Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Haiti during the past thirty years have addressed a broad list of critical needs, including healthcare, education, sanitation, micro-loans and agricultural assistance at the community, city or local and regional levels.
Simply put, NGOs have done a job the Haitian government was not equipped to do. There have been ten presidents of the country since 1990 and several coups. International embargos, led by the United States, and donor fickleness led to an ebb and flow of tightly controlled donor dollars—meaning that foreign assistance often bypassed the Haitian government for NGOs out of fear of corruption, lack of capacity and deficient regulations and controls.
With private funding from donors, we have been able to mitigate the impact of the political, financial and security turmoil in Haiti to have a consistent presence and focus. Paul Collier stated that there are too many NGOs in Haiti, one for every 970 Haitians, and said we should all be concerned about that high a number. Not true. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has an extraordinarily high need for assistance. For the sake of comparison, 1.4 million non-profits exist in the United States or approximately one for every 228 Americans. Having a large number of local civic groups located in one country is obviously not necessarily a bad thing.
NGOs in Haiti have built the capacity of local organizations and staff and provided for the needs of a population despite the fits and starts of international financial assistance and support.
Rather than seeing NGOs as a problem, as many critics of foreign assistance do, we call upon the U.S. government and other donors to build upon the successes of our community, engage our staff, their skills, knowledge and leadership to help address the overwhelming needs of Haiti. NGOs are part of the solution, not the problem.
