Sustainable Development Solutions: Rationale

It is relatively simple for a combination of national efforts and international investments and technical assistance to achieve local and short-term project success on a small scale when using proven technology – Haiti is literally dotted with very small and widely spaced internationally financed sustainable development projects such as village scale water supplies, farmer woodlots and health clinic solar panels. The central problem, however, is that such projects generally do not have any mechanism for replication or ensuring sustainability once foreign finances are exhausted. As a result, the great majority of the population do not benefit from these projects and the very localised benefits also fade with time as equipment breaks down.

Additionally, very small internationally financed or managed projects tend to be very expensive in terms of the cost per beneficiary due to the high and relatively fixed costs of project based international assistance (international travel, salaries, design, mobilization and familiarization costs etc.). As such the existing “ad hoc small project” approach does not present a scaleable model – with limited resources it is simply not reasonable or sustainable to expand such an inefficient approach on a national scale.

The prioritization, funding and implementation of sustainable development solutions in Haiti is currently problematic. Project selection and funding are either thematically or geographically biased, and they are predominantly based on short-term development and marketing efforts. There is often little transparency regarding the actual performance, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability of completed or ongoing projects. The impact of projects are not always evaluated well and the results of any such evaluation are rarely communicated to the general public. Many imported ideas and technologies are not suitable for Haiti or are introduced in a flawed manner,  which often means that the limited available funds are not effectively used for maximum efficacy. Furthermore, there is currently no real high-level quality control or prioritization with respect to investments in sustainable development in Haiti. Excellent ideas do exist, but they often struggle for survival and recognition in the current competitive aid environment. 

Haiti currently represents only an estimated 0.9% of the combined population of 851 million for the 48 Least Developed Countries on the UNDP Human Development Index. In this context, many of the sustainability problems of Haiti are not unique; some of the challenges facing the people of Haiti today have been fully or partly addressed or solved elsewhere in the developing world. Some of the proven foreign strategies have the potential to be successfully introduced to Haiti, however the importation process itself is fraught with difficulty. For example, the establishment of new supply chains and local centres of expertise are generally costly, slow and complex processes, and success is not assurred in the absence of multi-year sponsorship.