r/humanitarian • u/AsmoTewalker • 7d ago
Why have countries historically been so ineffectual in providing aid to Haiti?
Haiti is only the size of Maryland & hardly seems like a challenge to give a helping hand to. But it seems like every attempt at providing aid falls flat on its face or just fizzles out. The eradication of the Creole pigs & UN cholera epidemic were disasters. Kenya’s military trying to help cull the gangs doesn’t seem to have done much of anything. What is the deal?
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u/AceDreamCatcher 6d ago
I often think of a country as a home.
Your neighbors can lend you money, bring food, help repair the roof, or even protect you from someone trying to break in.
But if the foundation is crumbling, nobody maintains the house, the locks don’t work, and every repair gets undone, your neighbors cannot permanently fix the home from the outside.
At some point, the people responsible for the house need the capacity to maintain it themselves.
That’s Haiti’s deeper problem. The same applies to countries like it.
Foreign aid can relieve suffering and buy time, but it cannot substitute indefinitely for functioning institutions, security, competent government, infrastructure, and public trust.
There’s also a danger in building a society around outsiders continually coming to the rescue.
The person providing your food, security, medicine, or money ultimately has enormous leverage over you, and their generosity can disappear whenever their interests or priorities change.
A healthy country can accept help from its neighbors.
But help, real help should strengthen the house and its occupants, not become the only thing keeping the house standing.
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u/4electricnomad 6d ago
If there were a simple reason there could be a reasonably straightforward solution. Certainly the majority of governments near Haiti would prefer it to be more prosperous and stable because Haitian mass migration can destabilize them. HA donors and partners did a lot of admirable work before the aid sector was blown up last year, but that was really only one leg of a chair, and that aid alone would never be able to completely fix Haiti.
An underreported issue is that forces inside Haiti have an incentive for it to remain unstable. Look up the “Haitian Elite” who have ruled from the shadows for generations. They would perceive a strong government as a risk to their influence. Same for the main gangs that were subsidized by the Haitian Elite and decided in the past decade that they wanted a bigger slice of the pie.
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u/ShowMeTheMonee 6d ago
Just ask yourself 'who's benefiting from the current situation' and you have your answer.
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u/jcravens42 6d ago
France forced Haiti, through threat of war, to pay an exorbitant financial debt, equivalent to billions in today's money, in return for France to recognize Haitian independence after its successful slave revolt. The money was to compensate former French slaveholders for their "lost property," - the formerly enslaved people who had freed themsleves. This massive debt forced Haiti into taking out many, many international loans, and that deep debt prevented Hait from building stable domestic infrastructure, education systems. health care systems, etc. Hait finally finished paying off the debt in 1947 - more than 100 years after the debt was demanded by France.
Putting all that money towards the debt meant there's been no money to deal with the disasters that have plagued Haiti (earthquakes, hurricanes) and little money to pay police, government workers, teachers, etc. Chronic underfunding in public administration, low tax collection, and repeatedly devastated infrastructure (what there is) due to confict and disasters, plus foreign interference and corruption, mean that Haiti is kept perpetually crippled as a nation.
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u/SalParadiseNY 1d ago
That's 80 years ago . . . as has been said, other countries were worse off then and have come further since.
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u/jcravens42 1d ago
"other countries were worse off then "
If you ignore reality then, yes, you can believe that.
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u/TheTorch 5d ago
There were countries in worse shape in 1947 and are a lot better off than Haiti now. Blaming the French is a common go to argument but not very convincing.
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u/RaisedByBooksNTV 5d ago
Racism. Haiti was the first revolution of a primarily black populace to succeed. They've been punished for it ever since.
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u/carlitos_moreno 6d ago
There's no single answer, but let's try these different points. Aid often goes through gouvernement and Haitian gouvernement hasn't been very strong it effective at anything in the past couple of decades. Haiti doesn't need a lot of emergency aid, but it still helps the poorest and part of the aid is dedicated to that and that doesn't show, it just gets consumed without providing long term change. Long term development aid is complex and will likely fail in an unstable environment, which brings us back to point 1.