Corruption Aid

It is with the saddest heart and the greatest disappointment I present what purports to be a new school in Haiti.

When a shining star of a prominent and important public building done on behalf of the Ministry of Education to house the most vulnerable students in Port-au-Prince becomes a glorified cow shed and neglects to provide vital sanitation needs to the children it accommodates we are compelled to you ask the question "What went wrong?" 

The answer is a cataclysmic cluster of incompetence, corruption, apathy and ignorance coming together to make the perfect storm. 

Leadership in design and management being replaced by intense apathy by a Head of Mission whose sole purpose is to tick the "done" boxes for ignorant donors.

Donors with a lack of understanding to what construction actually requires, equating the handing out of buildings to a food drop from a plane. If it were the same this particular food box would have landed on the head of a one-legged orphan child.

Contractors who have zero interest in making their own country a place to prosper, who are driven solely by the desire to uphold the status quo of rich man good, poor man bad and make the quickest sickest buck possible. Contractors who have been quoted as dismissing the seismic issues that won't be relevant for another 100 years at which time you can rest assured their progeny won't be attending any diminutive education establishment in Haiti. 

Contractors chosen with the assistance of cosy, friendly, loquacious managers with strong political inclinations who are not afraid to side step the nebulous corruption policy consisting mainly of 7 low quality A4 clipart posters. 

Employees who actually care being disempowered and tarred with a brush of belligerence for seeking to push for higher results and expectations on behalf of those that can’t demand it for themselves. At times being removed from the equation entirely when quality over quantity is not the order of the day and attention to long term training and upskilling is an over-burden of an under-budgeted project.

The result of this Big Crunch of Development is a school that architecturally resembles an animal shelter, where the quality of workmanship can be guaranteed to degrade in two years; a splendid example of temporary building built for the price of permanence. A building that has changed so vastly that the alterations destroy the structural veracity to a point that the design can no longer promise safety in the event of an earthquake. A school absolutely bereft of sanitation for 900 primary children.

In essence the children for whom it was fought so hard to provide a better, safer and clean education environment might have been just as well off to remain within the crumbling walls or in the tents that they had to begin with. At least then they had somewhere to pee!

Some people should hang their heads in shame… but they won’t.