This text is part of the special section on International Cooperation
Is it possible to intervene in disaster areas while avoiding the pitfall of a foreign “savior” doing more harm than good? In Haiti, on the ruins left by the 2010 earthquake, then in the wake of the violent hurricane Matthew In 2016, the NGO Development and Peace – Caritas Canada launched several house construction projects with its local partner ITECA (Institute of Technology and Animation). Beyond the humanitarian emergency, the objective is to aim for long-term development through the involvement of local communities.
After a first project in 2011-2012 which will see the construction of 400 houses in Gressier, in the district of Port-au-Prince, largely funded by the former Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), a second project is emerging in 2017 in the town of Cavaillon, in the south of the country. The budget is much more limited, and the approach different, as explained by Mary Durran, the organization’s program manager for Haiti: “We want to change the way things are done: the assistantship does a lot of damage by infantilizing people . Haitians must be encouraged to take their future into their own hands, by consulting them, taking their needs into account and involving them at all stages of the process. This is the key for our actions to continue, long after our departure. Humanitarian work is all well and good in an emergency situation, but you have to make the link with long-term development. »
From coumbite to solidarity groups
In Cavaillon, the populations are therefore put to work. We start by forming solidarity groups, within which it is decided who will benefit from the new constructions (single-parent or multi-generational families, for example). The lucky ones have to finance about a third of the total cost of the house, which amounts to $10,000: they borrow money to buy materials, pay labor, etc. They dig the foundations themselves, and locally trained masons lay the bricks. the coumbite, collective work of the peasants, comes back to life in this construction project: we work together at one, then at the other.
Humanitarian aid is all well and good in an emergency, but you have to make the link with long-term development
However, the challenges are many. Everything is more complicated: the materials are delivered when the workforce is not ready, or the materials are delayed when the team is there; the materials have to be transported in rural sections that are almost inaccessible by road, especially in rainy weather; corruption attempts are numerous; masons trained on the job are not as efficient as professionals, and the whole thing stretches out over many months… much longer than it would take to lay brand new, turnkey houses, without involving anybody.
Sacrifices and Accountability
But in 2019, 18 to 20 months after the start of the work, the satisfaction is great: 25 houses have come out of the ground, more than 300 have been repaired. The population is proud of the work accomplished. “People made a lot of sacrifices to build their houses, it empowered them; the project has also had the effect of developing local construction expertise and strengthening all the community organizations in the region, which in turn become capable of supporting local authorities in the event of disasters”, explains Mary Durran.
The strengthening of the capacities of the State, thanks to the support of close-knit and effective communities, is one of the reasons for satisfaction at the end of this project. When the earth shook again in the south of Haiti, in August 2021, the most organized communities were quickly able to establish detailed assessments (human, material, agricultural losses) that very few official authorities would have. been able to quantify because of the difficulties of access to remote places or their chronic lack of means. The earthquake will also have confirmed that these houses, originally designed to withstand only hurricanes, also held up in the event of an earthquake.
“People on the ground told us ‘everything is destroyed, everywhere, there are only a few houses left standing.’ They were ours,” recalls the project coordinator. Thanks to their materials and their construction techniques, these houses designed by a Haitian engineer from the ITECA team have resisted perfectly and are now in high demand in rural communities, despite their increasing cost ($15,000), fed between others by inflation.
Faced with enormous needs, Development and Peace is therefore relaunching the project, to extend it in the coming months to four other municipalities around Cavaillon: Les Cayes, Saint-Louis du Sud, Maniche and Aquin. Ten houses are planned initially, more if the funds raised allow it.
As hurricanes promise to be more and more destructive in the Caribbean under the effect of the warming of the oceans, the question of climate justice is becoming urgent: “In Quebec, we can pollute without worrying about the effects of our way of life, without fear of a hurricane or other disaster. But, in Haiti, people are really vulnerable: they bear the brunt of the consequences of the pollution of others,” recalls Mary Durran. The figures indeed speak for themselves: according to Global Footprint Network, Haiti is one of the countries in the world whose ecological footprint is closest to zero.