The NGO Problem

Fair Warning. I get a little tedious here. I have been reading and thinking a lot about Haiti since I got here, and I would like to express some of my thoughts.

     Bill Clinton said recently that Haiti has more NGOs per capita than any country in the world. It is easy to visualize this as a benign flow of aid uniformly and greatly benefitting the populace. To do so would be a naive misconception of the truth and a grave error. While individual NGOs have educated children, built clinics, drilled wells, performed countless livesaving surgeries and saved tens of thousands of lives through vaccination  programs, they have accomplished little detectable change in the country as a whole. Both poverty and malnutrition rates have remained stable over the last 30 years while the NGO build-out was occurring.  While only about 450 NGOs are registered with the Haitian government, there are in fact around 10,000 here. In spite of many efforts to assess the number and quality of NGOs in Haiti, no one knows for sure how many there are, where they all are, how honest they are or how duplicative they are. At best, NGOs are a bit self-serving; they do things to keep money rolling in and employees well-paid; at worst they are rife with corruption, stealing not only from well-meaning donors but also from the intended recipients.

Not unexpectedly, the Haiti government has a budget problem. Seventy percent of the workforce operates in the "shadow" economy and so is untaxable.  Collectively, the NGOs have a much larger budget than the federal government, and most of their activity is also untaxable. There is no solution: the government is desperate for funds for the earthquake cleanup and so turns to the few things it can tax. Ships loading and unloading, for instance. Haiti has the highest wharfage fees in the world, so high that companies that wish to start factories refuse or can't afford to bring in their machine parts and other supplies. President-elect Michel Martelly has a difficult task if he is going to bring Haiti into the 21st Century, and one of his tasks will be to bring order and focus to Haiti's collection of NGOs, evicting some and redeploying others to underserved areas.