"A Great Country For Projects"

UNITED NATIONS, NYC – So Canada is in. The government has indicated its decision to pay $100 million to join a team of similarly minded funders to oversee the rebuilding of Haiti.  This is a good move and provides this country an ongoing seat at the table to follow-up on its pivotal emergency response in the days and weeks following the earthquake.Here at the United Nations with CIDA minister Bev Oda for the Haiti Donor’s Conference, I listen as the talk is all about how to get things right this time – to plan for a future response that is progressively better than past efforts. Better reforms are obviously needed.  All you have to do is think of Haitian society just prior to the calamity.  It was a dangerous concoction of fantastically rich and destitute poor. Aid projects that were supposed to assist the latter often ended up enriching the former.  As famed writer Graham Greene penned in his The Comedians: “Haiti was a great country for projects. Projects always mean money to the projectors so long as they are not begun.” Clearly things have to be done differently this time.To be sure, it appears as though the money will be there for reconstruction. Today, donors will be asked to pony up with the almost $35 billion required over the next decade to get it right. Canada will be part of that team, but what is still being put in place is a plan on how to properly implement those funds.  As the New York Times so insightfully put it yesterday: “The paradox being confronted on Wednesday is how to rebuild a country that was never properly built in the first place.”Columnist Lisa Van Dusen introduced a valid concern yesterday when she noted that,

There is no single United Nations agency, no US development agency and no other international NGO that cuts across all food aid, military, medical, construction, refugee relief, engineering and other specialties to provide concerted post-disaster crisis management expertise … There is also no such agency, international or otherwise, that provides centralized, long-term post-disaster reconstruction expertise the way some provide post-conflict reconstruction expertise in building civil society institutions and democratic governance after man-made crises.”

This is pivotal to our understanding of the coming challenge for the international community, and for Haitians themselves.  Who will coordinate the proper and effective disbursal of such vast sums of development money? Without one overall coordinating body, history might be destined to repeat itself.  Hopefully efforts in the next two days here at the UN will come up with an overall plan under one coordinating arrangement that will set this effort apart from all the others.Bev Oda’s role in all this can’t be easy. So much remains to be done just cleaning up from the quake itself that she’ll have to balance the emergency and long-term development investments in an effective manner.  I haven’t been informed, but she’ll likely focus on education and proper governance, as they have been Canadian strengths historically.Today, Wednesday, is the big day, the formative part of the conference that will determine the fate of future investment and hoped-for reconstruction and recovery. The next few posts will provide details and commentary as they become available. It’s an important moment, not in just Haitian, but Canadian development history.