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Think before throwing more money at Haiti

Dozens of governments and aid groups are scheduled to meet at the United Nations later this month to pledge millions, perhaps billions, in assistance to Haiti. My advice to many of those donors: Stay home.

Sure, everyone wants to help rebuild Haiti and finally turn the country into a thriving, self-sustaining state. But after decades of effort, many of the donors themselves have concluded that it's a Sisyphian task. By late January, more than $1 billion had been pledged for emergency earthquake recovery. Donors spent nearly $5 billion on projects there in 1990-2009, nearly all of it for naught.

The last event to prompt a spasm of foreign aid came in 2004, after Hurricane Jeanne devastated the island and left 700 people dead. The United Nations asked donor countries to provide $59 million in aid.

That effort spawned introspection because, once again, a flood of money had not changed facts on the ground at all. Haiti remained the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Almost 30 percent of the children still were victims of stunting, meaning they did not grow, mentally or physically. Ten percent still suffered from wasting, meaning they were, essentially, starving to death.

By 2006, the National Academy of Public Administration, a non-partisan, U.S. government-funded agency, had completed a comprehensive report titled "Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed." Its preface states: "This paper explains why, after consuming billions in foreign aid over three decades and hundreds of millions specifically for democratization programs, not to mention billions for other programs, Haiti remains politically dysfunctional and impoverished."

The report's conclusion, put simply: Haiti has no government to speak off. The state offers "dysfunctional budgetary, financial or procurement systems making financial and aid management impossible," the World Bank reported in 2005. The National Academy described secret, off-the-books budgeting, "sole source contracts and unadvertised bidding" as well as government spending policies that "make it virtually impossible to identify fund uses, beneficiaries or impact." Meanwhile, "budget reductions and low salaries drove away most finance professionals."

All of that screamed corruption. In fact, at the time of the National Academy report, Transparency International ranked Haiti the most corrupt nation on Earth. Since then Haiti has climbed up a few notches, bettered by two other Americ

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Taptap Haiti

Think before throwing more money at Haiti

Taptap Haiti.