Haiti ... and a parallel plan

Dear Colleagues

The Haiti emergency has moved from rescue to relief, and is now starting to move to the remaking or rebuilding phase.

It is not clear whether this will be a process that gets Haiti back to the pre-emergency situation or to something better. It seems that there will be an "official" development plan prepared by the Government of Haiti and its international collaborators including the UN and the major donors and large NGOs.

The diaspora may be included in the preparation of this plan, or they may be excluded. It is not yet clear. Nor is it clear whether the plan will be prepared using a methodology that builds on the natural resources of Haiti, or whether it will be little more than large scale development welfare. None of this is clear.

An unofficial plan can be prepared that will either complement the official plan or perhaps even supersede and official plan. If the Community Analytics (CA) planning methodology is embraced it will be possible to have socio-economic progress that is constrained by the physical and human resources and not by just money that is likely to be way too little.

A proposal has been floated to do this planning in collaboration with organizations already operating in Haiti and in collaboration with the diaspora. The goal would be to have a draft circulating at the same time that the official plan is presented to the UN at the end of March!

Peter Burgess
Community Analytics (CA)