Sunday, December 5, 2010

Paul Farmer offers "5 lessons from Haiti's Disaster"

h/t Balloon Juice.

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.
  1. Jobs are everything.
  2. Don't starve the government.
  3. Give them something to go home to.
  4. Waste not, want not.
  5. Relief is the easy part.


1 comment:

CNu said...

"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?