A Nation in Camps: In 2011, a year after a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, an estimated one million people were still living in tents and makeshift structures, despite an outpouring of aid from around the globe. Only an estimated 5 percent of the debris littering the country had been removed and the country had received little more than 10 percent of the $11 billion of aid it had been promised, according to a Time article.
Deplorable social conditions existing before the earthquake, a cholera epidemic, and a shady election process that generated civil unrest further hampered the nation’s ability to rebound from the disaster. Experts predicted it would be at least a decade before the country was able to recover.
“I think this is going to take many more decades than only 10 years and this is an enormous backwards step in Haiti's development,” Edmond Mulet, acting head of the UN Haiti mission, told the BBC in January 2010. “We will not have to start from zero but from below zero.”
Rising (Slowly) from the Rubble: About 75 percent of the 385 camps that once housed displaced Haitians are now closed, according to a recent report released by the International Organization for Migration, an organization that has been tracking displaced families since the quake. More than half the debris has been removed and a 10-year, $2 billion plan to address cholera is now underway.
Although the news is heartening, about 320,000 people—more than 81,000 households—still live in temporary conditions, according to the report. Of that amount, 67,000 households have no prospect of finding permanent homes and nearly 22,000 of them face eviction as landowners regain their property, the IOM said in a statement.
The Long Road to Homes: Reconstruction in Haiti continues, albeit at a glacial pace. An exhaustive investigation into aid and new development in Haiti by the New York Times earlier this year found that only $215 million of an estimated $7.5 billion in aid was spent on building permanent housing.
While some money went to infrastructure projects such as building highways, schools, and water systems, much of it has been disbursed into slow-moving bureaucracies that are only just now contracting the much-needed building.
“It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti, told the Times.