Countries fail to deliver on Haiti aid pledges
Posted: July 15th, 2010(CNN) — Six months after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, most governments that promised money to help rebuild the country have not delivered any funds at all, a CNN investigation has found.
Donors promised $5.3 billion at an aid conference in March, about two months after the earthquake — but less than 2 percent of that money has been handed over so far to the United Nations-backed body set up to handle it.
Only four countries have paid anything at all: Brazil, Norway, Estonia and Australia.
The United States pledged $1.15 billion. It has paid nothing, with the money tied up in the congressional appropriations process.
Venezuela promised even more — $1.32 billion. It has also paid nothing, although it has written off some of Haiti’s debt.
Former President Bill Clinton, a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said he plans to put pressure on governments that have been slow to deliver on their promises.
“I’m going to call all those governments and say, the ones who said they’ll give money to support the Haitian government, I want to try to get them to give the money, and I’m trying to get the others to give me a schedule for when they’ll release it,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this week.
He said the worldwide economic crisis was at least partly to blame.
“I think that they’re all having economic trouble, and they want to hold their money as long as possible,” Clinton said.
Altogether, about $506 million has been disbursed to Haiti since the donors’ conference in March, said Jehane Sedky of the U.N. Development Program.
That’s about 9 percent of the money that was pledged. But about $200 million was money that had been in the pipeline for aid work before the earthquake, and about another $200 million went directly to the government of Haiti to help it get back on its feet, Sedky explained.
That has left the commission with about $90 million in donations since the conference, Sedky said.
There is some dispute about the World Bank’s contribution
The bank says it has made available $479 million dollars, and of that $56.6 million has “already been used” for different government-led projects. The World Bank says that this money was provided directly to the Haitian government and did not go into the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.
