USAID

Haiti and the failed promise of US aid

The Guardian

Jacob Kushner

A decade after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, nothing symbolises America’s failure to help the nation “build back better” than a new port that was promised, but never built. 

After sinking tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into an ill-advised plan to build a new seaport, the US quietly abandoned the project last year. It is the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Haiti’s woes that have done little – or worse – to serve the country’s interests.

Read: The Guardian’s The Long Read

Supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Coca-Cola’s cleanup work in Tanzania shows mixed motives

GlobalPost/GroundTruth

(Jacob Kushner/GlobalPost)

Coca-Cola is partnering with governments, NGOs, and other companies to improve access to water, occupying a gray area where genuine charity meets corporate profit.

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — For years the Mlalakua River overflowed with garbage during each heavy rain. Homes would flood with water contaminated by sewage and trash. Even in the dry season, the narrow river had a nasty grayish hue, the product of runoff from the factories situated alongside it, residents and local water experts say.
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Some here call the Mlalakua River by a different name: the Coca-Cola River. The nickname comes from the red-brown hue of the water. But it may also reflect the fact that among those factories that line the river’s banks is a Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of three in Tanzania. As the world’s largest beverage retailer and one of its most recognizable brands, Coca-Cola goes to great lengths to protect its image. And a few years ago, someone at the company seems to have realized that being associated with a garbage-filled river was putting the company’s local reputation very much at risk.

So in 2012, Coca-Cola entered into a public-private partnership, or PPP, aimed at cleaning the river. The company — partnering with nearly a dozen government entities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other private companies — would dredge the sludge and garbage from the river, then engage the locals in a plan to keep it clean.
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But there are currents of criticism about the project — both from local residents and from a number of NGOs that focus on sustainable development. Critics wonder whether the cleanup was intended to achieve genuine and lasting change or to advance the short-term public relations goals of a multinational corporation. Indeed, most water experts and residents interviewed by GlobalPost say the Mlalakua River cleanup was inherently flawed. They say that while the river is undeniably cleaner, the project did not address the root causes of the pollution: the absence of a sewer system and trash collection for the communities along the river’s banks.
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A two-month investigation examines what happens when motives of good will and profit mix.

Read the investigation at GlobalPost

In Tanzania, Coke improves medical distributions

GlobalPost/GroundTruth

Jacob Kushner/GlobalPost

A successful Coca-Cola partnership in Tanzania to better distribute medicine across the country shows that not all public-private partnerships have to be self-serving.
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DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage retailer, has an unparalleled ability to get its goods to anyone and everyone. In Tanzania, Coca-Cola reaches areas where even essential medicines and life-saving medical supplies do not. An incredible 35 to 40 percent of all orders for medicine from Tanzania’s 5,000 health centers go unfilled due to “stock-outs.” The drugs simply don’t arrive.

If Coca-Cola can reach all corners of Tanzania, why not medicine? At last it is beginning to, thanks to Project Last Mile, a partnership that is helping to fix a number of kinks in the medical distribution process.

Read the full feature at GlobalPost.

Four months and $2M US tax dollars later, Haiti’s new Parliament building sits unfinished, unused

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
Legislators say they must now dip heavily into their public treasury to finish the job

By 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — One Friday last November, US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten joined Haiti’s President and then-Prime Minister at the edge of the Caribbean Sea in downtown Port-au-Prince.

To much fanfare, the trio inaugurated a $1.9 million US-funded building meant as a temporary home for Haiti’s Parliament, which had lost its old building and 32 of its staff members in the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010.

But more than four months later, that location remains vacant. The building is scattered with woodwork trimmings and debris from a costly ongoing renovation paid for by the Haitian treasury because legislators say the United States never finished the job. And critics in Haiti charge that the unfinished work and empty building stand as a powerful metaphor for much of what is wrong with USAID’s approach to development in Haiti: that it lacks coordination with and input from the Haitians themselves about how best to undertake reconstruction projects.

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

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Haiti’s politics of blame

GlobalPost/GroundTruth
As foreigners ask where aid money went, Haitians turn inward, demanding answers from their own government.

PORT-AU-PRINCE — For all the talk about a Haitian people who have grown impatient with the slow pace of a largely foreign-led reconstruction effort, what Haitians are clamoring for most is accountability from their own government for promises that remain unfulfilled two years after the earthquake.

Click HERE to read the full story as it appeared at the Global Post.

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