It is one month after the earthquake and I am sitting in the restaurant of a chic colonial era hotel using the wireless. There are two other men nearby. They are seated several tables apart having a loud cross-restaurant conversation about their respective attempts to help Haiti. They are a special kind of missionary/aid worker seen all too often here in Haiti. It is their first time here, they know little about the country, less about it’s history, don’t speak the language, but if people would just listen to them they could save Haiti and everyone who lives here. I’m praying they don’t talk to me.
But at some point it happens. The loonier of the two asks me a question and sure enough, three minutes into the conversation he is telling me that his mentors are Confucius, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. I am thinking, It’s worse than I expected, rolling my eyes–to myself—shutting down my laptop, and preparing my exit. But before I get away–and this is what I want to tell you–he is saying that the whole aid industry is symptomatic of a “socio-Darwinian dead end.” I am fitting my laptop into its case, “like the dinosaurs,” he is saying, “this strategy won’t survive.” I am zipping up the case. “We are on a path of institutional evolution that’s maladaptive.” I stand up and slip the computer case strap over my shoulder. “It will be like one of those branches on a phylogenetic tree where a species simply sputters out of existence.” And now I have to pause. He might be crazy. And I am definitely leaving lest I get into a real conversation with him. But he’s got a point. I’ve been working on just this topic. I wrote a book about wasted aid in Haiti and more recently I’ve been putting it into perspective with research on NGOs elsewhere in the world. What I’m learning is that Haiti is just one part of a worldwide trend in NGO fiascos, one that may well be summed up as failed socio-evolutionary adaptation.
With 9 million NGO workers and 1.1 trillion dollars annually spent in the sector the massive emergence of NGOs endeavoring to alleviate world poverty, unfair government practices, abuse, and environmental degradation has been called the “fifth estate” (Eizenstat 2004), “a boom in civil society” (SustainAbility2003:2), a post WWII phenomenon equated with “the rise of the nation State” (Salamon et al. 2003:6-7). The sector promised to end world suffering, educate the illiterate, cloth the naked, feed the hungry, cure the ill, make men and women equal. They were going to fix the environment, offset global warming, check big government. But the sector is sick. Waste and corruption plague it. As much or more than 50% of all aid to impoverished countries is embezzled; there are those NGOs, many of them, that collude in corporate dumping, market takeovers and tax evasion; those that collaborate in covert military operations and even terrorism; others that work deliberately to accomplish political objectives; those that deceive and disregard the interest of people they are supposed to be helping.[i] Until recently no one and nothing seemed disposed to do anything about all this. Indeed, quite to the contrary, when Interpol caught some of the world’s major NGOs red-handed in a calculated double dipping scam the result was cover-up and government intervention. Perhaps worse than anything else is that those NGOs that are sincere, unwittingly protect the corrupt, deceitful, and ulterior-motivated with a cloak of holier than-thou-ness. Most NGO directors think they have a moral prerogative that exempts them from accountability. In a University of Warwick survey of 600 NGO directors, most respondents gave no thought to their own accountability (Scholte 2003); the Global Accountability Project (GAP) found that many NGO directors considered NGOs above accountability (GAP 2009)
So the loon who thinks that he is some kind of messiah has a point, there is some widespread and very maladaptive behavior going on in the NGO sector. And the NGOs are beginning to feel the evolutionary pressure. Extinction might be a mere speck on the horizon, but it is arguably out there.In what some call the “war against NGOs,” right wing political groups and some private sector entities have assailed the sector’s credibility with increasing success. Financial support for NGOs peaked in the late 1990s and has been declining ever since. That’s sad. Especially when one considers that the end losers are the poor, sick, hungry, and illiterate. But what’s also sad is that it’s our fault. We, the well meaning and honest of the NGO sector, have allowed arrogance to check our progress. It’s what William Easterly (2006) calls “the other tragedy of the world’s poor.” The original tragedy being the afflictions of hunger, treatable and preventable diseases, infant mortality, and unnecessarily high illiteracy rates; the ‘other tragedy’ is the failure to do enough about it. In other words, the failure of the NGO sector. [ii]
This other tragedy screams out from recent Haitian history. For over fifty years now, Haiti has arguably been that country with more NGOs per person than any country on the planet. But things have gotten steadily worse, not better. Even before the earthquake the country was in downward disaster spiral: the economy wrecked, the government inert, production in almost every sector a small fraction of what it had been when the NGOs first began arriving. Indeed, Haiti is less developed, far less, than it was fifty years ago. I have argued elsewhere that the reason is precisely because of the NGOs. Their massive and indiscriminate distribution of US surplus food (food aid) helped destroy domestic agricultural production; their used cloths helped destroy the domestic textile industry; their monopoly of aid and private expenditure diverted money that could have reinforced the public sector, indeed, that could have helped build and maintain it. They have turned Haitians away from solving their own problems and created a nation of dependents. And if you don’t believe all that I am saying; even if you believe that NGOs could not possibly be at fault in Haiti, the facts are that the same problems described above–inefficiency, waste, greed, corruption, and perhaps more than anything else, the failure to do anything about it–have checked NGO progress in the fight against disease, hunger, and declining production in Haiti.[iii]
Yet, and here is why I can’t agree with the loon, we know the solution. The solution is accountability. I am not the only one who thinks so. Virtually anyone who has worked in the aid industry will tell you the same: if there were a mechanism to identify projects that are sincere and successful we could channel money away from the crooks and get the money to where it does good. And in recent years think-tanks, newspapers and parliaments have resounded with calls for accountability in the NGO sector. And that’s why I can’t waste my time agreeing with the loon. Because I know that everyone knows that we need accountability. We need some kind of institution that regulates and verifies the activities of NGOs and sanctions those that are either criminal, inefficient, or simply wasteful, and re-directs the money to those projects that work. We need a system that rewards efficiency and success, a type of Standard and Poor’s of NGOs and NGO projects, a dependable source that donors could use to monitor their donations or to decide where to donate in the first place. I also know that there has been a ground-swelling movement in Haiti to do just that. [iv]
Even before the quake a radical change was taking place. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was appointed as Secretary of State. She directed one her most trusted staff members–Cheryl Mills who some have come to call the Iron Lady– to take on the task of turning Haiti around. In 2009 the United Nations appointed Bill Clinton as Special Envoy to Haiti. In turn, ex-president Clinton appointed as Deputy Special Envoy Paul Farmer, Haiti’s most erudite and busy champion and traditionally among the most vocal critics of US policy in the country. “The stars,” as so many Haiti watchers noted at the time, “were lining up.” These are the architects of a new US and international policy to Haiti. Their ascension to power vis a vis Haiti is what brought many us back into believing that maybe, just maybe, the aid system can work. Meanwhile the stars continued to line up. Haitian President Preval with the support of the UN had brought political stability back to the streets of Port-au-Prince. His Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive was also Minister of Planning, the very ministry that oversees NGOs, and he was a strong advocate of NGO accountability. Indeed, it seemed that everywhere you turned the issue of NGO accountability was a priority. There were conferences and meetings where NGO accountability was a center piece. Massive funds were allocated to develop the country. Change was imminent. Then came the earthquake and while it was a terrible disaster it seemed to cement the inevitability of massive change. Sympathetic individuals, companies, church congregations, schools, and governments around the world pledged over 10 billion dollars to Haiti. Organizations such as the American Red Cross and Oxfam called it ‘an opportunity to change Haiti.’ Spontaneous Aid Watchdogs appeared. And perhaps more than anything else, the UN vowed to coordinate and follow the aid. Real hope had arrived. Things were going to happen. Special Envoy Bill Clinton became co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission which was granted temporary control over the Haitian political decision making process with respect to money from donors and projects to be carried out. The US representative was none other than Cheryl Mills, the Iron Lady; Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive was a member; and Phillip Becoulet, the man who had been at the forefront of the accountability movement in Haiti for 29 years was appointed as the representative for NGOs. They were going to count every NGO in Haiti; they were going to audit every charitable organization that had an annual budget of more than $500,000; they would approve and follow-up on all the projects. Yes, things were going to change. The UN made a massive administrative move into place, bringing all the necessary resources and expertise from the greatest international organization the planet has every known. It was finally going to happen. The loon couldn’t possible be right.[v]
*****
It is almost one year since the earthquake and I wander through a maze of white containers, knocking on doors. I am lost. Except for a different number on each door, all the containers look the same. The windows are obscure, you can’t see into them, and they seem small. But when a door opens a complete office appears inside: desks, Haitian secretaries, AC units buzzing. Complete self contained office-units, row after row of them, airlifted out of the developed world and plopped down next to Haiti’s main airport in what an American journalist friend of mine calls a trailer park. This is the UN Log Base, the brain of the emergency aid and recovery effort. It’s been here for over 8 months.
As I walk, I pass Haitian security guards, Haitian maids, Haitian grounds keepers. I also pass another population. I pass clean upper class people from every developed country in the Western world. Most of them are young, in their twenties, thirties, a few in their forties, even fewer in their fifties and so on. Many are attractive; all are well dressed. I know their clothing, their walks, their poise, their gestures. I am one of them. We are from the intellectual socially conscious class of the developed world. We are progressive minded graduates of major universities. We are here to change Haiti. We are experts in aid. If you talk to one of us you find that we are lawyers, social scientists, social workers, educators, journalists, MDs, PhDs, MBAs. Most of us earn between 6 and 10 grand per month. If you take offense to that we will tell you that is less than what we would make back home. The difference, however–and we often reserve discussing this with strangers–is that we can keep it all. No taxes, no parking fees, our rents are paid, we get stipends for food and drink. That makes it damn good money. In three years, some of us will go home with a quarter of a million dollars. But why not, we are making an enormous sacrifice being here. So I wander on through the rows of white trailers.
I am looking for what is called a “cluster meeting,” or what every other English speaker I know in Haiti has come to refer to as a “cluster fuck.” It’s a UN coordinated meeting, one where in the 10 months since the loon told me that international aid was an adaptation on course for extinction the UN has been trying to bring together all the NGOs and other organizations who work in particular areas of need. They have a cluster for everything. One for shelters, one for camps, one for rubble, one for health, one for sanitation, one for water. By now they surely have one for Cholera and soon they will probably will have one for elections—if they don’t already. Since the earthquake these clusters have been the heart of the coordination and accountability effort. It is to them you would go if you wanted to understand why we are spending at the rate of $1.3 billion per year to maintain tent cities, many of which have neither Haitian nor aid workers sleeping in them but rather hundreds of tents that people pretend to inhabit when a caravan of aid workers show up; it is to them you would go if you wanted to understand why a model camp with 518 tents and fifty toilets and showers was never inhabited—by anyone- while across the street one of the largest tent cites with 51,000 people only has 200 latrines (one for every 255 people); this is also where you would come if you wanted to know why after almost one year we have only built 19,197 of the intended 200,000 temporary shelters; or if you wanted to know why many of those temporary shelters have been erected in empty fields, far from any town, job, school, or even source of potable water, why like the tents, many are empty save for a few people there to guard claims or in case an aid vehicle shows up with something to give away; this is where you would come to find out why the major government designated and UN approved resettlement areas are full not so much of refugees from the earthquake but immigrants from other cities or the countryside and renters in the city who have staked a claim for free land; where you might ask why the night before what seemed the imminent landfall of a hurricane the government ordered all the people to flee those designated areas (five of the six sites were in flood zones); why less than 5% of the rubble has been cleared from the city or why after ten months no one is sure if the rubble can be recycled; why when Cholera hit (which overwhelming evidence suggests was brought in by an unscreened UN soldier from Nepal) it took three weeks for the aid agencies to decide what to put on the poster that would educate Haitians about how to prevent the disease; why none of the NGOs addressing cholera would tell the other agencies what areas they were working in; why to this day we do not know if 217,000 people died in the earthquake or if it was the much more realistic figure of 60,000. Yes, the cluster meetings are at the heart of what can be only be summed up as an inexplicable bureaucratic tangle, or if you prefer, a massive “cluster fuck.” And we all know it. At night over beers, in a fine restaurant, or in the seclusion of the average US$3,000 per month apartment, I’ve listened as some of the most important participants in these meetings describe them in terms such as, “a total waste of resources,” “ridiculous,” “exercises in getting nothing done.” Why, when talking about the meetings one NGO director bends over, sinks her fingers into her hair and says, “I can’t do this, I just can’t do it anymore.” Another says, “I mean, if it were children that we were talking about I could understand. But it’s not. These are rooms full of the world’s leading experts.” Even coordinators have discussed motions to declare their “cluster meetings” veritable “cluster fucks.” But no one has. And no one will. And the reason is because more important than anything for us foreign experts is not whether we are accomplishing anything, but that we show that we are coordinating, that we are trying to be accountable. Our jobs depend on it. I’m one of them and so, cluster fuck or no cluster fuck, I am going to find the meeting. It’s my job, and I’m making good money.
I finally find it.
The trailer is the same windowless white style as the others but it is larger than most. Inside there are partitioned off areas with conference tables for meetings, areas with desks and computers; there are projectors and easels with paper for illustrating points and writing down lists that everyone in the room can see. It’s a veritable think tank. Soon the meeting starts and sure enough, it’s a veritable cluster fuck. There are thirty people in the room. I start calculating: given the snarled street traffic that characterizes a city full of thousands of aid workers and aid vehicles, we are each devoting half our day to this meeting, that means half a day salary; I add per diem, rent, chauffeur, gas, cost of the car, security, and I conclude that the cost of this meeting is at least US$30,000. The speaker is talking French, something that the French aid workers have tried to make mandatory– never mind that only 5% of the local population actually speak it (indeed, for 200 years its functioned as a means of keeping the poor out of the political decision making process). A look around the room shows that maybe two people are Haitian. At least half of the aid workers don’t’ speak French either so they are trying to listen to an English translator who is not very good but loud enough to keep everyone else distracted. Meanwhile the French director of a French project is describing the benefits the project will bring to a population of poor Haitians in one of the highest crime barrios of the city. But the project has not been funded yet and he finishes on what seems a hopeful note that someone in the room can help them get funding. When the guy finally finishes talking everyone seems relieved. I certainly am. There are only three comments, two announcements—all in English. Then everyone is headed for the door. Upon contact with the fresh air more than half of them light a cigarette, break into small groups, and start chatting.
As I am walking out, past the smokers, through the trailers, and back out to dust choked road where in another couple weeks thousands of frustrated Haitian demonstrators from impoverished neighborhoods will gather and protest a US and UN sponsored election that was so poorly planned and so poorly prepared that many people could not find their names on the voting lists, others could not find a polling station, others didn’t know where to go, and many of the people who genuinely lived in camps couldn’t vote at all because there were no polling stations for them, I am thinking of how we coordinated nothing. There was no exchange of ideas, no planning, no conclusions, no cooperation with a cadre of Haitian counterparts or even any experts on Haiti. And even if there were, would any of it ever get carried out? And if it did, who would check to make sure?. I think about how it is almost a year now and with the government and politics and elections starting to take hold, a simmering anger beginning to brew among a population increasingly disgusted with the failed international response, anger with seeing the foreigners driving by in their SUV, asking the same questions, making the same promises, and doing little more than delivering water, giving jobs cleaning streets, hope is slipping away. Indeed, it’s gone. I think back to the day at the hotel with the guy who thinks he’s a messiah and I know, the nut was right: we’re on a bureacratic path to extinction.
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[i] Many examples of all the cited ‘extra-charitable activities’ abound, here are a but few: For estimates of aid money lost to corruption in Africa see Bovard 2005. For OLAF’s investigation of widespread systematic fraud in the form of double dipping among major NGOs, Monitor Digest 2005. For summary of major NGO fraud for 1998 to 2000 see Gibelman, et al. 2000. For the Philippine fraud cases that ignited the push to found the PCNC—by many accounts the most successful NGO regulatory agency in the world– see Sangco 2006 (p.4, 20). For a couple examples and discussion of involvement in covert military operations and terrorism see Snow (2009), Shenon, (2008) Agee (2003), for such involvement in Haiti see Hallward (2008). For dumping and commandeering NGOs for political and business agendas Oxfam International (2005); Shah (2005) is a great source for more references. For such involvement in Haiti see Hallward (2008). For the disregard NGOs have for the wishes of recipients, see Burger and Owens (2008) study of 300 Uganda NGOs in which they found that despite claims to the contrary, 69% of the NGOs did not consult the community before or after they initiated an activity and 25% of those who claimed to provide financial information either lied about it or did not, upon request, do so. For secrecy see Cariño (2002) who concluded her study of NGO accountability in the Philippines with the observation that many guard their financial information like they were “state secrets.” See also CODE-NGO (2000) who only got 50% of its members to provide profile information, some explaining that that they did not want their information to get into the “wrong hands.” Examples of waste, corruption, indifference, are Maren 1997; Edwards and Hulme 1998:9-19; CODE-NGO, 2000; Marschall 2002; Klein, 2003; Munyemesha 2003; Jordan 2003; Dombrowski 2006; Laurent 2009
[ii] With funds falling, the public exasperated, and what has been called “the war against NGOs” waging stronger than ever, it behooves us to heed Kumi Naidoo, Secretary-General of Civicus, who warns NGOs to “perform or perish” (SustainAbility 2003:10). Indeed, my argument and that made by others cited herein is that entire NGO sector must adapt lest the poor experience a third tragedy: the decline of the NGO sector before it has eliminated poverty and helped humanity achieve a balance with the environment. See Hardisty and Furdon (2004) for the war on NGOs and more attempts to adapt by providing evidence of accountability.
[iii] For NGO activity in Haiti and evaluation of the negative impact see Krisoff and Panerelli (2010), Schwartz (2008), Schuller (2007), Morton (1998).
[iv] Noteworthy ‘cries for accountability’ include Knight et al. (1996); Sphere Project (2000); SustainAbility (2009:49); specifically for a summary of the crisis of accountability see Ewards (2000), Slim (2002); Shiras (2003), Bonda (2009(; Barder (2009); Savedoff and Levine (2006); McGann and Johnstone, (2006): 66; Bonbright with Batliwala1 (2007); Constantino (1997); Commonwealth Business Council (2003), Dombrowski (2006). In Haiti calls for accountability include, Krisoff and Panerelli (2010), Clinton (2009), Schwartz (2008), Schuller (2007), Morton (1998). The talk of accountability is such that Jordan (2003) foresees the prospects of an emerging “accountability industry” and at least one observer claims that there are self-regulatory schemes in over 40 countries (Naidoo, 2003).
However, in almost every developing country in the world NGO accountability is not yet a reality. With the exception of the sporadic monitoring and evaluation attached to aid from foreign States—most of which is self-monitoring and self-evaluation – one can count on the fingers of a single NGO director the serious efforts to regulate the 9 million NGO workers and 1.1 trillion dollars annually spent in the sector. A visit to the websites of these organizations reveals how painfully ineffective they have been. Of the estimated 1.2 million NGOs in India, Credibility Alliance has 308 members; Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP), an agency seeking a voluntary system of accountability for the 40,000 international NGOs has, after 6 years of existence, a mere 36 members; Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS)–the world’s leading for-profit inspection, verification, testing and certification company–has, after 6 years of existence, certified a grand total of 68 of the world’s approximately 10 million NGOs; USAID funded ForeignAID Ratings, also in existence for 6 years, has certified a grand total of three NGOs; and InterAction, in existence for five years and the most prominent international NGO regulatory agency, has a better but still discouraging record of 180 members.
Moreover, and this is a major point, until now attempts to make NGOs accountable have been overwhelming self-regulatory, self-monitoring and even self-certifying (see Songco 2003:11-13 for a summary). When evaluation and monitoring is in-house or conducted by “independent experts” paid for by the NGO in question it is emphatically not accountability; and seeking approval from a consultant hired and paid by the organization that seeks the approval is a gross conflict of interest
Similarly, until now NGO leaders have reversed the logical order of making the sector accountable. Rather than first tackling what Avina (1993) calls “short-term functional accountability”— checking to see that projects are really being carried out, that money is not stolen or squandered, and that intended recipients are benefiting – NGO regulatory schemes have skipped the basics and jumped straight to “strategic accountability” – planning for long term development, goal setting, and coordination between NGOs. Meanwhile, no one even knows how many NGOs are out there: India, for example, might have one million (Credibility Alliance 2008) or maybe 1.2 million (India Guidestar 2009), or maybe five million (ibid). Russia may have 260,000 (Chicago Tribune 2008), or maybe 450,000 (Flounders 2006). Even Britain could have as many as 500,000 NGOs (Adair 1999); or maybe only the 170,000 that are registered (University of Kent 2008). Not surprisingly, Haiti suffers the same problem. One month before the earthquake Bill Clinton said in a speech that there were 10,000 NGOs in Haiti. He got the data, probably second hand, from an often cited World Bank (1998) report. But when I checked the source it was only an endnote and it didn’t say 10,000; what is said was that, “FAO reports that the most reliable estimates concerning the number of NGOs in Haiti put them at 800. Some advance the figure of 2000. The number of NGOs registered with the Ministry of Planning is 170 (FAO, Vol. 1, 1995).” Oh well. In 2008 the United States Institute for Peace said 3,000; when I asked them for their source it was Jean-Max Bellerive, Haitian Minister of Planning, who reported that that only 400 NGO’s were registered with the government but estimated that there are as many as 3,000. What he based that estimate no is unclear (almost certainly intuition). And none of this is to say anything about what is known about NGO performance, corruption, bad performance, and harmful projects. Need I say, little is known about those issues; and “little” is, to put it mildly, discouraging (see earlier endnote). But again, there is hope. And post earthquake Haiti at the moment that the nut was talking to me was the perfect example of that hope.
Having said that, here is a short summary of the history of accountability in Haiti.
Sometimes called the “Republic of NGOs” (United States Institute of Peace 2008), Haiti may indeed have more NGOs and charities per capita than any country on the planet. They began arriving after WWII. In 1981 USAID began bypassing what U.S. officials defined as an extremely corrupt Haitian government, US government aid dollars were subsequently delivered directly to international NGOs. Germany, Britain, and France followed suit and, in the words of Robert Lawless (1992), “Haiti soon became everybody’s favorite basket case.” But while individual NGOs educated children, drilled wells, planted trees, and saved tens of thousands of lives through vaccination and clinic programs; they accomplished little detectable change in the country as a whole. Haiti remains the most underdeveloped nation in the Western hemisphere and over the past three decades, precisely when NGO activity flourished, it sank further into abysmal poverty.…
The factors underlying the failure of the NGO sector in Haiti is the same lack of transparency, feedback, accountability, and coordination discussed above. While most aid workers in Haiti are sincere and well intentioned, the NGO sector as a whole is best described as an uncoordinated mass of organizations de facto unaccountable to any governing or regulatory institution, i.e. no accountants, no auditors, no verification or review of projects, no mechanism for systematic feedback from recipients, and no publication of poor or dishonest performance. But it is not because no one ever though about imposing order on what Robert Maguire (1981:14) calls, “a wave of development madness.” In 1981, the same year the U.S. decided to redirect aid from the government to the NGO sector, USAID financed the creation of an NGO umbrella organization called HAVA (Haitian Association of Voluntary Agencies). But instead of helping, HAVA itself became a prime example of the need for accountability. Here’s a summary,
The HAVA story begins in 1981 when, with its then 24-year-old French director at the helm, its chartered raison d’être was defined as, “an organism of coordination to sustain and reinforce the activities of NGOs working in Haiti” (see Mathurin 2008). Its first task was to create a database of NGOs working in Haiti.
In 1985– after a full five years of effort, and financing– the only thing HAVA had to show for itself was being ‘on the verge’ of inscribing on microfiche the data for 100 member NGOs (Fass 1990).
In that same year, 1985, the organization won its first Inter-American Foundation (IAF) contract. But it was a contract, not to ‘coordinate, sustain and reinforce the activities of NGOs working in Haiti,’ but rather for the provision of training, microcredit and legal services to the poor. In other words, nothing to do with accountability.
Over the next 10 years HAVA was given at least $1,149,353 of IAF funds, and perhaps money from other sources as well. No one really knows because, bolstering the point of what I am saying, there is no place to find out.
Meanwhile, in 1989, a point in time when most estimates of NGOs in Haiti were in the 1,000’s, HAVA still had less than 100 members on its list.
In year 2000, an IAF investigator reported to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that HAVA “only existed on paper” – no word on what happened to the microfiche.
The story does not end there.
In 2004, with HAVA still listed on the Internet as a viable entity, a new United Nations funded NGO umbrella organization was chartered, CLIO, ‘Le Cadre de Liaison Inter-ONG’.
CLIO was created with the same charter as HAVA, ‘to act as an organism of coordination to sustain and reinforce the activities of NGOs working in Haiti.’ It also had as its director the same French national, now 47 years old, (Mathurin 2008:13).
Perhaps not a surprise, CLIO accomplished little in making the NGO sector more accountable. In 2008, out of the thousands of NGOs in Haiti, it had 26 members. Indeed, rather than increase after being founded, its membership steadily declined.
In 2008, Concern Worldwide gave CLIO the money to conduct a study to try to figure out why it was unsuccessful in pulling the NGO community into a coordinated whole. What it discovered was that most NGO directors did not even know that CLIO exists.
Lest I be misunderstood, the point is not that the director of HAVA and CLIO is a bad person or responsible for the failings of these organizations. He is no more the cause of failure these organizations than Bill Clinton or his deputy, Paul Farmer , the author of this book, are responsible for the failure of the UN efforts in Haiti. The point is that something is seriously wrong with the system and the fact that this particular person remained at the helm of the most important accountability agencies while those same agencies failed to live up to expectations is symptomatic of the problem (note that he is also the NGO representative on the current IHRC).
Getting back to the issues at hand, the point for me isn’t the failure. The point is that we know what the failure is and so there was and maybe still is hope that we can correct the system. The lesson to be learned from the failure of HAVA and CLIO .has to do with the same lack of accountability seen elsewhere. First off, similar to overall failing of NGO accountability initiatives elsewhere in the world, HAVA and CLIO forsook “short-term functional accountability” and instead of focusing on a simple evaluation and feedback from specific projects, they focused on “long-term strategic accountability” (meaning meetings, planning, cooperation, self reports, good will and voluntary participation). In the process, they depended on the second major ingredient for failure: the disposition of NGOs to self-regulate and self-evaluate (Mathurin 2008). HAVA itself was never held accountable for not following up on the creation of an NGO database. The failure in this regard was such that 29 years after HAVA was charted and 5 years after CLIO was founded, the same director/president was still at the helm, of both organizations, the same one. And today there continues to be no mechanism for systematic evaluation of the actual work done (the projects rather than simply the NGOs); no comprehensive program to address the issue of project accountability, nor a definitive plan on how to go about evaluating transparency, efficiency and, more importantly than anything else, on-the-ground effectiveness and recipient satisfaction of the mass of projects operating throughout the country. But again, there was hope because even before the earthquake there was a massive ground swelling of support to make NGOs in Haiti accountable.
That hope is fast fizzling away. There was some effort. As of June 2nd-five months after the earthquake – OCHA listed 961 independent NGOs and United Nations sub-organizations working in Haiti. Similarly, the UN Office of the Special Envoy, had accumulated a directory of 832 of what they call Haitian Civil Societies They were going to audit every organization that received more than US$500,000 in donation.
[v] In April 2009 Donor’s conference in Washington D.C. Bill Clinton and participants emphasized NGO accountability as a principal goal; they did it again in the October Diaspora Unity Congress in Sunny Isles Florida and in virtually every other major conference since. Haitian Minister of Planning Jean-Max Bellerive, who became Prime Minister in December 2009 has been a champion of the call for accountability as has been UN Deputy Special Envoy Paul Farmer who discussed the importance of NGO accountability at the Caribe Hotel in Port-au-Prince on October 4th 2009 (Herz 2009). At the same time Hillary Clinton had been assailing the waste of monies spent on development –and not accounted for–by USAID in places like Pakistan. Since the earthquake the issue of NGO accountability in Haiti has risen to a pitched scream among those journalists and even politicians following the issue (to mention only a few, Clibbon 2010; Monzingo 2010; Nienaber 2010; US Congressional Committee on Foreign Relations 2010).
