One Third of USAID’s Programs in Haiti were Unsuccessful

At least one-third of USAID’s programs in Haiti from 2010 to 2020 were unsuccessful, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says.

The GAO released a report this month that summarized 29 of USAID’s own evaluations of its programs.

Some projects USAID promised Haiti went nowhere, such as a 2011 project to build a $67.5 million port in Cap-Haitien. After spending $4.2 million for pre-construction work, USAID canceled the project “due to higher costs than anticipated,” according to the GAO report.

Other projects fell significantly short of their goals. In July 2011, for example, USAID proclaimed its New Settlements Program would build 4,000 houses.

When the $62.5 million program ended five years later, USAID had built only 906 houses, less than 25 percent of its original goal.

USAID pledged to develop more partnerships with Haitian organizations to develop their capacity to manage money from donors, but twice as many programs and most of the money went to U.S.-based partners.

Some of the work that was completed quickly deteriorated. The report included pictures of a new drainage channel in 2012 that had become clogged with debris nine years later. It also showed pictures of a new stainless sink and pipe in a USAID-built home in 2014 that by 2021 needed a plastic bucket to catch leaking water.

The GAO also looked at International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) efforts to develop the Haitian National Police and concluded they had achieved “mixed results.” The GAO faulted INL for counting how many training classes it held without measuring whether the classes were effective.

Haiti endured one disastrous event after another during the period covered by the report, including a 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 250,000 people, one of the largest cholera outbreaks in history that killed 10,000 between 2010 and 2019, a hurricane in 2016 that caused damage equivalent to one-third of the country’s GDP, and a two-year drought made worse by the hurricane that largely destroyed Haiti’s food supply.