Free Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer

(from bridges to roads) and farmlands damaged by the storms. But we also had aspirations to build the development machinery back better. One of the books I gave to my new coworkers was a scathing indictment of development assistance, Travesty in Haiti, by anthropologist Tim Schwartz. I suspected it had won him few friends, but the book taught me a lot. His description of several abandoned windmills in the northwest could serve as a parable of foreign aid in Haiti:
    The wind generators stand like monuments atop a hill overlooking the city of Baie-de-Sol, the capital city of the province. They are the first thing one sees approaching the city, five majestic windmills, each one capable of producing fifty thousand kilowatts of energy. But they are useless, vandals having long ago ripped out their electrical guts. I had difficulty learning about them. No one could remember when they were installed. Government officials reported knowing nothing about them.... From missionaries I was able to learn that an unremembered foreign aid organization had installed the wind generators in the early 1990s, and that U.S. military personnel had tried to fix them during the occupation. That is all I got. But it was enough because it is the typical story regarding development all over Haiti: “it is broken, can’t be fixed, and nobody knows anything else about it.” And that was the whole point. To me the wind generators epitomized
foreign aid. Their guts ripped out, never having functioned for longer than a blan [foreigner] sat watching and caring for them. 23
    We agreed that it was our duty to learn why foreign aid had failed, and to engage in goodwill efforts to improve it. Another of the duties of our small UN office (fewer than a dozen people, including volunteers) was to track pledges of development aid and see if they really ended up in Haiti. This process, which was directed by a hardworking and savvy young Australian on loan from UNICEF, Katherine Gilbert, marked the first time that one could check whether or not promised capital was moving. President Clinton also reached out to governments and agencies slow to keep their pledges, prodding diplomatically. These two interventions—a real-time window onto pledges and the courtly chivvying of the Special Envoy—led sometimes to more recriminations (including official letters of complaint from sovereign nations protesting that they had, in fact, fulfilled their pledges) but also started to speed up disbursement of some of the money. But this did not mean effective implementation, as Schwartz’s windmills suggested.
    Because many of the implementers were nongovernmental organizations, we also sought to develop a registry of NGOs working in Haiti. Nancy Dorsinville and Abbey Gardner, two longtime colleagues and friends who’d come with me to the UN, took on this project, promising to produce an online platform by the end of 2009. Although we found thousands of NGOs, we had no way to assess the quality or even the goals of their efforts. Sometimes we weren’t sure organizations were still in existence. (Official records had not been updated in years.) Most importantly, despite the fact that the NGOs with the largest budgets (those funded by the United States and other bilateral and multilateral donors) were providing services for which the government was responsible, government officials had no way to monitor or coordinate their work.
    We knew from experience that after the money arrived, if it did, issues of implementation would take over. Delivery of quality services and coordination of nonstate providers were the biggest challenges in health care efforts, certainly. For example, Partners In Health and
Zanmi Lasante had recently built the Ministry of Health a small community hospital, our tenth together, for only $700,000, and thereby created another two hundred permanent jobs. But such projects seemed too modest to those looking at the big picture , and