

But until profits from transit fees arrive in quantities sufficient to fill the 50 percent hole in Sudan’s budget, al-Bashir’s regime must quickly find other sources of revenue to stem rising inflation that has been the driving force behind the demonstrations. In the meantime he must also prevent disillusionment within his own power base, or risk a takeover of the nature that brought al-Bashir himself to power 23 years ago.

“The government needs to pay its civil service, its army,” said Yongo-Bure. “[Without that], a military coup could happen.”

Says Goldstone, “If the government starts to run out of money because of the dispute over the oil and some of the soldiers and officers worry that they might not get paid, then they might not defend the regime as fervently as they have.”

In the interim, Sudan will also have to keep foreign investors from being scared away by the economic uncertainty. Already, China canceled a major loan in April that would have improved electricity access in the North but that depended on future oil profits for repayment. One month later, China instead offered South Sudan a loan to improve infrastructure to the tune of $8 billion– more than the new nation’s annual budget.

All this is complicated by the fact that there is little evidence that al-Bashir is more dedicated to ensuring a viable future for his nation than he is to lining his own pockets. A March 2009 diplomatic cable sent to American officials by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, made public by Wikileaks, suggests al-Bashir may have personally taken as much $9 billion of the nation’s wealth during his tenure.

“al-Bashir’s regime is structured much like those in SyrIa and Egypt: He’s got a corruption based regime that’s not necessarily popular or effective,” said Goldstone. What remains to be seen, he says, is whether Khartoum can keep Sudan’s economy from deteriorating further so as to pacify an urban population that seems increasingly willing to oppose their government for economic concerns.

“My expectation for al-Bashir is that his time is limited. With the broad political discontent and al-Bashir’s illegitimacy due to the division of the country, I would not bet on him being in office 18 months from now.”

Read the full story as it appeared at the Foreign Report.

NEW YORK — Two years ago, auditors revealed the Washington, DC, consulting firm Chemonics International and a partner company were employing only one-third as many Haitians as their contract required to clear rubble left by the January 2010 earthquake from city streets as part of the US government-funded “Cash for Work” program.

Read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post. 

Chemonics even directed some of those workers to remove rubble from private lots adjacent to its Port-au-Prince headquarters instead.

Undeterred by the mishaps, just three months later the US awarded Chemonics $53 million to implement 141 new Haiti projects. Now, an internal audit reveals some of these projects are lagging behind schedule and others have failed entirely because the company didn’t engage local communities in the work.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is in charge of allocating US aid in Haiti and around the world, responded to an audit last week of its Haiti contracts with Chemonics, the largest recipient of US aid contracts in the island nation and around the world. The audit, which concluded in February, examined 22 of the 141 projects, totaling $6.8 million. Among its findings:

• Chemonics evaluated some of its projects based upon criteria that had absolutely nothing to do with the goals of those projects. In one case, Chemonics was charged with providing school supplies including chairs, desks and backpacks to two public schools, but it evaluated its work based on the number of children who returned to school. “The performance measure did not correlate to the activity,” according to the audit. Similarly, a project that was supposed to create a plan to improve roads in a Haitian town was evaluated by the “Number of reconstructed national governing institutions and systems that receive [US Government] assistance to incorporate principles that support democracy and government legitimacy” — whatever that means.

• A Chemonics consultant who was supposed to help Haiti’s national mapping agency replace geographical data lost during the earthquake hadn’t finished the job when her contract ended in February. “The activity did not meet its objectives because Chemonics did not communicate effectively with [Haiti's mapping agency] or provide adequate support to the consultant,” according to the audit. “The Chemonics officials said they never asked agency staff members whether the consultant was meeting their needs and learned only at the activity’s end that [the agency] was not satisfied with her.” The head of the agency told auditors that the consultant’s work was “insufficient and would have to be redone.”

• Chemonics failed to conduct an “environmental mitigation and monitoring plan” before beginning a project to plant hundreds of thousands of medicinal jatropha plants near the city of Saint Marc. “Potentially adverse environmental impacts can occur if proper mitigation and monitoring procedures are not put into place before implementing an activity and monitoring it,” the audit warned.

• Chemonics was awarded “urban beautification” contracts to build benches and spruce up public spaces near the new $224 million Carocol industrial park outside Haiti’s northern city of Cap Haitien. But instead of hiring Haitians from the local communities, Chemonics brought in workers all the way from Port-au-Prince in the south of the country. “As a result, residents saw jobs in their neighborhood being done by outsiders, and without an understanding of the activities, they did not see how anyone local benefited,” the audit stated. It concluded two of these beautification projects failed altogether because Chemonics did not involve local residents in the process.

• Chemonics failed to set timelines or estimated dates of completion for some work being done by subcontractors, causing some projects to run behind schedule. In September 2011, USAID awarded Chemonics a $1.9 million contract to build a temporary space for Haiti’s parliament, which lost its building in the earthquake. But no timelines were set for steps in the process – such as installing “utilities.”

In March, GlobalPost witnessed Haitian subcontractors installing electrical wires in that building — four months after USAID officially “inaugurated” the structure, announcing it complete. A GlobalPost investigation found the building remained unused by Haiti’s parliament months after the inauguration because USAID only asked Chemonics to construct the frame of the building — leaving the offices void of furniture and the chambers hall empty and unusable. Haiti’s government later drew at least $775,000 from the public treasury to finish the job.

Last week’s audit is likely to fuel scrutiny of USAID deals with companies like Chemonics, both in the United States and in the countries where those deals take place.

It isn’t the first time USAID has reacted to mistakes by Chemonics by sending even more contracts its way. A 2005 audit found the company’s $153 million program to improve agriculture in Afghanistan had missed an important objective that resulted in the “limited” success of the project. Nonetheless, one year later, USAID awarded Chemonics a new $102 million contract for similar work in Afghanistan. A later investigation found even that project was flawed, running so far behind schedule that Afghan farmers on 10,000 hectares of land were unable to plant their crops one summer.

Critics of USAID spending say the mistakes Chemonics made in Haiti and Afghanistan are emblematic of those that occur frequently across the development aid world as aid contracts increasingly shift away from NGOs to for-profit companies. Foreign Policy reported in July that in 2011, 27 percent of USAID funds worldwide went to American companies like Chemonics.

“These companies operate for profit. They’re not your mom and pop’s NGO or aid group,” said Jake Johnston, who analyses US aid to Haiti for the CEPR. “They have high overheads, they take off money off the top, they pay high salaries for their staff.”

Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2009 that USAID has “turned into more of a contracting agency than an operational agency with the ability to deliver.”

The result is that many Haitian organizations and businesses are left hoping that some of the funding trickles down to them. They are often disappointed.

The president of Haiti’s National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Reginald Boulos, said the audit’s findings are “not surprising” to Haitian businesspeople who’ve witnessed billions of dollars in aid bypass Haitian companies.

“In the 90s, someone in Washington came up with the idea of subcontracting the work of USAID and local organizations to US firms,” Boulos said. The result has been a “huge flow of NGOs that rushed to Haiti after the earthquake” which “created a meltdown of the economy, with probably no growth this year and again nothing to show for the billions of dollars spent after the earthquake.”

In May, a GlobalPost investigation revealed that not a single dollar of the original $1.1 billion in humanitarian assistance the agency allocated in Haiti in fiscal year 2010 went directly to Haitian organizations or businesses. An analysis by the CEPR found that 70 percent of the $450 million awarded through reconstruction contracts has gone to Beltway companies like Chemonics, and only 1.3 percent has gone directly to Haitian companies.

But now, USAID is trying to change that.

Last month, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah announced the agency plans to send 30 percent of Haiti aid directly to local companies and organizations by 2015, as part of USAID’s Forward program that intends to reach that mark worldwide. Many who work in the humanitarian world have applauded the push to “contract local.” But as Johnston points out, the 30 percent local contracting goal seems highly optimistic for a place like Haiti, where currently only 1.3 percent of aid contracts go to local companies. And a Government Accountability Office report last month found USAID doesn’t currently have a mechanism to even track its progress toward that goal.

“There are a lot of people at USAID who do want to change the system, but it’s so ingrained in how they operate that they don’t have the ability to make the switch,” Johnston said. “The for-profit development sector has really taken over this industry in the last decade.”

And they’re fighting to keep it that way. Last year, Chemonics joined 50 other American development contractors to form a lobbying group to fight the sort of reforms proposed in USAID’s Forward initiative. The companies argue that the status quo is preferable to giving contracts directly to smaller companies within host countries because they are harder to hold accountable and often have no experience handling large-dollar contracts.

Members of the US lobbying group, the Coalition of International Development Companies, have much at stake in that argument. Members received 60 percent of all post-earthquake USAID contracts in Haiti, according to the CEPR. The group has already spent $150,000 in the first half of 2012 lobbying Congress to reject the proposed USAID reform that would send more money the way of local organizations and businesses.

Chemonics declined requests for an interview. USAID did not respond to questions about its contracts with Chemonics in Haiti.

Jean Pharés Jérôme contributed to this report from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.