NHADS SURVEY (Nutrition, Health, Agriculture and Demographic Survey, Jean Rabel, Haiti)

The survey for this report was conducted in 1997 in Commune of Jean Rabel which covers 467 km2 of territory and has an estimated population of 130,330 residents, 278 people per km2. The area is generally considered among the poorest in Haiti. Infrastructure in the form of a few roads and schools are in horrificRead More

Haiti Anthropology Brief: Eighteen Characteristics of Life in Rural Haiti that Every Aid Worker Should Know

For at least the past 50 years Haiti has arguably been the most aided country on the planet, and arguably the country with the most dismal development record. Aid workers typically leave frustrated, not able to understand why rural Haitians will not adopt crops they promote, or the technologies and strategies that seem to soRead More

Haiti Anthropology Brief: Cultural Materialist Cake of Culture

Here I provide a brief summary of the cultural materialist model with the graphic Cake of Culture. I do so because, a) The model is useful to those seeking to understand the social system in developing countries, and more specifically for those endeavoring to evaluate development interventions and understand why they work or don’t workRead More

Haiti Anthropology Brief: Cake of Vulnerability and Adaptation to Poverty

Here are a series of diagrams intended to make the prevailing rural Haitian household livelihood strategies easily understandable. The first diagram, above, is what we are calling, “The Cake of Vulnerability.” It is a model reminiscent of Marx’s Infrastructure, Structure and Super-structure description of modern human social organization. Here it is inspired by the moreRead More

A Model for Humanitarian Aid Beneficiary Targeting

Targeting strategies are as old as humanitarian aid, but the formal study of targeting is recent, arguably only beginning in the past decade. To date, much of what is written is unclear. This paper is intended to present a synthesized model of humanitarian aid targeting that will clarify the many ambiguities and differences inRead More

Geographic Homogeneity of Poverty in Haiti

It is always very difficult to quantify malnutrition in Haiti. …the data available from actors appears to show that, strictly speaking, there are no pockets of malnutrition. ECHO 2011:24 Although humanitarian aid organizations working in Haiti almost universally target specific departments and communes based on CNSA vulnerability assessments (see CARE 2013a), a longitudinal lookRead More

household livelihood strategies