Word: undp
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...helped to ease it - not only by paying them a wage in a city where jobs collapsed along with buildings, but by making them more than just dazed and helpless bystanders in the Haiti recovery process. "Life stopped with the earthquake," says Denise Metelas, 34, sporting a blue UNDP T-shirt and baseball cap. "I feel like I'm among the living again." Massenat sees a more practical value. "Whenever there was a disaster in Haiti before," he says, "the international community never directly involved the poor. We're finally taking part in getting things done now." (Read about...
...more effective rebuilding effort in Haiti, but of a new development strategy that's less about top-down, welfare-style aid and more about economy-stimulating engagement of the grassroots. "The old, more paternalistic way of doing charity was easier," says Brazilian aid worker Eliana Nicolini, a UNDP cash-for-work coordinator in Haiti who first helped bring the plan to Port-au-Prince a couple years ago. "This is different - I really believe it has longer-lasting development effects because it's the local community, not the foreign community, that's executing it." (See pictures from Haiti's catastrophic...
...Haiti cash-for-work program, which is expected to last through the spring, has employed more than 35,000 locals since it began early this month, at a cost of about $175,000 a day. (Workers earn about $4.50 a day, slightly more than Haiti's minimum wage, UNDP officials say, but not enough to siphon workers from the country's other vital economic sectors.) But the goal is 100,000 workers - a number that will require more than the $25.5 million the UNDP has so far garnered in donations and pledges for the project, which is why the agency...
Those criteria, which the UNDP insists it verifies for each hire, help prevent the program from becoming a political patronage orgy. UNDP officials say the Haitian government has been remarkably cooperative. But Haitians aren't shy about noting how thoroughly corrupt that government is. Many workers openly laud the fact that they don't need to know (or kick back to) a local machine boss to get a cash-for-work spot - "If the government were running this, I probably wouldn't have this job," says Sentelis Doassalit, 30 - and that the pay goes directly to their hands...
Bruno Lemarquis, a UNDP director in Haiti, says the plan now is to "redirect" cash-for-work beyond clearing streets to tackling the country's drainage infrastructure, which is impossibly clogged with earthquake rubble but has to be cleared now that the rainy season is near. In the end, says Lemarquis, "cash-for-work can only be a temporary step in the recovery process. After that, Haiti and the international community have to take this approach to a broader level, especially to the private sector." It's not a panacea, but so far it's proven...