NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former US President Bill Clinton hopes that pledges to help quake-devastated Haiti at his philanthropic “summit” this week will push governments to fulfil promises of billions of dollars in reconstruction.
Clinton, who is the UN special envoy for Haiti, will hold a special session on the recovery of the impoverished Caribbean nation with Haitian President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive at the Clinton Global Initiative.
More than 1,000 people including heads of state like US President Barack Obama, business leaders including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, humanitarians and celebrities will attend the meeting in New York, starting today.
Putting a spotlight on Haiti “might help shake loose some of the donor commitments from the governments,” Clinton told Reuters in an interview.
“There is a lot of money that has been promised to Haiti, but not much has been given. Almost all that has been given has been for the emergency phase. Now we’re into rebuilding … but we need the donors to come up with the money,” he said.
In March, international donors pledged more than $5 billion over two years to rebuild Haiti after a January 12 quake killed up to 300,000 people, devastated the country’s economy and infrastructure and left more than a million people homeless.
“How fast we can move depends in large measure on whether these commitments will be honored that have been made, but I’m hopeful,” said Clinton.
Clinton and Bellerive chaired a meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly yesterday. Earlier France and the United States said that they would each contribute $25 million to rebuild Port-au-Prince’s main teaching hospital.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that it was “unrealistic” to expect rebuilding progress immediately after such devastation. “In the wake of the terrible quake, many spoke about the need not only to rebuild what was lost but to fundamentally re-imagine the Haitian landscape,” she said.
Clinton hoped the CGI meeting would also produce pledges to help Pakistan cope with massive floods that have destroyed agricultural land and livestock, displaced millions of people, and caused damage the government has estimated at $43 billion.
“They didn’t get the response that Haiti got partly because of donor fatigue and partly because there’s apprehension in our part of the world about whether the money could be effectively spent,” he said.
Some Pakistanis have grown angry with their government’s sluggish response and are turning to Islamist charities, some tied to militants. The United States worries that the battle against such militants may have been made more difficult as Pakistan struggles with an economic meltdown and public fury.
When Clinton’s initiative began, corporations tended to show up and write checks to fund humanitarian programmes. Now many see their philanthropy in terms of investment opportunities.
