More than 200 years after a slave rebellion turned Haiti into the world’s first free Black republic, the country is mired in gang warfare, political chaos, devastating poverty and widespread corruption. Foreign aid, more than $13 billion in the last decade and a half, has failed to solve any of the country’s problems, and may well have made them worse. Last month, 400 Kenyan peacekeepers entered the country to try to restore order.
Canada was asked by the U.S. to do that job because it has a long history with the nation, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau balked at making the commitment.
In too many people’s eyes, Haiti isn’t a country and its inhabitants aren’t people, it’s just a hell on earth. But Haitian Guenson Charlot, who knows what it’s like to be born into abject poverty, has a vision, a dream where Haiti isn’t beholden to foreigners and where the people themselves can rise to rescue their country from the grip of destitution, dishonesty, despair and distrust. The youngest of nine children and the only one to graduate from high school, Charlot is now the president of Emmaus University in northern Haiti.
Its aim: to prepare the influencers of the future, the Haitians who will change their own country. Already doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen, even a judge have graduated from the master’s program. But can Haiti, a country that has been called the “Republic of NGOs” because of all the foreign aid and international organizations, be weaned off that monetary aid tap? And are the seeds of Haiti’s success, as Charlot believes, really planted in its own soil? Long before Haiti was the “Republic of NGOs,” its beauty and wealth made it “The Pearl of the Antilles,” part of that Caribbean archipelago that also includes the islands of Jamaica, The Cayman Islands and The Bahamas.
But the rich 18th-century sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton crops were harvested on the backs of a huge number of slaves imported by the French, who ruled with brutality and a barbarity unrivalled by even other slave-holding nations. A slave revolt in 1791 – inspired perhaps by the French Revolution only two years earlier — turned into a long war that resulted in Haiti winning its independence in 1804. The price of freedom for the fledgling nation was catastrophic.
France sent gunboats to blockade the country, and demanded 150 million gold francs in order for Haitian independence to be recognized: slaves paying their slave masters for their freedom. Prof. Marlene Daut, an expert on colonialism and slavery at the University of Virginia, called it “the greatest heist in history.
” Haiti borrowed heavily from French banks and took 122 years to pay off the debt, repaying between US$20-US$30 billion in today’s dollars. Daut sees the poverty rate in Haiti of 59 per cent of the population and its meagre median annual income of US$450 for a family as a direct consequence of that crippling “indemnity” payment. The violent birth of the nation also gave rise to political instability.
The first self-proclaimed “emperor,” Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was assassinated two years into his rule. In four years, ending in 1915, seven presidents were killed or overthrown, and with German presence in Haiti rising in the early part of the 20th century, the U.S.
sent in the military. Haiti was a U.S.
military protectorate from 1915 to 1934 and again from 1994 to 1995. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier became president in 1957, with his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” taking over after his death, establishing a 30-year dictatorship characterized by thousands of political assassinations, corruption, cronyism and repression. The political chaos continues even today.
In 2021, Haiti’s 43rd president, Juvenal Moïse, was assassinated. This year, his widow, an ex-prime minister and a former police chief were indicted by a judge and accused of being involved in the killing. And on top of all that are the natural disasters.
Earthquakes, cyclones and hurricanes are all frequent occurrences. Mudslides and flooding are common because of deforestation. In 2010, an earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 Haitians.
“Haiti is a battleground,” says Charlot. “We have man-made disasters. We have natural disasters.
We have spiritual battles going on. Physically, if you look at what’s happening, you will not see much hope because there has been a cycle of violence.” Is it any wonder that Haiti relies so heavily on foreign aid? “It’s like a bottomless pit.
So many resources have been poured in. But nothing major has happened, there’s been no change. You see a lot of people feeling desperate.
And there’s a lot of mistrust,” says Charlot. But where does all that aid go? Who spends it and what is it spent on? And, most importantly, what good does it do? Claudia Charlot met her husband to be, Guenson, in Bible school in Jamaica. She was 16, he was 25, and her preacher father frowned on the relationship.
Still, love will find a way and Claudia proved more hard-headed than her obstinate father. The Charlots were married in 2008 after a long-distance relationship. Foreign aid to Haiti has been a particular focus for Claudia, who did an MBA and a doctorate in transformational leadership and has published her dissertation as a book: Haiti: The Black Sheep, subtitled: “Why foreign aid has failed in Haiti and what to do about it.
” The U.S. is the largest aid donor to Haiti (US$5.
1 billion since the 2010 quake) with Canada in second place ($2 billion since 2010.) “Poverty is big business,” says Claudia. In her book, she details some of the major problems that have plagued aid to Haiti.
The “transfer paradox” is the concept in which foreign aid is directly tied to the buying of the donors’ goods and services. In this case, says Claudia, the aid often helps the donors’ export markets more than it does the country receiving the money. She notes, for instance, that the website for the U.
S. Agency for International Development says, “USAID’s work advances U.S.
national security and economic prosperity.” Political considerations also influence the amount of aid, making the amount of foreign aid unpredictable, and long-term economic planning difficult. Of the billions of dollars of foreign aid sent to Haiti after the earthquake, 99 per cent went to humanitarian agencies, NGOs and private contractors.
Only one per cent went directly to the Haitian government. When this happens, the “trickle down” effect means that aid goes through several layers of bureaucracy, with each taking an administrative fee, thus reducing the aid that is delivered. In her book, Claudia notes that several U.
S. organizations handling large amounts of aid were embroiled in controversies over financial accountability. “One thing is clear,” Claudia writes, “it was not the Haitian government that stole or mismanaged the money.
” NGOs form an almost “parallel state” in Haiti, she says, and cites a former World Bank official who said one obvious sign of where the money went was in the Land Cruisers and Pathfinders in the capital. “Port-au-Prince’s narrow streets are jammed with big SUVs emblazoned with an alphabet soup of NGO logos,” she records him as saying. Claudia writes, “Unfortunately most of the money donated for humanitarian aid in Haiti goes to wealthy expats to maintain their luxurious lifestyles.
The rest is paid to foreign contractors who charge grossly inflated fees for their services. As such, the money does not get to those who need it the most — the poor and the destitute.” Claudia claims one of the most damning examples of the mismanagement of aid was the Red Cross, which raised US$500 million in the wake of the 2010 earthquake — and built only six permanent homes.
Then there were the “schools” built by the Clinton Foundation that the Nation magazine found to be 20 prefab trailers “beset by a host of problems, from mould to sweltering heat to shoddy construction.” The trailers were also laced with formaldehyde. “NGOs are variously described in Haitian Creole as ‘volè’ (thieves or crooks), ‘malonèt’ (liars) and ‘kowonpi’ (corrupt),” wrote researchers Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz in a 2012 major policy paper titled Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone? Haiti is the recipient of a large amount of food aid, which also causes problems.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for life, goes the old proverb. Never was this more true than in Haiti, although instead of fish it is rice.
Haiti was “virtually self-sufficient” in rice production in 1980, according to Oxfam. Claudia writes that Haiti now imports 80 per cent of its rice (mainly from the U.S.
) and about 60 per cent of its general food supply. Former U.S.
President Bill Clinton shoulders a lot of the blame for this turnaround, as he was instrumental in orchestrating massive U.S. subsidies for rice exports to Haiti.
In 2010, Clinton apologized for his trade policies that were so economically destructive for Haiti. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” he said.
“I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.” So what is the key to Haiti’s future? Guenson Charlot’s father was a subsidence farmer in a small village near the northern town of Cape Haitien. Guenson passing his high school exams was a major event for the family, and he started learning English with hopes of studying abroad.
“That was my dream. It took me five years and I can remember when one time I was doing my devotion and I was pleading to God and God answered me saying, ‘I’m going to send you to school overseas. But wherever you go, I want you to return to Haiti,'” His education took him to Jamaica, the U.
S. and Bethany Bible College (now Kingswood University) in New Brunswick. In Canada, he did so well that he was offered a job and the chance of a different life.
“I saw all the wealth here. It was very tempting,” he says. But his calling saw him return home, something that few Haitians do when they leave their country.
When he arrived back in Haiti, without a place to live or a job, a surprised customs official asked him, “Were you deported?” Eventually, he ended working at Emmaus University as a translator, then assistant dean and finally the top job in 2020, the institution’s first Haitian president. Guenson sees a major divide in the country between the majority of poor people and a relatively small number of rich, powerful families. “It’s like we have a bunch of people in power that do not really love the country.
They take the wealth and go build in the Dominican Republic and to other countries. It’s like they’re taking things away from the country. We have a minority, a few families that own everything,” he says.
“And there’s a system, a structure, and it’s almost impossible for you to go up in the ladder, to get a better life.” “Haiti is one of the most polarized countries in the world,” adds Claudia. “And that’s part of the reason for the social and political upheaval because the masses always feel suppressed.
The oligopolies rule. The one per cent controls almost half of the country’s wealth.” At the end of February, Haitian criminal gangs in the capital coalesced to attack the weakened political structure.
The gangs attacked police stations, prisons, seaports and the airport. The unrest forced the prime minister to resign. The United Nations states that gangs control about 80 per cent of the capital as well as roads leading into and out of the capital.
The escalating murders and rapes have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. To combat the violence, 400 Kenyan police arrived in June — the first contingent of an expected 2,500-member international force. The U.
S. put heavy pressure on Canada to lead the peacekeeping effort, but the Trudeau government resisted. Instead, Canada is investing $80 million to support the international force and 70 Canadian soldiers are in Jamaica training personnel who will deploy to Haiti.
“There’s always this simmering discontent and that causes people’s upheavals,” says Claudia. “That’s one of the big challenges.” “And this is where our work at Emmaus comes in,” adds Guenson.
Emmaus University, located just outside Cape Haitian, is the only higher educational institute on the island with both government recognition and international accreditation. Most of the campus, which sits among green fields with mountains in the distance, was built with the help of Canadian money, specifically through the aid of One Mission Society (OMS) Canada, a missionary organization dedicated to spreading the Christian faith and building churches throughout the world. “OMS Canada contributed significantly to build the campus we have now as well as providing scholarships to our students.
OMS Canada helped pay for my master’s degree and part of my doctorate,” says Guenson. The university is also rooted in the Christian faith with a purpose to create the leaders needed to transform Haiti. Students to the university — who come from an “average background” — get a quality education from faculty trained in North America, including Harvard, for a fraction of the cost, says Guenson.
Students pay US$500 a year, but even that is a struggle for many families, which is why the Charlots need to raise funds from donors. “We are training these people to go out into the world, into the corporate world, to live out what we are teaching them. And what we are teaching them is key to a new Haiti.
What is Emmaus doing? Influencing the influencers.” Integrity and honesty are central to Emmaus’s teachings, says Guenson. In May, Emmaus had 58 graduates — 30 from the master’s program (subjects were theology, education and leadership and administration) and 28 undergraduates studying theology.
“Some of them were already in positions of leadership,” says Guenson, citing graduates who were lawyers, doctors, school principals, politicians and government workers. “And others are making their way into leadership positions and we are really having an influence on those people. My hope — our hope — is that these people will lead differently from the previous generation.
” The university now has 380 students, far more than the campus was built for. This month, the Charlots are touring Canada, visiting towns in Ontario as well as Edmonton and Calgary to update supporters and raise money to build a library, computer lab, new classrooms and conference rooms. The couple dream that, one day, the NGOs with their millions of dollars might invest in Emmaus and help empower the people of tomorrow.
“It’s not that aid isn’t the answer,” says Claudia, “but it’s the type of aid. The type of projects that aid goes to is what we need to reconsider. We need to invest more in people and the leaders, identify talent and give them room to solve their own problems.
“In the West, there is a take-charge mentality, and I think that has to change,” she says almost defiantly. “Give us the tools to do the job.” Her husband adds, “(Donors) may not see the results tomorrow, but they will know they have planted the seed that will bear fruit in the future.
We need Haitians to help Haiti. Frankly, you can help at a certain level, but the change, the transformation, needs to come from Haitians.” Haiti is not a hell on earth.
It’s not even a failed state. It is a shockingly poor country that has been badly managed from the inside as well as from the outside by many people who sought only to help. Two hundred years ago it rose to throw off the shackles of slavery.
If it is to rise again, it needs a new revolution, one rooted in education, self-sufficiency and an aid industry geared toward teaching people to fish. Ultimately, the seeds of success lie in the heart of the Haiti population, but people like Guenson and Claudia Charlot can provide the greenhouse. Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary.
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