Roundup: U.S. aid money for post-quake Haiti reconstruction poorly managed: investigation

An independent investigation jointly conducted by two well-known U.S.-based media organizations has indicated that U.S. aid money for reconstruction of Haiti in the wake of the deadly 2010 earthquake has been poorly managed.

The U.S. Red Cross has poorly managed 500 million U.S. dollars collected in aid to help rebuild Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake, claims the investigation published in Haitian capital on Thursday by ProPublica and NPR News.

The U.S. Red Cross, officially known as the American Red Cross (ARC), promised to build homes for 130,000 people in the Campeche neighborhood in southeast Port-au-Prince. However, only six houses have been built in five years, according to a report elaborated by Justin Elliot from ProPublica and Laura Sullivan from NPR News.

On January 12, 2010, a powerful earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter Scale destroyed a large part of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and some towns in the southeast.

According to official figures, 222,570 people died and the material loss totalled 7.9 billion U.S. dollars.

A total of 1.5 million people were affected by the earthquake and, out of this number, 79,397 people (around 21,218 families) are still living in 105 camps which remain, especially in the capital, according to data released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

After the disaster, the international community sprang into action to help Haiti.

Among the organizations extending aid was the U.S. Red Cross. In it's latest annual report, the foundation stated that 4.5 million people had received help to get back on their feet.

"No, no it's not possible," Jean Max Bellerive, who was Haiti's Prime Minister at the time of the earthquake, told investigators recently.

He doubted the figures given by the aid organization as he said the total population of the country is about 10 million. This would mean that the organization had helped around half of the total population, which he was almost certain it hadn't.

Jean Flaubert, head of a community group set up by the U.S. Red Cross in the Campeche neighbourhood, drew attention to the lack of progress and to the "generous" salaries paid to expatriate aid workers.

"What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Now I don't understand the change that they are talking about. I I think the Red Cross is working for themselves," said Flaubert, according to the report. He is a volunteer for the "LAMIKA" program, an acronym in Creole for "A Better Life In My Neighbourhood".

Apart from destroying almost all public buildings in the capital, including the National Palace, the earthquake caused 105,000 houses to collapse in the whole country.

A year and a half after the disaster, Haiti's government, sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), launched the project 16/6 aiming to rehabilitate 16 poor neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince by moving the people who have been living in the six biggest camps set up after the earthquake.

Through the plan, every displaced family receives 20,000 gourdes (500 U.S. dollars) which will allow them to pay rent on a flat for one year.

The U.S. Red Cross has said, like all nongovernmental organizations, that it ran into trouble in developing housing projects due to land title problems that exist in the country, high demand for skilled workers and a cholera epidemic.

The charity added that despite these difficulties, "it has created more than 100 projects," including repairing 4,000 homes, building temporary refuges for thousands of families, distributing the equivalent of 44 million U.S. dollars in food aid and financing hospitals.

Elliot and Sullivan's investigation discovered that apart from abandoning various projects, an internal evaluation found that in some areas the number of ARC beneficiaries was higher than the number of people living in that community. In other cases people were upset about the delays so much so they rejected the charities' intervention.

"They were more interested in projects that would generate good publicity than those that would provide the most homes," said Lee Malany in the research project. Malany was responsible for the ARC's shelter program in 2010.

The authors of the report work for ProPublica -- an independent, non-profit news agency founded in 2008 with its headquarters in New York, and NPR News (previously known as National Public Radio) -- a privately and publicly funded media organization located in Washington which operates through a network of almost a thousand public radio stations in the U.S. Endi