2 months since the earthquake

On the two-month anniversary of Haiti's massive earthquake, I wanted to reflect on what we have achieved here in the past few weeks. It has been an extraordinary period.

The impact of the Haiti earthquake - one of the largest disasters in recent history - has been exacerbated by the pre-existing poverty of Haiti coupled with the near total incapacitation of Haiti's capital city, government, financial center, the Haiti offices of the UN and the humanitarian community. Above-and-beyond this, the operational challenges have been substantial: amidst the disorder of shattered infrastructure and disintegrating security we needed to build a foothold among the rubble and chaos. In spite of this we have been able to put an experienced team on the ground, contributed significantly to the delivery of food, water, shelter and sanitation to those most in need, and at the same time established a long term strategy around youth, water/sanitation and economic recovery. We’ve developed an operational and programme platform to move into a broader long term strategy aimed at long term recovery and reconstruction. We are now expanding our operation to fulfill the early commitment we made to provide WASH, Comfort for kids and cash-for-work programming to thousands of families in the Petionville and Tabarre sections of Port au Prince, while at the same time carrying out the early assessments and initiating the activities that will be necessary to open programmes in the Central Plateau and beyond. These will reach tens of thousand more people. We have established a firm programme footing.

Funding has also come together remarkably well. Emergency funds were quickly allocated to ensure a rapid deployment and response. We raised over 10 million dollars in net private funds funds for programming, and to provide core funding for our recovery / reconstruction strategy. This has bought us time to develop proposals for our longer term institutional partners: we have secured significant funding already with more in the pipelines from OFDA, Gates, American Red Cross the UN and others. More will follow in the next week or so from ECHO, the UK & Scottish Governments.

From not being present in Haiti at all we have built an organization employing over 70 national staff and many expats with a huge range of skills, crisis tested in some of the worst humanitarian crises around the world. This team will take forward a strategy which we believe offers hope to the people of Haiti, and which will allow the people in our sectors employment, training, medical care, education for their children and a future they can believe in.

There are challenges here in Haiti, and sometimes the scale of the task ahead can be daunting, but looking back at where we were and seeing just what has been achieved gives me real confidence that we can achieve even the difficult targets we have set ourselves.