Via CBC News: Canadian aid to Haiti gets mixed results. Excerpt:
Canadians generously opened their wallets after the Jan. 12 earthquake devastated Haiti, a Caribbean nation that remains the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Individuals donated a total of $220 million to Canadian charities, an amount matched by the federal government.
About one-third — $146 million — went to emergency shelter, medical aid, water and sanitation in the immediate aftermath, but a large portion of the total $440 million has yet to be spent.
Ten months later, the slow pace of progress worries some people who want to help Haitians.
Martine Ste. Victoire is among those feeling disillusioned. The Montreal woman organized several big fundraisers for aid agencies, including the Red Cross, but stopped in March.
"The reason why I stopped doing fundraisers is I didn't know where the money went."
Ste. Victoire says she asked the Red Cross for a breakdown of how the money was spent, but the information wasn't detailed enough for her.
"Anybody who is giving money to an NGO has the right to demand to see where it goes."
Additional frustrations, she says, were the share of donations spent on salaries, the inefficiencies in relief efforts and the lack of local help on projects.
Jim Scott, president of the Windsor, Ont.-based company Ground Effects Inc., is in a similar boat. He says he gave up trying to get shipments into Haiti. About 380 of his temporary housing units arrived in March and sat at the airport until June.
There were plans to send 10,000 units and train 150 Haitians in how to assemble them. Instead 20 Haitians were trained and 380 units assembled.
"What we thought was going to be a two-year project in Haiti was a two-month project," he says.
Scott's company, which started up a year ago, sells its housing units to Angola and Sri Lanka and is trying to secure a contract in Senegal. Haiti, by comparison, was "3,000 times more difficult," to get products into, he says.
