Paul Farmer of Partners in Health wrote a short article for Foreign Policy that could be a wake-up call for some deserving nation. Can't imagine which nation that would be. Said wake-up could be for how to consider treating Haiti in the future (like a sovereign nation?) or it could be for how to heal the deserving nation itself, as it is in a bit of trouble these days. I'll list just the five lessons, and you can read the details over there.
- Jobs are everything.
- Don't starve the government.
- Give them something to go home to.
- Waste not, want not.
- Relief is the easy part.
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"Building Haiti back better" means sustaining those temporary gains and adding education, health care, services, and good governance.
What's most important in getting started? Economic growth. Yet it is a challenge hardly mentioned in aid documents or strategies -- coming up only twice in the United Nations' most recent 44-page report. Poverty of the kind that was so acutely revealed this January can't be defeated until there is a brighter economic future for the millions of Haitians who are ready to seize it.
The only stock-in-trade that Haiti has to offer is unskilled and exceedingly low-cost human resources. Still in the opening chapters of the global greatest depression, what differentiates Haitian super-poor from the super-poor in say..., India, or Guatemala?
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