This post deals with the impact of a welfare system in Haiti. USAID, the World Bank, and WFP have proposed a type of welfare system for Haiti’s most vulnerable (see KORE LAVI program). While there are definitively many vulnerable people in Haiti, the idea of an institutionalized safety-net brings up questions that should be addressed. This post presents eight of the most important of these questions with the intention of highlighting the more significant complications that come with attempting to implement a social welfare system in Haiti. Before elaborating, however, some readers may be more interested in other relative topics regarding household studies in Haiti and can refer to these posts:
Eight Questions About a Welfare System in Haiti
The rural population in Haiti is generally poor as a group. Although the data is unreliable–to say the least–the extremely poor are estimated at 67% of the rural population (people living on less than $1.25 per day); those living on less than US$2 per day make up 88% percent of the rural population. What these World Bank poverty thresholds mean is often the difference between a person living on USD $1.24 per day versus on living $1.26 per day. Moreover, the rural Gini coefficients for Haiti, hovering around 36, are largely attributable to differences between provincial rural areas versus village. The extremity of the poverty and the fact that such a massive bulk of the rural population is included brings up the first of a series of questions that, in view of the geographic homogeneity of poverty in Haiti (see this post), should call into question the strategies that UN and NGOs currently use to target the poor. All this is dealt with extensively elsewhere (see report on vulnerability in Haiti). Here I simply want to ask eight questions that I think highlight the misunderstandings humanitarian aid agencies have about the Haitian poor.
Question 1: If so many people are so close to margin survival (i.e. extremely poor), how is it they survive recurrent disasters and shocks?
The answer is not because the NGOs keep saving them. If the Haitian population were dependent on international aid, they would have been dead a long time ago (see Travesty in Haiti and The Great Humanitarian Aid Swindle)
Answer: For 200 years it has been the household—and not international aid agencies—that has functioned as the primary social security mechanism for men, women and children in Haiti. Families were able to maintain themselves so close to the margin of survival for so long because of dependency on productive strategies organized around the household. These strategies involve a multiplicity of risk averting-endeavors, specifically agriculture, livestock rearing, fishing, and charcoal and craft production, all interlinked through dependency on the regional rotating market system (see this). In this way, when we speak of social security and safety nets it might behoove us to redefine the household not so much as a unit of consumption, but as a unit of production (read this). When the household ceases to produce, or begins to go into deficit, its members draw on a second tier of social security, the social capital of individuals seen below (go here for a graphic summary of adaptation to vulnerability in Haiti).
Question 2: What happens, in the absence of aid agencies, when social capital is exhausted and the household can no longer continue as a productive enterprise?
Households are made up of individuals. These individuals have their own specific kinship linkages and social networks that they can turn for assistance when crisis strikes. For example, the typical rural Haitian child has a total of 35 uncles, aunts, grandparents, older siblings, half siblings, and godparents. Adults too have their linkages. They have extensive biological family; their own godparents as well as co-parent relations linked through their own children and godchildren; a woman may have links with more than one father of her children; a large minority of men (about 11 percent at any given moment in time) have more than one wife. All these linkages provide potential options in the event that a household must break up.
When a household is forced to break up because of crisis, this social capital for individuals, rather than households, comes into play. When a household faces an internal crisis that it cannot overcome, members rely on their personal safety nets. They go to live in other households, with other family; they migrate. Indeed, as in developed countries, the entire household may simply move, reconstituting itself in a new place where there are alternative economic opportunities.
It should also be understood that Haitian children, the greatest concern for most socially conscience aid workers, are readily incorporated into other productive households in Haiti or even across the border in the neighboring Dominican Republic (a main destination for many Haitians faced with economic crisis) as highly prized contributors to the labor pool, so much so that true orphans are almost impossible to find in Haiti and “orphanages” that thrive on donations for “orphans” are typically stocked with children who have parents, and in many cases middle class urban parents (see Schwartz 2012). Thus, the next question that should be asked is,
Question 3: If as a natural course of events households cease to exist when they are no longer productive, i.e. they breakup, should aid agencies and the Haitian State intercede, detecting those closest to the point of dissolution and providing subsidies to help maintain them, in effect, maintaining entities that are no longer viable and whose members would otherwise seek membership in productive households elsewhere?
Answer: First we can simply dispense with the notion that the Haitian State is going to do anything for anyone–other than the politicians and bureaucrats who manage to get control of it–since for at least 40 years it has been unable to meet its own budget without the assistance of other countries. Indeed, for all practical purposes here, the Haitian state does not exist, rather it is a proxy for the international aid community. So we can speak specifically about donor agencies that will fund either the Haitian State or the NGOs to care for households deemed unproductive and unable to care for themselves. The first problem is that the NGOs too have a horrific track record at actually alleviating poverty. The vast majority of past projects are utter failures. And even if they were not, the NGOs work on three and five year budgets, are largely funded by the US, EU, Canadian governments and the UN. Their priorities change with the political agendas of these countries. Their budgets can and often are cut off for political reasons or redirected to different priorities. So relying on the NGOs to provide a costly safety net for 1 million Haitians–as the World Bank/USAID/WFP/MAST are trying to do with the KORE LAVI program— is a risky endeavor. Indeed, the entire process is arguably a non sequitur, meaning it makes people more vulnerable. Specifically, if we are successful at creating a safety net for the poor and vulnerable households we will eliminate the incentive for the safety nets that already exist—the productive households and strong kinship linkages seen above–and thereby lay the foundation for catastrophe, i.e. by encouraging the proliferation of non-viable households that will face severe crisis in the likely event that in the future, international donors cannot or will not have the funds and will to sustain a safety net for these households. The point suggests yet another question critical to understanding the impact of targeting the most vulnerable,
Question 4: How stable is the group of households that comprise the most vulnerable? Is it the same people who we see at the bottom in 2017 that we see in 2018? To what extent has the composition of the poorest change from year to year?
If any study has addressed Question 4, I don’t know about it. We do know however that poverty in Haiti is relatively uniform across the entire country and that pockets of poverty tend to occur temporarily in response to ecological crisis (don’t believe me, read this). But it begs another question that will help us to answer question 4.
Question 5: What proportion of the most vulnerable households are vulnerable because the head is promiscuous, alcoholic, simply a bad parent, or someone who others in the community otherwise see as a burden and undeserving of aid?
It might be politically incorrect to acknowledge it, but we can assume that a portion of rural Haitian society has, like societies everywhere, at least some individuals who are lazy, wanton, violent, prone to steal from their neighbors, or otherwise burdensome to those around them and that at least some, if not many of those people, can consistently be found among the lowest rungs of the society–if not as a consequence of ostracism, then as consequence of their own dysfunctional behavior. Should we provide economic support to those people? This brings up yet another—perhaps politically incorrect but important– question,
Question 6: Does the community see those people as deserving of aid?
We have some insight from surveys. For example, in a survey I conducted in North West Haiti, 63% of respondents said that there was a distinction between those who need aid and those who deserve it; and 40% said that there were people in need who do not deserve aid. Among the reasons given by those who thought some people do not deserve aid, 57% cited laziness, 39% cited not caring for family, 37% cited having multiple spouses, 34% cited drinking alcohol, 24% dishonesty, 15% sexual promiscuity and 37% included other reasons (for the data see the end of this report). In addressing the political correctness of even asking the question, it might behoove us to ask ourselves if we would want subsidies given to the undesirables in our own neighborhoods. Regardless of the response, the issue touches on community buy-in and the appropriateness of who gets to target and how the selections get made.
Question 7: What is the impact of mis-targeting? Put another way, if 50% of the rural population is among the rural extremely poor, but we can only reach 8%, what is the impact on relations among people in the community when the aid only goes to a minority of them?
Answer: When an aid agency arrives and gives $50 per month to a household with three members who are among the 67% of all rural households who live on less than $1 per person per day, the agency has just launched them into the higher strata of income earning households. Anecdotally we know that jealousy, conflict and resentment are common reactions from the neighbors. Households often diffuse the neighbor’s envy by sharing, i.e. investing their windfall in social capital. Those who do not are treading on perilous territory. But we can also assume that when beneficiaries fall in the category that many people see of as undeserving of aid it engenders resentment and robs the program of respect and community ‘buy-in.’ All of which brings us to a final question,
Question 8: Why can’t we just ask people in the communities to identify the most vulnerable households among them?
The irony of the search for the ideal targeting mechanism is that we are trying to determine something that, if people in communities were forthcoming, they could tell us. And that is precisely the problem. What most aid workers know but it is politically incorrect to say is that the entire endeavor to find an effective targeting strategy is and long has been about keeping people from gaming the system. And in Haiti, whoever’s fault it may ultimately be—donors, implementing partners or the State for ineffective monitoring, or the population for not self-regulating– there has been a great deal of gaming going on, and for a very long time. This is precisely what renders strategies such as consumption scores invalid, because they are basically asking directly, ‘are you one of the most vulnerable?’ Rare is the rural Haitian farmer who would say “no.” In effect, rendering the entire endeavor to aid the most vulnerable an opportunity for the aid agencies and dishonest people, and arguably making the situation for those really in need even more dire (want to a proposed solution, read this).
