Gender in Haiti: Review of the Literature

This is a much expanded version of two shorter blogs, ‘A Short Note about Gender in Haiti‘ and ‘More on Gender in Haiti.’ It sums up the radical misunderstanding that seemingly all NGOs and journalists as well as many scholars have presented of gender in Haiti before and after the earthquake.

Vulnerability Targeting in Haiti Report (WFP & CNSA 2015)

This study was commissioned by CNSA with the financial and logistic support of WFP and FAO. The objective was to examine the processes that NGO and governmental agencies employ to select beneficiaries of social assistance programs in rural Haiti. The task responds to needs associated with current humanitarian aid and development programs such as: EdeRead More

Children of Haiti: The Haitian Restavek and Child Slavery

The cry ‘child slavery’ grabbed world attention in 1998 when Haitian-born Jean-Robert Cadet published his shocking autobiography, From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, in which he recounted his life as a restavek, the Haitian Creole word for child domestic servant. As the Cadet Foundation website tells potential donors, “As a restavek he lost hisRead More

History of NGOs and Disaster in Haiti

If there’s a milestone year when NGOs began arriving in Haiti that year is 1954, when Hurricane Hazel struck the island. Hazel would go on record as the most destructive storm in Western history. Haiti got the worst of it. Hazel stalled over the country for three days, pounded the mountains and plains with overRead More

Haiti Earthquake Media Exaggerations: Violence, Murder & Mayhem

This is a chapter from a book that I am wrote, the Great Haiti Humanitarian Aid Swindle (2017). I originally published as it is here on Open Salon in 2011. I think it’s important because it summarizes the role that the mainstream media played inciting panic over insecurity after the earthquake. Anyone interested inRead More

Anthropology of NGOs Part II: History of Accountability in Haiti NGO Sector

This is the second part of a three part series about accountability in the NGO sector. In Part I, I examined NGO accountability globally. In this article I trace the history of NGO accountability in Haiti. In Part III, I provide recommended actions to increase accountability among NGOs in Haiti and make them more effective.Read More

Anthropology of NGOs Part I: History of NGOs and Accountability

This is the first part of a three part series about accountability in the NGO sector. Here I examine NGO accountability globally. In Part II, I trace the history of NGO accountability in Haiti. And in Part III, I provide recommended actions to increase accountability among NGOs in Haiti and make them more effective.

OCHA Clusters in Haiti: Bureaucratic Path to Extinction

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 workerRead More

Gender in Haiti: Short Note on Misrepresentation of Gender in Haiti

Beverly Bell, author of the acclaimed book, Walking on Fire (2001), and one of the most vigilant contributors to the gender struggle in Haiti, illustrates how many feminist activist-scholars have tended to obfuscate gender issues in Haiti when she writes, “Haitian women place at the absolute bottom in female-male life expectancy differential, incidence of teenRead More

Gender in Haiti: More on Gender in Haiti

This is a longer version of the blog “short note on gender in Haiti.” I’ve expanded it in part because I don’t think the other blog was fair to Beverly Bell. It appeared that I was singling her out and she is by no means the first or only writer-scholar to project a Western partriarchicalRead More

Ethnography-of-NGOs-in-Haiti