Why Is it Taking So Long to Rebuild Haiti?

Why Is it Taking So Long to Rebuild Haiti?

“The glass is 10 percent full,” says Nigel Fisher, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for reconstruction efforts in Haiti. “It’s now time to tackle the remaining 90 percent.” Yet more than two years after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and after billions of recovery dollars pledged by the United Nations, foreign governments, and private aid organizations, 10 percent full sounds appalling. An estimated 420,000 Haitians still live in tent camps. The cholera outbreak that began in October 2010 has killed more than 7,000 and infected more than 500,000. (In March, U.N. special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton acknowledged that the disease was brought to the island by U.N. peacekeepers from South Asia.) Billions of dollars in promised aid money has yet to be doled out, let alone spent; for instance, only 54.5 percent of the $4.5 billion pledged for 2010/2011 reconstruction at a New York City donor conference in March 2010 has been disbursed.

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