About 200 ex-soldiers occupied former military buildings in northern Haiti on Tuesday to demand the reinstatement of the disbanded army and 14 years of back pay, the group’s leader and witnesses said.
The men took over the buildings in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, and in Ouaminthes, a town on the border with the Dominican Republic.
I think Reuters got the name of the town wrong. It probably should be Ouanaminthe.
The developing story from Radio Kiskeya [in French]:
Armoured MINUSTAH tanks and members of the Haitian National Police’s (PNH) special units tried, without success, to remove the 100 or so ex-military who were occupying the Ministry of Culture and ISPAN (Institute for the Safeguard of National Heritage) buildings.
The leaders of the occupation claim that the reinstatement of the military will help “restore safety and fight against the kidnappers”
In a bit of good news for Haitians:
Emmanuel “Toto” Constant goes down like Al Capone.
A former Haitian paramilitary leader who has been branded a ruthless killer by human rights groups was convicted Friday of helping hatch a mortgage fraud scheme that cheated lenders out of $1.7 million.
A Brooklyn jury found Emmanuel “Toto” Constant guilty of fraud and grand larceny. Constant faces up to 15 years in prison at his sentencing on Sept. 10.
CNN reports that he could face between 15-45 years. I don’t know which reporting is correct.
Background on Constant:
The son of a military officer, Constant emerged as the notorious leader of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, or FRAPH, after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was toppled in 1991.
Human rights groups allege that between 1991 and 1994, FRAPH terrorized and slaughtered slum-dwellers loyal to Aristide. When Aristide returned to power in 1994, Constant slipped into the United States.
Despite a 1995 deportation order, Constant was allowed to remain in the U.S. because of instability in Haiti. He kept a low profile, living with relatives in the New York City borough of Queens until being jailed in 2006 in the fraud case.
Starthrower Foundation, another NGO working in Cap had this grim news in the beginning of July:
I am sending on some news about what’s happened in the past few days. It seems lawlessness here is at an all time high.
In Cap-Haitien:
A 23year-old kidnapped from our katye was killed as her parents had no money to pay ransom.
A doctor kidnapped from the corner paid $50,000.00 US for his freedom.
A friend of Jack’s was kidnapped last night while riding a taptap; the same ransom demand ($50,000). He has 2 small children, no job.
Relief Web, the online hub for humanitarian information, reports that:
[The] kidnapping of children remains an area of high concern [throughout Haiti]. Children represent 35% of the total number of victims of kidnapping, and an increasing number of girls and since the beginning of the year 66 minors, including 28 girls, were victims of kidnapping [in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien] (compared with 80 victims (41 girls) in all 2007). Two of these children were killed.
The victims were a six month baby in Arcahaie and a 16 year-old boy, whose body showed signs of torture, in Port-au-Prince.
Month
Boys
Girls
Total
January
4
2
6
February
4
3
7
March
7
5
12
April
6
4
10
May
13
2
15
June
7
8
13
July*
2
2
4
Total
41
26
67
* Reported on July 22nd.
Most of the girls who were kidnapped were also sexually abused. “A significant number of kidnapping cases reported during this period were perpetrated against children nearby or on the way in/out of school.”
Compact Haitian Creole, a stand-alone 10-lesson (5 hours) program, teaches beginning language strategies for essential communication and traveling needs, plus an introduction to reading.
These CDs are particularly useful if you don’t already speak French.
A simple introduction to Haitian Creole for English speaking people. Sixteen easy lessons cover the basic elements of Creole grammar and how to pronounce Creole words. The lessons include simple exercises and translation keys. A thorough up to date dictionary of over 4600 words Creole to English and English to Creole word translations is included. A 2 CD set pronunciation guide is available separately.
Ann pale kreyòl is a comprehensive set of teaching materials designed to provide learners with a thorough grounding in the sounds, grammar, and vocabulary of Haitian Creole. It includes 25 chapters, each containing dialogue materials, grammar sections, and extensive practice materials progressing from drill to communicative activities. Also included is a guided introduction to the official spelling system, varied listening comprehension sections, keyed exercises, and reading selections covering aspects of Haitian geography and history. The book is illustrated with many line drawings; a 1200 word Creole-English glossary is appended.
Here is updated information on our programs. If you’ve been following us for a long time, a lot of this will be familiar to you. If you’re just finding out about us (Hi!), this is the crux of what we’re trying to do and how we are trying to do it.
Overview:
The Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) creates and incubates small-to-medium enterprises that provide underserved communities in developing countries with affordable, locally produced and environmentally sound technologies to meet their energy, sanitation and water needs.
We provide our businesses with financing in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. Recognizing that capital is not the only barrier that prevents engineering talent/budding entrepreneurs in emerging markets from forming such businesses, we also provide business training, technical training, legal assistance as well as help navigating government bureaucracy.
By operating in the missing middle, i.e. providing more funding than a micro-finance institution, but less than mid-scale investor, we target a level of service provider that is vital to the development of local economies. Our businesses can create jobs and deliver services that can be transformative for families and communities, but that are too large for an informal sector micro-entrepreneur and too small for a major government development initiative.
We have three primary programs: Incubation, Education, and Outreach. While these three programs have a high level of interdependence and rely heavily on each other for execution, the core of AIDG is the incubation program. We currently maintain operations in Guatemala and Haiti.
Incubation Program:
The goal of AIDG’s incubation program is the creation of independent locally owned enterprises that can serve the infrastructure needs of impoverished communities using appropriate technology and market mechanisms. Currently the focus of this program is the formation of enterprises in the arenas of Energy, Water and Sanitation. Future arenas under consideration include Communications, Housing, Transportation and Agricultural Processing.
The incubation program relies on a 2-3 year agreement between AIDG and a locally owned formal sector company (either pre-existent or that we help entrepreneurs form) that combines technical training, investment, and service contracts. After the incubation period a member of AIDG’s team retains a seat on the business board of directors for a standard board term. We operate the program through five steps, Talent and Opportunity Identification, Program Related Investment Lending, Tools and Equipment Provision, Training and Research, Contracted Services:
I) Talent and Opportunity Identification
The identification of talent and local business opportunities in the small-scale infrastructure sector is one of the areas where AIDG sets itself apart from other SME lenders. Our community partnerships with civil society, community leaders and local university and business groups, formed through our outreach program, have given us a tremendous network of referrals for local talent and potential business opportunities. We have leveraged these networks to create a catalog of unmet community needs/business opportunities as well qualified human resources who can solve these problems.
As we expand the number of enterprises we can support and the number of businesses we incubate, we anticipate that our opportunity and candidate stream will only grow. We foresee significant growth in our enterprise incubation both in replicating businesses we have experience with (e.g. establishing another stove manufacturer in a new region) or expanding to meet new demands brought to us by our constituent networks (e.g. establishing a producer of no head hydroelectric systems for the Peten).
Market opportunities and technologies are reviewed in group meetings and are scored in a competition matrix based on price point, market demand assessed through community surveys, cost saving impacts for communities, viability within local material streams, and manufacturability. Technologies are tested up to a year through outreach projects and community feedback before they are placed into consideration for an enterprise.
Individual candidate or enterprise vetting is accomplished through a multistage interview process. Local human resource and business conditions influence the decision of whether to go work with a group of entrepreneurs of a previously established business. For example, XelaTeco was founded with electrical and mechanical engineers who were underemployed in industries ranging from weaving to beer bottling. They were coalesced into a new company because there were no local renewable energy companies that could be strengthened into doing micro-hydroelectric systems. By comparison, where we are based in Haiti, the pool of qualified entrepreneurs is more constrained, partially due to limitations of the educational system. There, we are looking to train several existing enterprises who engage in traditional sanitation work in the installation of Biogas systems. Additionally, the legal process for establishing a formal sector business in Haiti is 3 to 4 times longer than it is in Guatemala.
II) Investment Lending
We provide our businesses with financing in the $10,000 to $100,000 range. The amount of the loan depends on the scale and scope of the enterprise. The interest rate (fixed) of most AIDG loans ranges from 0% to 5%. The lent capital is divided into a series of disbursements granted over the incubation period. No interest is accrued until the end of the incubation period. The companies having the option of paying down the principal at any time.
The loans have very generous repayment terms and schedules to accommodate the enterprises we support, which operate in difficult market environments. Since our goal is enterprise success and not fund return, loans made by AIDG are intentionally below market rate. We attempt to use the loans as an extension of our training for the enterprises, to help them develop their revenue sources and the fiscal discipline to be able to approach larger investors as needed for future stages of expansion. For those future stages of funding we hope our PRI fund will to allow AIDG to act as a guarantor with local capital partners, such as banks or other SME lenders such as E+Co, Acumen Fund, S3IDF, Agora Partnerships or Root Capital.
With XelaTeco, our first enterprise, lent capital was derived from AIDG’s unrestricted funds/donations. We are in the process of attracting funding to build a restricted program related investment fund. We are building the fund initially with donations and grants. We hope eventually to fulfill SEC requirements to be able to attract social investors seeking returns. This fund is not for general operations use, though provisions have been made such that the board can vote for emergency disbursements in case of fiscal crises that pose a threat to organizational continuity. Loans from this fund will be presented to the board for approval quarterly.
III) Tools and Equipment Provision
Most of the enterprises that we aim to incubate require some level of specialized equipment (e.g. foundries, milling machines, computer aided circuit design software). AIDG provides an equipment grant of $2,000 to $25,000 of either purchased or donated equipment to help the enterprise get itself on its feet.
IV) Training and Research
Our training services are at the core of our incubation program. It is easy to find a welder or civil engineer or electrician in Guatemala, but pulling those individuals together into an enterprise than can install a village scale hydroelectric system requires technical training, aid in negotiating legal processes and training in business and project management.
Our training involves direct mentor pairing between members of our internship program and member of the enterprise. To date this has revolved around skills assessment and skill building exercises in both technical and business realms, ranging anywhere from electronics to accounting. We are in the process of developing a standardized training curriculum for each skill set. Additionally, we are working with teams of experienced professionals who can come to the field for shorter terms and give very specific skills based training to augment the intern mentorships. For example we are bringing down experienced foundry workers to improve XelaTeco’s metal casting skills. We also contract local experts to give trainings where appropriate, for instance on Guatemalan Tax Law and Health Care requirements.
We retain legal services to start the enterprises but have found many of the barriers to enterprise formation in the bureaucracy are reduced the more contact you have with the officials. By incubating many enterprises we develop an advantage in corporate filings, shipping and receiving, telecommunications provision, etc. that an individual entrepreneur entering the formal sector for the first time would not have. Leveraging the same local vendors across multiple companies also gives us an advantage in securing better pricing and deals for the new enterprises.
AIDG also acts as a research and development arm for our incubated enterprises working to solve individual technical challenges based on customer feedback and ideas about product improvement.
V) Contracted Services
Much of AIDG’s outreach work is accomplished through the contracting of our incubated enterprises to perform infrastructure projects in local communities. This both provides us with real world environments to train business team as the enterprise is getting started. It also builds awareness of AIDG’s work and programs in the region and serves direct charitable purposes for schools, daycares, orphanages and other community organizations. During the 2 to 3 year incubation period of AIDG businesses, the enterprises are responsible for implementation and product delivery while AIDG acts as project manager and monitors project quality on contracted work. Outside of this period, the businesses do both project management and execution.
Occasionally we will contract the incubated enterprise to work in partnership with another NGO for the pilot or demonstration phases of a potentially longer-term contract for our enterprises. For instance, we are funding a portion of a solar installation by XelaTeco at a radio station in partnership with another NGO that maintains a network of 140 community radio stations in Guatemala. The pilot should lead to a significant long-term contract for the enterprise.
Education Program:
The Education program relies on AIDG bringing down experienced engineering and business students and professionals to work directly with our incubated enterprises. We have a steady stream of graduate students from Stanford, Harvard, Tufts, MIT, Berkeley, Michigan Tech, and other institutions who commit 3 to 9 months working on with our enterprises on skills building and novel technology research and design. This educational exchange goes both ways, building skills in our incubated enterprises as well as educating the university students about the challenges of working in resourced constrained environments in developing countries.
Our research work primarily revolves around adapting appropriate technology solutions to local supply chains and the introduction of technologies that are established in other regions, but are new to our areas. For example there are millions of biogas systems throughout India, but only a few dozen in Haiti. Unfortunately a standard fiberglass dome KVIC biodigester design from India cannot be reproduced in Haiti due to a poor supply chain for fiberglass. Interns prototype and develop new or adapted designs that can be taken to production quality by our incubated enterprises.
This focus on design around local materials and teaching engineering students to adapt to local conditions has attracted the attention numerous groups doing more traditional design at the bottom of the pyramid work in the states. As a result we have worked with EWB San Francisco, Humdinger Wind Energy, UC Berkeley, and MIT D-Lab on multiple design projects. Our community partnerships through our outreach program have given us numerous locations to field test emerging technologies and evaluate real world effectiveness.
AIDG is working to try and strengthen its physical resources in Guatemala to have a proper test and development center for students and groups interested in design for the other 90%. We hope that as our incubation program grows we will be able to leverage research done in this center across multiple enterprises and multiple regions.
Outreach Program
AIDG’s outreach program is aimed at providing services to communities and community organizations. As stated earlier, the vast majority of our outreach work is accomplished through contracting of our incubated enterprises. The work contracted by our enterprises helps us leverage volunteer resources effectively and guarantee high quality results to our constituents. For example stoves contracted from and manufactured by XelaTeco can be installed by a TecoTour team and then put through performance and community feedback testing for model design revision by engineering interns. Short-term visiting engineers generally lack the real world production and construction sills that we work to develop in our incubated businesses. The workmanship also has the guarantee and consistency of the incubated enterprise.
Additionally we will do outreach in response to natural disasters. After Hurricane Stan, we contracted XelaTeco to produce several hundred emergency camping stoves to be distributed with food aid and to perform electrical repairs in residences hit by flooding and mudslides.
What is your intern project?
Being the first intern in our office in Haiti has given me the chance to help establish AIDG´s presence in Haiti. So far, I have worked on the construction of public toilets in Shada, and a biodigester at Doug´s village. Building capacity with our local staff, translating, and driving are other duties I have been performing.
Describe what your normal day as an AIDG intern in like.
It is challenging to describe a normal day here. The most common characteristics between construction site, office work, and search for materials consist of lots of joy, smiles, and building up friendships.
What are the main challenges you face?
Once I arrived, the biggest challenge was the language barrier since I could not speak Haitian Creole yet. Since I have overcome that, I would say that finding supplies for our projects is the biggest challenge we face in Cap-Haitien.
What has been the most rewarding moment for you?
There has been many special moments for me in Haiti, because of the Haitians I work with and have met so far. The first moment that came to mind was when some children in Shada gave me one of their few toys (a couple of colorful stickers) as a thank you gift. Besides thanking me for the morning gymnastics with them (before construction started off course), they were very thankful for having a toilet next to their homes. Generous and sharing acts makes me believe in humanity even more.
Who have you met who has inspired you the most and why?
Many people are inspirational to me here. Merci-Lourde is one of them. She is a restavec girl who has so much strength and determination. She is very sweet, hard-worker, and helps everyone. Sasha is another one person. She inspires me because of her courage, interest in politics, and belief in change.
Why did you choose AIDG? What inspired you about the organization?
I had heard great things about AIDG from Chase Nelson, a personal friend from college and AIDG-Guatemala intern. Once I understood the unique business incubation idea and about the local empowerment that AIDG promotes, I made a decision to contribute to AIDG efforts.
The folks at Celsias posted a great article on the wide scale socio-political (and corporate) forces that are a major cause of current and previous food crises worldwide. A major point made in the piece is that bad economic policies/onerous conditionalities foisted upon nations receiving aid or loans from the IMF and World Bank, coupled with noncompetitive agricultural subsidies in rich nations have helped crush the food producers focusing on internal markets in many developing countries. They give the example of Haiti.
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”
“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.
… People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more. — Counterpunch
Also of note:
Much of the news coverage of the world food crisis has focussed on riots in low-income countries, where workers and others cannot cope with skyrocketing costs of staple foods. But there is another side to the story: the big profits that are being made by huge food corporations and investors. Cargill, the world’s biggest grain trader, achieved an 86% increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of this year. Bunge, another huge food trader, had a 77% increase in profits during the last quarter of last year. ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, registered a 67% per cent increase in profits in 2007.
Nor are retail giants taking the strain: profits at Tesco, the UK supermarket giant, rose by a record 11.8% last year. Other major retailers, such as France’s Carrefour and Wal-Mart of the US, say that food sales are the main sector sustaining their profit increases. Investment funds, running away from sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, are having a heyday on the commodity markets, driving prices out of reach for food importers like Bangladesh and the Philippines. - ENN
Accompanying the Poorest Out of Poverty: The Effect of the Global Food Crisis Date: Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 Time: 6:30-8:00PM Location: Laura Parsons Pratt Conference Center, 281 Park Avenue South, NY, NY 10010 Cost: Free for MFCNY and WAM members, $10 for non-members. RSVP: Please RSVP to mfclubny {at] gmail [dot} com to confirm your attendance. Speaker:Anne Hastings, Executive Director, Fonkoze
Fonkoze office in Cap Haitien (January 2008)
Description:
Please join us for an evening with Anne Hastings, Executive Director of Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution. Under her leadership, Fonkoze has grown from 2 volunteer employees to over 560 full-time employees. The institution now has 30 branches throughout rural Haiti, with over 120,000 clients, more than 45,000 of whom have microcredit loans.
Speaker Bio:
Anne Hastings has been the Executive Director of Fonkoze – Haiti’s largest microfinance institution – since May 1996. Under her leadership, the institution has grown from 2 volunteer employees to over 575 full-time employees. The institution now has 30 branches throughout rural Haiti, with over 120,000 clients, more than 45,000 of whom have microcredit loans. In July 2004, Fonkoze spun off its financial services component to form a commercial financial institution. Anne serves on the board of directors of that institution. She also continues to manage the foundation, which is now devoted to monitoring the impact of microfinance on the lives of clients, eliminating illiteracy among its clients, incubating new branches that reach ever poorer and more rural clients with microfinance services, and continually testing and developing innovative new products for the clients of both the commercial entity and the foundation. She is the recipient of the 2005 Pioneer in Microfinance Award of the Grameen Foundation USA. In 2006, she was honored in the First Annual Chiapas Project Recognition Dinner in Dallas, Texas.
Before coming to Haiti, Anne had fifteen years of experience in providing strategic management services to executives and in managing young organizations for high performance and steady growth. She was Senior Partner and Managing Director of Scanlon and Hastings, a management consulting company in Washington DC, from 1985 to 1996 and a Senior Analyst at Advanced Technology in Reston, Virginia from 1982 to 1985. Anne holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and an Honorary Doctorate in Business Leadership from Duquesne University. She completed research fellowships at the Brookings Institute and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, both in Washington, DC.
I come to you from Cap Haitien, Haiti where we are at work on AIDG- Haiti’s first biodigester. The majority of the biodigesters construction techniques have been developed in Guatemala but are being tried out here to make the technology more appropriate for Haiti.
Right before coming to Haiti, however, I was in Pachalum, Guatemala (Department of Quiche) working on the first of three biodigesters that AIDG is building in the community. AIDG and the municipality of Pachalum have entered into a unique project relationship. AIDG, Pachalum, and the families who will be receiving biodigesters are equally shouldering the costs associated with the project. The owners of the first digester, Don Ramiro and his family, will begin filling it with animal waste created from their pig farm. The Ramiros don’t currently have electricity and are looking forward to the benefits that their biodigester will bring. They are also excited to have one of the first biodigesters in the area.
The pigs on the Ramiro farm are used in the family restaurant, “La Casa de los Chicharonnes”, making the biodigester site long-term stable. A problem that we’ve observed with single family biodigesters is that the owners’ tend to sell off the animals that feed the digester in times of need. Once there is no waste to put in the digester, the system will stop producing gas after about a month. Undigested waste will settle to the bottom of the tank. The loads of settled out waste have to be removed before the digester could be put back on line.
Don Ramiro is less likely to reduce the number of animals he has unless his business closes down. So, we’ll be recommending “La Casa de Los Chicharonnes” to everyone to make sure that it doesn’t close!
Completed Biodigester at Don Ramiro’s
I’m using many of the techniques that were developed in Pachalum here in Haiti as we construct the biodigester. The system is being built at Project Pierre Toussaint, a center for Cap Haitien’s street boys. The center takes in street boys of all ages and shelters them, feeds them and gives them a hands-on practical education. It’s a very inspiring place to work.
After the digester is complete here, I will return to AIDG- Guatemala to finish up the project in Pachalum and build a biodigester for AIDG’s new educational center in Xela. We hope to use some new ideas for this installation that incorporate aspects from both the floating dome and fixed dome designs.
We’ve made multiple improvements to the design over the course of the technology development in Guatemala and Haiti:
We are now using a removable wood form for the construction of the concrete biodigester tank. The use of reusable forms is dropping the overall cost of the system and allowing it to be constructed more quickly and with much greater consistency in the shape of the tank. The removable wood form, when assembled looks like a giant wine aging barrel.
We are now encapsulating the fiberglass/sheet metal dome in a PVC frame that acts as part of the guide system to ensure the dome floats directly up and down as gas is produced and consumed. The PVC capsule carries all the structural forces so this is also a step in the direction of removing the sheet metal core from the dome. Removing the sheet metal/flat iron core would greatly reduce the overall cost of the system and also remove the potential of problems arising from zinc galvanization leaching into the digester and disrupting the process.
Interior Wood Form being used to Construct the Digester Tank
The wood form wrapped in HDPE, ready for the exterior form to be placed around it.
Making the concrete digester tank at Project Pierre Toussaint
Part of a 2004 PBS Frontline story by Shoshana Guy on the Struggle for Water in Haiti. [Full story: Flash Version | Text Version]
Water Trucks - “God Before Water”
Massive water trucks, belching black smoke and sloshing water down their sides, dominate the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince. The trucks, which can carry 3,000 gallons, are painted in bright greens, oranges and yellows with
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