Research for Haiti

2010 US Census Apportionment Data and Calculations

The Excel file below allows users to play with the 2000, 2010, and their own population estimates to see how it affects the apportionment of seats for the US House of Representatives. Apportionment also influences the presidential Electoral College vote count for each state. To get the number of Electoral College votes for a state take the number of U.S. House seats and add two (recall that DC, which is not in the file as it has no seats in the US Congress, is given three Electoral College votes). Some explanation of the apportionment process and how to use this Excel file is on the first tab in the file.

Note: if you see any errors, or have useful comments, you can contact me at douglasrhess [at] gmail. Do NOT leave comments on this blog as I will not see them (we haven't updated this blog in a while).

Download Apportionmentworksheet_ver3

Online Conference “Looking back, moving forward: Applying the lessons learnt from the Haiti Earthquake response” 26 October 2010 13:00-14:30 (GMT+01)

An Online Event sponsored by  Overseas Development Institute and Humanitarian Practice Network. 26 October 2010 13:00-14:30 (GMT+01 (British Standard Time)) - Public event, Overseas Development Institute and screened live online

Looking back, moving forward: Applying the lessons learnt from the Haiti Earthquake response - Events - Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

Donations by Phone Text Messaging: Stanford Social Innovation Review

An interesting brief article on the text-giving: Five-Digit Giving (June 14, 2010) | Stanford Social Innovation Review. At least one survey found that one-in-eight households said it used text-giving to donate to some cause.

The cons of raising donations through text messaging:

“Nonprofit leaders also worry that mobile giving will result in less money raised. “There is a fear that people who give smaller amounts through texting will not give otherwise,” says Katrin Verclas, a MIT Media Lab fellow and cofounder of MobileActive.org. Indeed, the average online donation in 2009 was $92, reports Network for Good, whereas text donations are capped at $10. Verclas says the other possible downsides of mobile giving are the fees that nonprofits incur, the complexity of setting up a campaign, and the payment delays that nonprofits face. Donations take from 30 to 60 days to process, though in the case of Haiti, wireless carriers remitted millions of dollars to nonprofits well before donors paid their cell phone bills.”

One commentator on the article notes that mobile phone donation systems can be set up that allow users to opt to give larger amounts, not just a set amount. If so, that could help raise the amount given, by some donors, to the more traditional amounts one sees through mail solicitations.

The pros:

“[The] pros of text giving are growing as the dollar amounts rise. At the top of the list is the discovery of a new generation of donors who want giving to be quick and easy. A week after the earthquake in Haiti, the Pew Research Center reported that 14 percent of American donors gave money by text. That group, according to early analyses, skewed young.”

Haiti: A Forward Look – US Peace Institute

The US Peace Institute is sponsoring a conference “Haiti: A Forward Look”:

Haiti's reconstruction presents challenges and opportunities. How are international efforts contributing to lasting stability and growth?  Experts will address these questions and identify key issues on the horizon for Haiti.

Please note: This event will be webcast live beginning at 9:30am EDT on Thursday, June 3, 2010 at http://www.usip.org/webcast.

To RSVP, or for more information about this event, please visit http://www.usip.org/events/haiti-forward-look

Speakers:

• Lieutenant General P. K. Keen, Keynote Speaker
  Military Deputy Commander, U.S. Southern Command

• Auguste Kouame
  Lead Economist for Caribbean countries, The World Bank

• Monika Kalra Varma
  Directer, Center for Human Rights, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

• René Aubourg
  Assistant Professor, School of Public Affairs, American University

• David Beer
  Director of Business Development, Pearson Peacekeeping Centre
• Robert Maguire, Moderator
  Chair of Haiti Working Group, U.S. Institute of Peace
  Former JR Senior Fellow, U.S. Instiute of Peace
  Associate Professor of International Relations, Trinity Washington University

White House Draft Proposal Discusses Taking Development Assistance Away from State (sort of)

Well, it’s about time. Both the broad strokes and the details of US development assistance, down to the specifics of what (or who) gets funded, is often a political football. Aid work, as with domestic policy work, will always be influenced by changes in the executive and legislative branches, but it should also be subject to scientific review and professional standards. But as long as development work is housed at State, I worry that that will not happen to the degree that it should. Of course, I am not certain that any single pending reform will make foreign assistance policy more evidence-based and less tainted by the ideological spin of administrations as they come and go, but it seems that some very serious reforms are under consideration, including taking aid work away away from the Department of State. That article (at Foreign Policy) discusses a draft paper (which is available at the website) that recommends moving aid out from under State:

One important section of the seven-page document would establish an interagency "development policy committee"  -- moving the responsibility for coordinating U.S. policy on development out of the State Department.

At issue is whether Foggy Bottom should have the ultimate authority over development policy or whether oversight should be done by the new interagency body, which reports up to the president.

The draft document also calls for an overall review of U.S. development strategy every four years (separate from the QDDR), and the design of country and/or regional strategies to "organize U.S. engagement and inform resource allocation."

The idea of a government-wide, independent committee to oversee development is one that Senate Foreign Relations Committee heads John Kerry, D-MA, and Richard Lugar, R-IN, also support.

However, the draft would not allow for complete independence of US AID from State. Dr. Shah, for instance, would still report to Sec. Clinton, not President Obama; and the budget would still be (partially?) controlled by the State Department. One “development observer” interviewed by the Foreign Policy blog “The Cable” stated: "We're not hugely supportive of the USAID administrator reporting to the secretary of state, but a lot of this is largely positive in terms of strategy and overall direction." (Note that this is all very much a draft, but it is interesting to get a glimpse.)

Corruption – Daniel Kaufman and Mushtaq Khan Interviewed by Owen Barder on “Development Drums”

You can read the transcript or listen to the pod cast of Development Drums’ Episode 20: Corruption which features an interesting conversation with Daniel Kaufman and Mushtaq Khan (see also) about corruption in development. This has been a frequent topic in discussions about Haiti recently.

Sadly, discussions of corruption in Haiti often focus—to the neglect of the seriousness and nuance of the topic—just on Haitian officials. This is a real deficiency in the conversation. Any serious conversation about corruption in Haiti needs to include a recognition of the role that forces outside the country have played (e.g., drug smuggling, gun running, past support for paramilitary groups, past support of opposition leaders of questionable democratic credentials, etc.) in corruption and governance problems in the country. The U.S. has come clean recently about the role the U.S. market for narcotics plays in the violence and corruption that is causing havoc in Mexico; discussions of corruption in Haiti need to include similar recognition before there is too much finger pointing.

Discussions of corruption also need to go beyond discussions of bribes and diversions of public funds. Kaufman has an interesting discussion about this here.

For me, though, the most important take home message from the podcast is that corruption should be viewed as a symptom as often as a cause of development problems. This is something I have mentioned to several people about Haiti but the point seems to fall on deaf ears, so it is nice to see it mentioned in the podcast. In the case of Haiti, it is the lack of governance capacity as much as and likely more so than corruption per se that is the barrier to development in Haiti. 

Photos of Resettlement Camp at Corail Cesselesse, Haiti on Flickr

Oxfam has uploaded some photos on Flickr of development taking place at Corail Cesseleese, the large track of land the government has set aside for new housing and urban planning. Read more about Corail Cesseleese and see maps of this large area in this previous post. If you search flickr for the phrase Corail Cesseleese

Vietnam's Viettel Invests in Haiti's Telecom Market

South-South investments are an interesting phenomenon. Here’s an article that claims that the “largest foreign direct investment after the earthquake” in Haiti is coming from Vietnam.

­Vietnam's largest mobile network operator, Viettel has signed a deal to upgrade Haiti's fixed line network in the country's largest foreign direct investment after the earthquake. Under a public-private partnership structured by World Bank's IFC, Viettel will initially invest US$59 million, and an additional US$40 million over four years, to upgrade services offered by fixed line operator Télécommunications d'Haiti (Teleco), creating a new company in which Viettel will hold a 60 percent stake and Banque de la République d'Haiti (BRH), Teleco and their affiliates will control the remaining 40 percent.

If you do a Google search on Viettel and Haiti, the articles seem a bit old, so it would be interesting to know if this is working out. It wasn’t clear to me who owns Viettel.

New from the National Academies Press: “Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development: Summary of a Workshop”

The National Academies Press is a great place to look for discussions and summaries about research on the cutting edge of the sciences. Their reports are often free to read online (sometimes free to download in their entirety as PDFs). Importantly, even when the topic is rather technical, the authors strive to keep the reports succinct and approachable by people outside the field (as best they can).

Given the current situation in Haiti, many engineers or people making use of engineers may find the following very brief report worth a glance, a skim, or even a read: Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development: Summary of a Workshop. Some presenters for the workshop were engineers discussing their work in locations following crises. (Note that the online version is a prepublication copy.)

At a glance, a major theme seemed to be that young engineers working in crises will find that they may be quickly taken out of their area of expertise and working with low-quality information in a fast-past environment. On the topic of planning projects that are sustainable and ethical, presenters emphasized the need to work with local knowledge and address local populations’ concerns; the skills for doing this, it was noted, are  not something that many engineering education programs may not emphasize.

From the description:

Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development is the first in a series of biennial workshops on the theme of engineering ethics and engineering leadership. This workshop addresses conflicting positive goals for engineering projects in impoverished areas and areas in crisis. These conflicts arise domestically as well as in international arenas. The goals of project sponsors and participants, which are often implicit, include protecting human welfare, ensuring social justice, and striving for environmental sustainability alongside the more often explicit goal of economic development or progress.

The workshop, summarized in this volume, discussed how to achieve the following:

• Improve research in engineering ethics.
• Improve engineering practice in situations of crisis and conflict.
• Improve engineering education in ethics and social issues.
• Involve professional societies in these efforts.

Biodiversity in Haiti’s Cloud Forests

Cloud forests along the southern peninsula of Haiti in the Pic Macaya National Forest are home to a variety of endangered frogs and birds found only in Haiti (see also this report).

The Vermont Institute for Natural Science (VINS) has made several trips to the Pic Macaya in recent years to capture, tag, and document birds there. This 2006 brief, but very informative, report (with a couple of nice photos) is worth a look (a longer and much more technical report from 2004 is also available). It sounds as if plans exist to help protect both of Haiti’s national forests and some part of future international funds should, I feel, go towards this goal. This 2007 report by VINS indicates that interest in the government is present. They also found that the local population had an interest (although they gave no specific details):

Locally, a conservation ethic appears to be present, but acknowledgment of Macaya's importance is constrained by the day-to-day struggle of its people to survive. No one harbors illusions that long-term conservation must entail significant socioeconomic changes for the local population. We batted around many ideas of how that might happen, but it is clear that a significant international commitment of resources will be needed. The situation is tenuous, but far from hopeless. (page 2; emphasis in original)

I lived for several weeks in Jeremie and went up into the mountains one day on a mule. The greenery and fog up in those mountains are truly amazing.

Haiti’s other national forest, La Visite in the southeast, is also home to some endangered bird species (see page four of that VINS report).