Four days after the earthquake in Haiti, the only working runway at the airport in Port-au-Prince was a jumble of activity. As I walked down the stairs of our U.S. Coast Guard C-130 cargo plane, I saw pallets of supplies sitting untouched on the tarmac. Planes with more emergency relief circled overhead, waiting their turn to land. The terminal itself was dark and abandoned, glass from its shattered windows strewn over the ground. Traumatized families had taken refuge on the airport grounds. Few Haitians wanted to be indoors after the earthquake, especially as aftershocks continued, and there weren’t nearly enough safe structures left in the country to provide shelter for the more than 1 million people who lost their homes.
The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed more than 230,000 people in a country of 10 million and injured at least 300,000 more. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Now it faced a staggering humanitarian disaster. The need for both immediate relief and long-term reconstruction in Haiti would test our aid capabilities and underscore the importance of pioneering a new approach to international development for the 21st century.
By my side that day in Haiti was Cheryl Mills, my indefatigable Counselor and Chief of Staff, and Dr. Raj Shah, the new head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who had been sworn in only nine days earlier. Cheryl had been spearheading a review of our Haiti policy for the past year, and when the earthquake struck, she moved quickly to organize a massive response across the U.S. government. The State Department set up a twenty-four-hour-a-day crisis task force in the Ops Center to stay on top of the flood of information, requests for help, and offers of assistance. Consular officers worked around the clock to track down the whereabouts of an estimated forty-five thousand American citizens in Haiti and responded to nearly 500,000 inquiries from concerned friends and loved ones.
In the middle of that first night we learned that the United Nations mission in Haiti could not locate many of its people. By the morning we learned that the head of the UN mission, his principal Deputy, and 101 other UN workers had been killed, tragic losses for all of us that dramatically reduced the ability of the international community to muster and coordinate a response to the disaster.
Almost nobody was able to get into Haiti in the first forty-eight hours. The world was lining up to send aid, and there was no system for getting it in or distributing it once it arrived. The destruction of Port-au-Prince’s port forced shipping cargo to land more than a hundred miles from the capital. The road connecting the Dominican Republic to Haiti was unnavigable, and other roads across the country were impassable. Only a small number of air traffic controllers were left at the damaged airport to manage the stream of planes trying to deliver aid. It was a mess.
When I got the news of the earthquake, I was in Hawaii on my way to Asia for a four-nation tour. As soon as I realized the extent of the damage in Haiti, I canceled the trip and headed back to Washington to oversee relief efforts. A number of Asian leaders were disappointed, but they all understood the urgency of the crisis, and many offered to help in any way they could.
My head was full of memories dating back to the first time I visited Haiti in 1975 as part of my honeymoon with Bill. We experienced the tension between the beauty of the place—the people, the colors, the food, the art—and the poverty and weakness of its institutions. One of the most memorable experiences of our trip was meeting a local voodoo priest named Max Beauvoir. Surprisingly he had studied at the City College of New York and the Sorbonne and had degrees in chemistry and biochemistry. He invited us to attend one of his ceremonies. We saw Haitians “seized with spirits” walk on hot coals, bite the heads off live chickens, and chew glass, spit out the shards, and not bleed. At the end of the ceremony, the people claimed the dark spirits had departed.
We also saw the infamous security forces of dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier strut around town with their mirror sunglasses and automatic weapons. At one point we saw Baby Doc himself drive by, headed for his palace—the same Presidential Palace that would fall in the earthquake thirty-five years later.
When I got back to Washington after the earthquake, I did not think it made sense for me to go to Port-au-Prince right away. After watching and participating in emergency responses to disasters over the years, I had learned that one of the most important responsibilities for public officials is to avoid getting in the way of first responders and rescue workers. We did not want to tax Haiti’s already overwhelmed systems or divert any of its limited resources to support a high-level visit when the priority was saving as many lives as possible.
But two days after the earthquake Cheryl spoke with Haiti’s President René Préval, and he told her that the only outsider that he trusted was me. “I need Hillary,” he said. “I need her. And no one else.” It was a reminder of how important personal relationships can be, even at the highest levels of diplomacy and government.
On Saturday, January 16, I flew to Puerto Rico, where a Coast Guard cargo plane was waiting. It would have an easier time than my 757 negotiating the tricky landing at the damaged airport. When we arrived in Port-au-Prince Ambassador Ken Merten was waiting on the tarmac.
His team at the embassy was doing incredible work. One embassy nurse, whose own home was destroyed, worked nonstop for almost forty-eight hours in a makeshift surgical trauma unit to tend to seriously injured Americans who showed up at the embassy seeking help. A security officer, who, along with members of the local guard force, went searching for missing U.S. staff, found two injured colleagues whose home had fallen into a deep ravine. They carried the couple by foot for six hours on a makeshift gurney of ladders and garden hoses until they reached the embassy health unit.
But we suffered the loss of a number of our embassy personnel and their family members in Haiti, including Victoria DeLong, a Cultural Affairs Officer, and the wife and young children of Andrew Wyllie, a decorated State Department officer working with the United Nations.
Our embassy team was working closely with our staff back in Washington to coordinate offers of assistance. We successively tested an innovative idea with Google and a number of telecommunications companies to collect and map requests for emergency assistance—many of which came in via an SMS text hotline—which were then shared with rescue teams on the ground.
Experts from across the U.S. government were trying to get into Haiti to help. The Federal Emergency Management Agency swung into action, sending doctors and public health specialists from USAID, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Federal Aviation Administration sent a portable airport control tower. Six search-and-rescue teams made up of firefighters, police officers, and engineers arrived from California, Florida, New York, and Virginia.
Next to Ambassador Merten on the tarmac was Lieutenant General Ken Keen, the Deputy Commander of U.S. Southern Command, who had been in Haiti on a planned visit when the earthquake hit. They were standing on the back porch of the Ambassador’s residence when the ground started to shake. Thankfully the residence was largely undamaged and quickly became a gathering place for embassy personnel and Haitian government ministers, as well as General Keen’s link back to U.S. Southern Command in Miami as he managed the military’s role.
Coast Guard officers were America’s first boots on the ground. Eventually more than twenty thousand U.S. civilian and military personnel were directly involved in search and rescue. They restored airports and seaports, provided life-saving health and medical service, and met basic survival needs of the Haitian people. The hospital ship USNS Comfort treated hundreds of patients. U.S. forces were welcomed and cheered, and the people and their government begged them not to leave. Soldiers who served in Haiti between multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan marveled at what a refreshing change it was to feel so wanted on foreign soil.
I saw another familiar face on the runway: National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. He had caught a military jet the day before to help coordinate the complex relief effort. He was literally soaked in sweat in a polo shirt and khakis helping direct traffic on the tarmac. His presence spoke volumes about President Obama’s personal commitment to Haiti. I had stood with the President in the White House two days before, when he publicly pledged U.S. assistance. It was the first time I ever saw President Obama fighting to control his emotions.
My first order of business was to confer with President Préval. We met in a tent on the airport grounds. Immediately I could see why Cheryl thought it was so important that I come in person. The destruction of Préval’s country and the despair of his people were etched on his face.
When the earthquake hit, Préval and his wife were arriving at their private home on a hillside. They watched their house collapse in front of their eyes. His office at the Presidential Palace was also severely damaged. Préval couldn’t find several of his ministers. Others were severely injured or dead. According to reports, 18 percent of Haitian civil servants were killed in Port-au-Prince, twenty-eight of the twenty-nine government buildings were destroyed, and members of the Cabinet and legislators were missing or confirmed dead. The situation was dire and the government crippled.
When Préval first became President, he had little political experience, but by the time the quake hit he had become adept in the deal-making culture of Haitian politics. Still, he remained naturally reserved and found it difficult, even in the aftermath of the quake, to go out among his people, who wanted to see, touch, and talk to their leader.
Sitting in the tent with Préval, I tried to gauge how he was holding up in the face of such an overwhelming catastrophe. We had urgent business to conduct. The international relief effort was choking on the bottleneck of the airport. I proposed that the U.S. military take over operations there as soon as possible so that aid could begin flowing. Préval wasn’t sure. Like all nations, Haiti prized its sovereignty. And even in an emergency, memories of previous U.S. military interventions were not easily dismissed. I assured him that our troops would not be there to patrol the streets or replace the UN forces working to restore law and order. This was just about getting the airport working again and making sure planes landed and supplies got distributed. Cheryl and our team had prepared a legal agreement for Préval to sign to give the U.S. military temporary responsibility for the airport and port. We walked through it line by line. He recognized that Haiti needed all the help it could get, but he also understood that other countries and his political opponents would criticize him for “selling out” to the Americans. It was one of many painful decisions he would have to make in the days ahead.
Préval signed the agreement. He was putting his personal trust in me as much as in our country. He looked me in the eye and said, “Hillary, I need you to be Haiti for Haiti, because right now we can’t do it.” I told Préval he could count on America, and me. “We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead as long as you want us.” Soon, with U.S. help, the airport and seaport began handling ten times more cargo, and aid began reaching the people in Haiti who needed it most.
At a second, larger meeting with American and international aid groups, Préval was less cooperative. He disagreed sharply with the recommendation to set up large camps to shelter hundreds of thousands of homeless Haitians. Presciently he worried that if we built these camps, Haiti would never get rid of them; instead he asked that we give people tents and tarps to stay in their own neighborhoods. But the UN team argued that it would be much harder to distribute food and water if people were dispersed. Camps would be much more efficient, which is why they are part of the standard international response to disasters.
When we flew out of Port-au-Prince later that day, we packed as many people as we could onto the plane, bringing two dozen Haitian Americans to safety. Cheryl and I talked about all the work that lay ahead. If we were going to live up to my promise to Préval—to be Haiti for Haiti—this wasn’t going to be a quick relief effort. We had to be ready for a long haul.
In times of emergency Americans’ first instinct is to help. None of us who lived through the dark days after 9/11 will ever forget how people across the country lined up to give blood. We saw the same generosity on display after Hurricane Katrina, when families in Houston and other communities opened their homes to displaced residents of New Orleans, and after Superstorm Sandy, when people came together to help New Jersey and New York. When the earthquake hit Haiti, the State Department worked with a technology company called mGive to enable Americans to make donations directly to the Red Cross via text message. The effort raised more than $30 million in less than three weeks from more than 3 million Americans. All told, Americans wound up contributing $1 billion to help Haitians after the quake.
For our country, stepping up in an emergency is not just the right thing to do. It’s also a smart strategic move. In the aftermath of a disaster like the Asian tsunami of 2004, when we provided extensive humanitarian relief, we built up valuable reservoirs of goodwill. In Indonesia, the epicenter of tsunami damage, about eight in ten people said our emergency assistance improved their view of the United States, and approval of America more than doubled from an Iraq-era low of 15 percent in 2003 to 38 percent in 2005. We saw the same phenomenon in 2011, when the United States rushed to provide assistance to Japan after its earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown known as the “triple disaster.” Approval of America among the Japanese soared from 66 percent all the way to 85 percent, the highest among any nation polled.
While many of us respond to urgent needs in a crisis, it can often be harder to summon the resolve to step up and help when it comes to slow-motion tragedies like poverty, hunger, and disease rather than dramatic, attention-grabbing emergencies like a tsunami. Helping Haiti in the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake was one thing. But what about before the disaster, when Haiti was plagued by the worst poverty in the Americas? Or afterward, when it faced years of difficult rebuilding? What role should the United States play in those efforts?
Americans have always been charitable. In the early days of our nation, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the “habits of the heart” that made our democracy possible and brought frontier families together to raise barns and sew quilts. My mother was one of tens of thousands of Americans who sent care packages to hungry families in Europe after World War II. They included staples like powdered milk, bacon, chocolate, and SPAM. I am continuously impressed by the philanthropic spirit of the so-called Millennial Generation. According to one study, nearly three-quarters of all young people in America volunteered for a nonprofit organization of some kind in 2012.
Yet in debates about foreign aid, especially long-term assistance rather than short-term relief, many Americans ask why we should be generous abroad when there is so much work to do at home in our own country. In a time of tight budgets and big domestic challenges, there are certainly hard choices to make, but it’s helpful to be clear about the facts. Polls show that Americans significantly overestimate the percentage of the federal budget allocated to foreign aid. In November 2013, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that, on average, Americans believe that 28 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign assistance, and more than 60 percent of people say that’s too much. But in reality we spend less than 1 percent of the budget on foreign aid. When people learn the truth, opposition is cut in half.
For decades, there has been a philosophical tension in our approach to international development. Should foreign assistance be purely altruistic, to help alleviate suffering wherever the need is greatest, or is it intended as part of our strategy to compete for hearts and minds in extended ideological struggles like the Cold War? Or to address the despair and alienation that fuel current radicalism and insurgency? President Kennedy inspired a generation with his call to service in “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself,” as he put it in his inaugural address. Yet he never lost sight of the strategic context. The idea for the Peace Corps began with a brief campaign speech at 2:00 in the morning at the University of Michigan in October 1960. “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” he asked the crowd of students who had gathered in the middle of the night to hear him speak. “On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.” Even at 2 A.M. he was thinking about how development might advance the interests of the United States.
I’ve always thought the debate between “aid for aid’s sake” and “aid for strategic ends” was somewhat beside the point. We need to do both. President Obama and I were committed to elevating development alongside diplomacy and defense as core pillars of American power, but inside the administration we had many of these same debates. As the White House began putting together the first Presidential Policy Directive on development, I argued that we needed to draw a clear link between our aid work and U.S. national security. There were some development professionals who disagreed with that view, but the President eventually accepted the premise that natural disasters, poverty, and disease in other countries were also threats to U.S. strategic interests.
Haiti provided a prime example. Helping the country get back on its feet made sense for both humanitarian and strategic reasons.
It was impossible not to be moved by the plight of poor Haitians crowded into the slums of Port-au-Prince, with few economic or educational opportunities and a series of corrupt, erratic, and dictatorial governments. The Haitian people have enormous talent and perseverance, but they have had to endure crushing poverty and disappointment that would sap anyone’s spirit. It should offend our conscience to see children growing up so close to our shores in such dire conditions.
And allowing a bastion of poverty, drug trafficking, and political instability to fester just seven hundred miles from Florida—a little more than the distance between Washington and Atlanta—is a dangerous proposition. Every year waves of refugees flee Haiti trying to make it to the United States through dangerous, shark-infested waters in rickety boats and rafts. Compared to military intervention and caring for massive influxes of desperate refugees, smart development assistance is a bargain.
Even before the earthquake Haiti was a priority for me. When I became Secretary I asked Cheryl to take a fresh look at our policy toward Haiti and come up with a strategy for high-impact economic development that would make a difference in the lives of Haitians. I also saw this as an opportunity to road-test new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world. After all, despite its challenges, Haiti had many important ingredients for success. It was not riven by religious or sectarian divides. It shares an island with a stable and democratic country, the Dominican Republic, and enjoys proximity to the United States. It has big diaspora communities in both the United States and Canada. In short, Haiti has so much going for it that other desperately poor countries do not. If we could help Haitians build on these advantages, they could unlock great potential.
On the day the earthquake hit in January 2010, Cheryl and her team were finalizing a report to send to the White House with a full set of recommendations for Haiti, based on priorities laid out by the Haitians themselves. In the following weeks everyone’s focus was on emergency response. But soon it would be time to think about long-term reconstruction and development needs. So I told Cheryl to dust off her report and get to work.
The challenge of “building back better,” a phrase borrowed from my husband and his work with President George H. W. Bush after the Asian tsunami in 2004, was daunting. The earthquake was a disaster of unprecedented scope that devastated Haiti’s economic center and much of its productive infrastructure, including the main port and airport, power lines and substations, and important trunk roads. Préval and his Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, recognized early on that Haiti required bold economic development strategy that would use recovery funds to create lasting improvements in the lives of the Haitian people. They had plenty of prescriptions to choose from as Haiti became the focal point of an ongoing debate about development and the role foreign aid can play in stimulating an economy and improving a government.
What emerged was a development strategy crafted by the Haitian government that served as a guide for reconstruction. Two of its central tenants, to create economic opportunity in regions called growth corridors outside of congested Port-au-Prince and to expand jobs in agriculture and light manufacturing, became hallmarks of U.S. assistance to Haiti.
The idea of letting the local government set priorities and guide the development was not exactly new. In his celebrated speech launching the Marshall Plan in 1947, George Marshall argued that, “It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically.” But Marshall’s wisdom was often overlooked in the following decades. Donor nations and NGOs swooped into developing countries with their own plans and ideas. That impulse was understandable, considering that local governments often required expert advice, but it often led to unintended consequences. Aid workers in the field sometimes griped about the “10,000-mile screw driver” with which officials back in Washington or various European capitals tried to micromanage development efforts. Plans that sounded good on the drawing board foundered when applied in the real world, and without local cooperation and buy-in they didn’t translate.
Eventually the international development community rediscovered General Marshall’s guidance as the principle of “country ownership,” and we put it at the heart of our efforts in Haiti and around the world. Country ownership meant that for us, as much as possible, we would work with local officials and national ministries on the needs they identified, to help them build up their capacities and ensure a coherent, unified approach with all donors and organizations working together toward those ends, rather than in parallel or in competition. Our development model could not be formulaic. What works in Papua New Guinea may not work in Peru. We had to go case by case, country by country, even village by village, to analyze needs, assess opportunities, and tailor investments and partnerships to maximize our impact.
In Haiti and elsewhere, the primary vehicle for our development work would be USAID, an agency filled with determined public servants but plagued by years of dwindling resources and drifting focus. In the 1990s Republicans in Congress led by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina called for abolishing USAID altogether, arguing that the end of the Cold War had removed the strategic rationale for large-scale foreign aid. Although Helms failed to dismantle the agency, he was able to drastically reduce its budget. Lost in the debate were the real consequences of pulling back and letting problems fester, especially in places like Afghanistan. When the United States walked away after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, we created the space for the Taliban to emerge. It was a costly error.
Interestingly, near the end of my husband’s presidency Senator Helms came to support Bill’s initiative to forgive the debts of poor countries if they put all the savings into health care, education, or economic development. A lot of the credit for that goes to Bono, lead singer of U2, who proved surprisingly persuasive with the cantankerous Senator.
The Bush Administration had its own take on development. The President’s brand of “compassionate conservatism” led him to invest in new development programs outside of the existing bureaucracy of USAID that have made huge impacts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The Millennium Challenge Corporation provided generous assistance to countries that met certain standards and made reforms on corruption and governance. President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief built clinics, distributed drugs, and saved lives all over Africa. It was an amazing success.
When I became Secretary, rebuilding and refocusing USAID was a top priority. Without reforms, including reducing our reliance on outside contractors and increasing our ability to innovate and execute, we were in danger of being outpaced and outclassed by other countries. Many European nations had excellent development programs that operated with more local involvement and much lower overhead than typical USAID efforts. China was spending huge sums across the developing world. We might not have thought highly of their methods, which prioritized extracting resources and bringing in their own people rather than adding value, increasing employment, and protecting the environment, but there was no disputing the scale and scope of their engagement. As I found all over the world, few people could identify tangible symbols of American aid, but in many nations people drove by a Chinese-built stadium or on a superhighway every day. We didn’t want to emulate their approach or discount the value of less visible projects, especially ones that boosted crop yields and prevented unnecessary deaths from AIDS, TB, and malaria. But we did need to keep improving and innovating so that American development programs would remain the most respected in the world.
To run USAID we found a thoughtful and talented young man at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Rajiv Shah. A trained doctor and health economist who had run major programs at the Gates Foundation, Raj soon became a valued partner who shared our commitment to reforming the agency and elevating development within our foreign policy.
The Obama Administration proposed doubling foreign assistance by 2014, but just as important, we planned to reform how that money was spent, making sure less was diverted to salaries and overhead for for-profit contractors and more went directly into programs on the ground. I also wanted to reverse the “brain drain” at USAID by increasing the number of development professionals and making it once again an exciting and fulfilling place to work.
Raj and I agreed that to succeed, USAID needed a new emphasis on innovation, investment, and self-sufficiency. We began looking for new ways to identify and support the best development ideas from outside government that could help us solve problems around the world, especially market-driven solutions that would empower people and encourage creativity. USAID launched “Grand Challenges” competitions—contests to support potentially game-changing innovations. We also created a venture capital–style fund to invest in big ideas that could yield big results. The first round of financing supported projects like solar lighting in rural Uganda and mobile health services in India. New partnerships with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health began connecting American scientists working on development research with their counterparts around the world. New science fellowships allowed us to bring in more researchers, engineers, and physicians to work with USAID. In 2008 USAID spent roughly $127 million to support research and development. By 2014 that number was up to $611 million.
Starting in 2011, Raj and I began discussing a centerpiece project for this innovation agenda: a state-of-the-art development laboratory run by USAID in partnership with research universities, NGOs, the tech community, and U.S. corporations. After three years of preparation I was proud to join Raj in early April 2014 to help launch what is now called the U.S. Global Development Lab. It will focus on breakthrough solutions in water, health, nutrition, energy, education, and climate change, with the goal of helping 200 million people in the first five years.
Another major push was to find new ways to stimulate private-sector investment in developing countries. American companies often struggle to navigate the complicated array of U.S. agencies involved in international investment and trade, including the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the State Department, USAID’s Development Credit Authority, the Trade and Development Agency, and the Export-Import Bank. Before I left office, I presented President Obama with a plan to build up OPIC into a full-scale “development finance institution” that could mobilize resources from across the government to incentivize private-sector investments that would require no additional taxpayer money. Other countries have these kinds of institutions; we should too. It’s good for American businesses and for our partner countries.
While we improved our own development capacities, it was also crucial to help our partners improve theirs. I was especially concerned about corruption and poorly functioning tax systems in developing countries we were trying to help. Foreign aid is a hard enough sell under the best of circumstances, but it’s even more difficult when elites in our partner countries do everything they can to avoid doing their fair share. That was something I saw all over the world, and it outraged me. When a country makes reforms to improve tax collection, expand transparency, and fight corruption, it can ignite a virtuous cycle. Taxpayers can see what they’re getting for their money. Higher revenues allow governments to provide better services and pay decent wages to public employees. All this, in turn, creates a more attractive climate for both foreign investors and development donors and puts countries on the path toward self-sufficiency.
Helping rebuild Haiti would be a major test for USAID and for how well we could work with the Haitian government while increasing its capacities, and coordinating with all our international partners, including governments, NGOs, and institutions.
I began calling leaders around the world right after the earthquake, starting with the Foreign Ministers of France, Brazil, Canada, and the Dominican Republic. At a Haiti Donors Conference in the spring of 2010 the United States began the process of allocating more than $3.5 billion in assistance, and we encouraged other nations to follow our example. All told, the conference yielded in excess of $9 billion in government pledges for long-term development, in addition to substantial commitments from the private sector. Every country in our hemisphere got involved. I was especially glad to see that the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti and has not always gotten along with its neighbor, went above and beyond to help. We even cooperated with Cuba and Venezuela.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had asked Bill to serve as his Special Envoy to Haiti starting in May 2009, a position he held until 2013. Then President Obama asked him and former President George W. Bush to lead a postearthquake campaign that raised tens of millions of dollars to start new enterprises and increase employment. By Bill’s side was Dr. Paul Farmer, a cofounder of the organization Partners in Health, whom Bill had asked to become the UN Deputy Special Envoy in August 2009. Partners in Health started working in Haiti in 1983, developing a unique model of providing quality care with limited resources to poor people in rural areas. After the earthquake Paul and his team managed to build a full-fledged teaching hospital, Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais, in Mirebalais, Haiti, which is also the country’s largest solar-powered building.
The international relief and reconstruction effort did a lot of good, especially in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but there were shortcomings in the efforts. Tens of thousands of relief personnel set up camp in what felt like a city under siege, and they were not always well coordinated. Too many well-meaning NGOs clogged the pipelines. And, in a heartbreaking case of unintended consequences, the cholera epidemic that broke out in the fall of 2010 likely started with Nepalese peacekeepers brought in by the UN.
USAID missed the mark in some important places. The hospital referral networks that one of our health experts designed never materialized, largely due to bureaucratic infighting. On energy, the United States built a power plant and did repairs, but our grander plans of energy transformation have not yet come to fruition.
There were, however, important successes. As of January 2013, 7.4 million cubic meters of rubble had been removed, one third of it by the U.S. government. The number of Haitians living in tent camps declined from a high of 1.6 million to less than 200,000. More than 300,000 people have found safer housing thanks to USAID-funded programs. And the cholera response and vaccinations led by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) helped drive down the fatality rate of the cholera epidemic from 9 percent to just over 1 percent. The United States supported 251 primary care and fifty-two secondary care sites across Haiti, which were estimated to reach the health care needs of nearly 50 percent of the Haitian population. We helped nearly ten thousand farmers access improved seeds and fertilizer and introduced new techniques for better productivity. Rice yields have more than doubled, and corn yields have more than quadrupled.
The primary goal of our long-term development strategy in Haiti was to jump-start the economy, create jobs that would pay people decent wages, and reduce dependence on foreign assistance over time. A centerpiece of our efforts was a $300 million industrial park at Caracol, in the northern part of Haiti, funded jointly by the State Department, USAID, the Haitian government, and the Inter-American Development Bank. It quickly became a global effort, with a Korean textile company, Sae-A Trading Co., committing to build and run a factory there to make T-shirts and other items for Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, and Target. When I visited for the October 2012 dedication, 1,050 Haitians already worked there, with more expected to be hired soon.
The Caracol project was in keeping with a broader trend in our development work around the world. We were shifting our focus from aid to investment. In the 1960s, when President Kennedy created USAID, official development assistance from countries like the United States represented 70 percent of the capital flows going into developing countries. Since then, even though countries have actually increased development budgets, official development assistance represents just 13 percent of those capital flows. That’s mainly due to surging private investment and trade in emerging markets, which is good news. Given this shift, it made sense to refocus our approach to development so we can better harness market forces and make smart public-sector investments that could catalyze sustainable economic growth.
The United States was not abandoning traditional aid, such as sacks of rice or cases of medicines. That kind of assistance is still a vital tool, especially as part of an emergency response to a disaster. But through investment we sought to break the cycle of dependence that aid can create by helping countries to build their own institutions and their own capacity to deliver essential services. Aid chases need; investment chases opportunity.
By the end of 2013, just over a year after it opened, the industrial park at Caracol was providing jobs to about 2,000 Haitians. There were six private-sector tenants, a million square feet of leased factory and office space, and $26 million in annual exports. Over the course of 2014 employment and exports are on track to more than double as manufacturers move into newly completed factories. It also has a modern waste water treatment facility, a new electric grid providing reliable power to surrounding towns for the first time, as well as new housing, schools, and health clinics.
In a 2013 column in the Financial Times, Haiti’s Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe noted that the majority of Haitian families make around $700 a year in subsistence agriculture and are “never certain if heavy rains may wash away their harvest.” So when Caracol opened, fifty applications came in for every job. “A single mother in Caracol now earns an average annual salary of $1,820 in her first ever wage job,” Lamothe wrote. “If she advances to become a line supervisor, she can earn up to 50 per cent more. Previously unemployed, she now can afford to send her kids to school, pay for a mobile phone and 24/7 electricity and have some discretionary income to save. She also benefits from paid vacation, health care and one of the best worker rights and worker safety regimes in the world.”
The day that the Caracol industrial park was dedicated in October 2012 was an occasion for all of us who had lived through Haiti’s darkest days to celebrate a little good news, and no one deserved applause more than Préval himself. By that point, however, he had been out of office for more than a year, and his relationship with the new President was far from warm.
The ill will dated back to the November 2010 elections, just ten months after the earthquake. The official government tally and an independent count by the Organization of American States (OAS) reached different conclusions about which candidates should advance to a run-off. Many Haitians, who had already endured so much, were outraged that after all they had endured their votes might not be counted. The streets were soon full of loud and unruly protests.
I decided to go to Haiti to meet with Préval and the candidates to see if there could be a peaceful resolution that would avoid a crisis when there was so much work still to be done in the aftermath of the earthquake. Préval’s preferred candidate, who the OAS said had actually finished third, complained that the international community was pushing him out of the race. I insisted that just wasn’t the case. After all, I explained, people tried to push me out of the race when I ran for President in 2008. Just as President Obama and I did, he and the other two candidates had to respect the voters’ preference. “Look, I’ve run in elections,” I said. “I’ve won two, and I’ve lost a big one. So I know how it feels. But what’s more important is that democracy be protected.” Unlike a professional diplomat or an academic or businessperson, I could put myself in these candidates’ shoes. Elections can be painful. Democracy is tough. In some places you can be killed because you want to run or you want to vote, or you can be imprisoned and bankrupted. You have to understand the risks that people are taking, the worries they have, their need to feel respected.
I met with Préval at his temporary residence. We sat close together in plush chairs, practically knee-to-knee. I started talking about what it means to think not just for tomorrow but for the long term. I told him that this was his defining moment. He was either going to be remembered as a President no different from all the Haitian leaders in history who refused to listen to their people, or he was going to be remembered as the President who allowed democracy to take root. He had to choose. “I’m talking to you not only as your friend, but as someone who loves my country and had to do a lot of hard things, too,” I said. “Do the hard thing, because the hard thing is going to ultimately be in the best interests of your country and in your best interests, even though you won’t feel that way until you’re able to step back and look back.” He ended the meeting saying, “Well, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll see what I can do.”
Shortly afterward Préval and all three candidates accepted the OAS results. The celebrated musician Michel Martelly, widely known as “Sweet Micky,” won the run-off, and Préval retired. Usually the winner of an election receives all the kudos. But in this case I thought the hero of the hour was the man who stepped down gracefully, even with his country still reeling from an unimaginable catastrophe. It was the first time in Haitian history that any President peacefully turned over power to someone from an opposing party.
This was a very good sign for the country’s future. The link between sustainable development and good governance is well established. That’s why we put it at the heart of many of our aid programs, most notably the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Haiti’s troubles on both fronts provided a case in point. And we had a counterexample readily available. Chile was hit by an even more powerful earthquake just a month after Haiti. But unlike Haiti, Chile had the infrastructure, resources, and governing institutions to withstand such a devastating event and respond quickly and effectively. To “build back better” Haiti needed to do more than clean up the rubble and get the economy going again. It needed a strong democracy and an accountable, responsive government. A peaceful transfer of power was a crucial first step.
I was pleased to see Préval at the Caracol ribbon-cutting event, but I wondered how he and Martelly would interact. To my surprise and delight, Martelly acknowledged Préval and brought him up onstage. Then they raised their hands together in celebration. It was a simple gesture, familiar to Americans. But no two Presidents had ever done that in Haiti—mainly because there have been so few peaceful transitions. It left me believing that Haiti was, finally, despite all of the struggles, on a better path.
In the international development business, it’s easy to get frustrated and fatalistic. But step back and look at the sweep of history, and you realize just how remarkable our country’s contributions have been. Just in my lifetime the United States has helped eradicate smallpox and reduce polio and malaria. We helped save millions of lives through immunizations, life-saving treatment for AIDS, and oral rehydration therapy that greatly reduced the deaths of infants and children. We helped educate millions of young people and provided significant support to once impoverished countries that have flourished and become generous donors themselves, such as South Korea. Americans should take pride in these achievements, which have not only helped humanity but have also helped our nation project our values and strengthen our leadership in the world.