Rebuilding the Water Infrastructure in Haiti from the Bottom Up. Life Giving Force Co-Founder Shane Hackett

After the January 12 earthquake, aid groups in Haiti have focused, rightfully so, on delivering immediate relief — medicine, medical services, food, shelter, emergency water — to those directly affected by the disaster. These efforts have been admirable and substantial.

The recent cholera outbreak, however, has highlighted the need for long-term potable infrastructure and that emergency water, what aid groups are delivering today, is not sustainable or scalable. Despite the decades of aid and billions now pouring into Haiti, most Haitians do not have access to clean, affordable water. The aid and donor communities need to step up.

But it needs to be done the right way. The right way is NOT to have NGOs provide free water to everyone indefinitely; it’s not sustainable or affordable and does nothing to develop capacity in Haiti. It’s also NOT waiting for the Haitian government to take on a country-wide feasibility study for an infrastructure program.

LifeGivingForce is working with local business people and local leadership (mayors, comité) to setup and run infrastructure for clean, affordable water The infrastructure is run by local businesses and comités in a commercially viable way that makes it sustainable. Donors/NGOs can provide the funding and oversight for the upfront costs of the infrastructure, but Haitians run operations with enough “profit” to make it in everyone’s interest to maintain and grow a system providing clean, affordable water to a much larger proportion of the population that has it now.

For example, in rural areas where there is no clean, affordable water, donors and NGOs can partner with local businesses and local mayors and comités to help finance water purification systems that will last for the next 10-20 years and have the businesses profitably distribute and sell the water at less than 1 gourdes/gallon (currently 1 gourde buys you a small water sachet on the open market). Proceeds from the sale ensure that there is an incentive and the resources to maintain the systems and run manage operations efficiently so that not only is it sustainable, but it will encourage other businesses and local governments to do the same. A mobile phone call costs 1 gourde. Any of you who have been in countryside will see even the poorest owning mobile phones and making calls. 15 goudes/day will allow a family to provide safe, clean water for drinking and cooking (using SPHERE guidelines of 10 liters/person/day for drinking and cooking). This is exactly the model we are deploying now with MINUSTAH-CVR in the SudEst.

In urban slums of Port-au-Prince, 1 gallon of water of dubious quality trucked in from La Plaine sells for 5 gourdes. We can get this down to less than 1 gourde for high quality water, provided through a system operated by local businesses and that requires no trucking. This makes the building and long-term provisioning of water sustainable with an incentive to expand. We are putting a proposal together to do this in the slums of PaP. Eventually, I can see a scalable public-private partnership where equipment is funded by donors, operations are run by businesses based in the slums, and the government regulates the price of water to make it affordable to a population that doesn’t get it now.

There will still be a segment of the population that may not be able to afford even 1 gourde. They can be given vouchers or credits by the NGOs to purchase the quality water from existing vendors once there is enough capacity to provide it. It’s far more efficient that NGOs staffing distribution of free emergency water at high cost forever.

This ground up, market-driven approach to building water infrastructure for everyone may seem slower than a top-down, government-funded approach, but how long have Haitians been waiting for that to happen?

The role of NGOs should be to fund infrastructure setup and oversee programs like the examples above to make it sustainable, scalable, and self-propagating.

The other day I listened to a representative from a NGO on CNN responding to a question about why 9 months after the crisis we’re facing a cholera outbreak. The response was that the group was focused on hygiene and sanitation education. I don’t dispute the importance of that, but telling people that they need to wash their hands and drink clean water when there isn’t anything affordable seems a little disconnected. The response was also indicative of the fact that the majority has been focused on providing temporary aid to those directly affected by the earthquake, not on infrastructure development. That needs to change.

Visit Life Giving Force at http://www.LifeGivingForce.Com