Haiti - Economy: investments of the Diaspora in Latin America and in the Caribbean
For the first time, the Association of the American Chambers of Commerce of Latin America and the Caribbean (AACCLA) will hold its annual regional conference, "Business Future of the Americas," in Haiti, from June 15 till 17, 2015. The event will take place at the hotel Marriott of Port-au-Prince. The theme will be "Investments by the Diaspora in Latin America and in the Caribbean." This conference is organized with the support of several Haitian companies: Brana, Digicel, Marriott, Decently, Delta, DHL, Groups Accra, Dagmar, Access Haiti.
This event will offer opportunities to exchange with a network of more than 300 business managers from the United States, the Caribbean, Brazil and several other countries of the region. With world-famous speakers, companies and organizations strategically based at the heart of the Caribbean, this conference will allow Haiti and Latin America to distance themselves from their emergent status in the global economy. "The emphasis put on the Diaspora and its driving role in investments seems to us particularly interesting for Haiti, and we hope that this conference will be a meeting place for our Haitian businessmen from the diaspora, who are the best placed to do business and to work in the region," explained Régine René Labrousse, President of the Steering committee of the conference.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Haiti (AmCham) will give to this annual conference a wider reach by adding to its conference one day to discuss "Doing business in Haiti." The panels which will be held at this event will give an additional insight into the challenges identified in terms of investments and the available solutions. "Business-to-Business Meetings" (B2Bs) will be also planned throughout the day.
The Diaspora has a new Secretary for Haitians Living Abroad
His name is Robert Labrousse and he was installed in his post last Wednesday, April 29th. In his speech, Secretary Labrousse [who replaces Olicier Pieriche] asserted, “I shall be a Secretary of dialogue and openness. We all know that the mission of the MHAVE is to allow Haitians living abroad to maintain the link with their homeland. Roots, attachment, link, connection, all these words bring [us] to the same concept, the unity of Haitians, whether it is from the inside or from the outside!
He replaces Olicier Pieriche who was appointed in January, 2015.
Robert Labrousse is a businessman who occupied the post of external Secretary of State for Overseas Development within the government of Evans Paul. He is a treasurer and founder of the Pink and White Foundation of President Michel Martelly and his wife Sophia St Rémy.
He was a vice-president of the chamber of commerce and industry.
Pieriche had to resign at the request of Prime Minister Evans Paul, after having made a diplomatic passport for the Assistant General Coordinator of the Program of Identification and Documentation of Haitian Immigrants (PIDIH), the ex-deputy of Petit-Goâve Jean Limongi. The latter was arrested at the beginning of April in Florida and charged with drug trafficking.
Deportations: june is getting near
It is the month chosen by the Dominican Republic to deport Haitian citizens living in the Dominican Republic but having no documentation allowing them to stay in the country.
The deportations, however, have already begun, and every week we learn that a new contingent of Haitian-Dominicans has arrived in Haiti.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are in this situation. While those who were authorized to legalize their papers by obtaining birth certificates and passports from the Haitian government are few, due to the slowness of Haitian authorities to supply them this documentation.
On the Haitian side, no preparations have been made to welcome these fellow countrymen. What are the possibilities for them to find employment in a country already known for its very high unemployment? Will there be enough schools for their children? What about hospitals, when sanitary services are clearly insufficient in the country?
When we are considering that these compatriots don’t even speak French nor Creole, having been born in the Dominican Republic, we easily understand the extent of the problem.
But nothing has been done to welcome them and it is without a doubt that their arrival will increase the number of people living in the capital or other large cities in the country, building a place to live wherever they can, even in ravines along major roads. This will only increase the number of shanty towns.
MOVIE: “Sweet Micky for President”
“That’s how things were happening to us — to the point where if you really look at the movie, it feels like a narrative,” admitted former Fugees rapper Pras Michel, who never expected the experience to become a film. “How it was going down was how it was captured and then we went back and went ‘Wow, this really feels like a movie.’”
Since his days as one-third of Grammy-winning group The Fugees, Michel has been “loving the film aspect” of his career as much as making music. Having produced documentaries like 2007’s Skid Row (where he masqueraded as a homeless person) and a long-awaited project about Somali pirates, these days he’s certainly more filmmaker than Fugee.
“I’m catching the buzz and I’ve got a couple more narrative projects that I’m developing,” said Michel. “We want to make things that are avant-garde (and) interesting but at the same time, get to the core of the issue.”
“Sweet Micky for President” will have its Canadian debut next Wednesday at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto.
Lessons Nepal can learn from its tragic twin Haiti
Nepal faces a Himalayan task: it must overcome the aftershocks of history just as much as the effects of Saturday’s calamitous earthquake. As with Haiti, also a historically impoverished, poorly governed country hit by a devastating quake, Nepal may find it a struggle to “build back better.” Bill Clinton crafted the memorable slogan after the “goudo goudo” – the onomatopoeic Creole name the Haitians gave the 2010 quake in memory of its frightening rumble. Now, Clinton’s phrase is used wryly, if not in outright jest.
Unsurprisingly, development do-gooders are cautious about suggesting Nepal build back better, even at this point, [a few] days after the quake, when the world feels its pain most acutely.
For, the slow, ineffective – in some cases, even impossible –search for survivors in Nepal’s remote, hardest-hit western regions illustrates the massive fault lines of its entrenched problems: acute poverty, political dysfunction, rampant corruption and a deep fatalism that inhibits planning.
Those infuriatingly inaccessible western districts were the ones that suffered such prolonged government neglect that the violent Maoist insurgency first took root there nearly 20 years ago. And it says a great deal that those areas still remain so cut off from Kathmandu that earthquake relief packages cannot reach them, and there seems to be no way to assess deaths and damage. The Maoists, supposedly the party of the poor, have been elected – and rejected. The monarchy has been swept away. Nothing has changed and nothing works. For Nepal, its worst earthquake in 80 years has been “an acute-on-chronic event”, to quote Harvard doctor and Haiti champion Paul Farmer on the Haitian catastrophe.
The two countries make for a tragic twinning. Until this earthquake, perhaps the only time the words “Haiti” and “Nepal” appeared in one sentence was in reference to the cholera epidemic unwittingly introduced by Nepalese United Nations peacekeepers stationed in Haiti. It seemed an excessively cruel twist to a pathetic story – dirt-poor Haiti, leveled by a devastating earthquake and infected by soldiers from an equally poor faraway land. But now, the two earthquakes – five years apart – may have created discouragingly new parallel lines of protracted woe. The Nepalese quake was 16 times stronger than that in Haiti. More than 200,000 people died in Haiti; what will be the final toll in Nepal?