This is a much expanded version of two shorter blogs, ‘A Short Note about Gender in Haiti‘ and ‘More on Gender in Haiti.’ It sums up the radical misunderstanding that seemingly all NGOs and journalists as well as many scholars have presented of gender in Haiti before and after the earthquake.

The quantitative Gender Survey described in this document was part of a larger evaluation and exploration of gender in Leogane and Carrefour, two communes (counties) near to Port-au- Prince that were among those most heavily impacted by the January 12th 2010 earthquake. Following the catastrophe CARE initiated emergency and supportive relief efforts in the communes, including sanitation, health and cash for work programs.

Sex, Family and Fertility (Also published by Lexington Books as Fewer Men, More Babies) re-evaluates the debate over family patterns in the Caribbean with respect to the critical importance that child labor plays in peasant household livelihood strategies. Earlier anthropologists widely accepted and provided empirical evidence that the contributions made by children to the peasant household labor pool was a significant determinant of social patterns and high birth rates. In the 1960s researchers began to dismiss the economic utility of children.

Thirsting for sensational stories about hunger, suffering, and violence, the world’s most prestigious news agencies—the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Reuters, CNN, CBS, The Guardian—have for decades uncritically repeated anything NGOs, UN agencies, or pseudo-researchers claim about Haiti. No vetting of data. No critical review.

This paper describes the application of Killworth et al. (2006) Scaling-Up technique to estimate the number of rape victims in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the three years following the 2010 earthquake. The data comes from a 1,600 household random survey of the communes of Leogane and Carrefour, two communes (counties) near to Port-au-Prince that were among those most heavily impacted by the January 12th 2010 earthquake. The work was financed by Care International.

NGOs have intervened in the purchasing-processing-storage-and-marketing chain to help fishermen get better prices for their fish and thereby bolster income to impoverished households. This support has encouraged the formation of male-dominated fishing associations. In addition to help with offshore fishing, they also often provide the associations with coolers and cold rooms for conserving fish and they help link the associations to urban purchasers.

In this article I begin with the rape epidemic that supposedly shook Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and then trace back in time the role of international aid agencies, activists, foreign governments, Haitian politicians and Haitian opportunist aid entrepreneurs in creating what has become an industry of being “viktim.”

In this paper I take a look at how NGO use of “asosyasyson”–what might better be called cooperatives–have probably hurt the economic autonomy of rural Haitian women. Specifically I look at USAID/Coca Cola/IDB funded Haiti Hope Mango project. The project was implemented by TechnoServ. I don’t mention it here, but we’ve observed a similar phenomenon with fishing associations.