The Economics of Aid to Haiti

If you’ll pardon me, I’ll break from my reporting of confirmed fact today to delve into the realm of analysis and opinion. I shouldn’t even grace this piece by economist Felix Salmon with a response, but it does bring up many of the misconceptions that might keep people from donating money to charities working in Haiti that is so direly needed. Salmon’s main point is that giving money that is earmarked for Haiti and Haiti alone can be too restrictive when charities come to use that money. It’s an ill time to make that observation, but he’s at least partially right.

What I find more disturbing, though, are the two subtext points he seems to be making:

1. Charities working in Haiti already have plenty of money to support their relief efforts there.

   His given example is that Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières , or MSF), on their US donation page, is asking for unrestricted donations to their general Emergency Relief Fund. From this he extrapolates (falsely) that MSF “has already received enough money over the past three days to keep its Haiti mission running for the best part of the next decade.” He goes on to compare the earthquake in Haiti and subsequent outpouring of support to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. But as the US Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders points out,

   comparisons to the Tsunami are misplaced because the medical systems affected by that crisis were not decimated and the short and long term emergency surgical needs of the population were much narrower.

   Furthermore, even if MSF did have plenty of money to support their work in Haiti, other organizations don’t. Groups like Partners in Health, which is now running the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, are serving thousands of patients with extremely limited supplies, doing surgery with no anesthesia, making splints out of whatever’s handy in lieu of casts. They need money to purchase supplies and get them into the country. (Incidentally, they also need clearance to actually land the planes full of supplies.)

2. Money donated to charities working in Haiti won’t all go to Haiti anyway.

   To demonstrate this point Salmon cites the recent hubbub over accounting at Yéle, and takes particular exception to the fact that 20% of the funds from the George Clooney telethon will go to Yéle. I’m not convinced that there’s anything so fishy going on at Yéle as is being alleged, and it may well be racism that’s partly fueling the scrutiny of that organization in particular. But I would point out that the other 80% of money raised by the telethon will go to Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, and UNICEF, organizations that have an established presence in Haiti and are respected for putting all donations to use in the place they’re needed (although the Red Cross is not without their share of controversy).

By all means, when you donate for relief in Haiti, donate unrestricted funds, so that the organizations receiving them can decide for themselves how best to use them. And don’t let Felix Salmon’s faulty framing of that point deter you from doing so.

While we’re at it, let’s stop referring to Haiti (or any other country?) as a failed state. It’s patronizing and unhelpful, and moreover it insults the Haitian people: Haiti is a country with remarkably functional communities, given the poverty and instability imposed on them (largely by the rest of the world). If its national government is dysfunctional, it’s not because of any defect in the Haitian temperament or culture that the term ‘failed state’ implies.