I’m in Haiti for INURED’s retreat.
INURED stands for L’Institut Interuniversitaire de Recherche et de Développement. As the name suggests, the organization started in 1997 as an effort to connect Haitian institutions with international scholars working on Haiti. Some of its activities consist of straightforward stuff along exactly those lines, like managing scholarships from the Brazilian government for talented students from Cité Soleil to study at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Go, Partido dos Trabalhadores!), or running summer schools in Haiti taught by visiting faculty.
But INURED also has a great local network that it’s built up over years of working on ground in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s largest slum. They’ve been able to parlay this into a really marvelous rapid data collection infrastructure. This has allowed them to produce some cutting edge research, such as the first post-earthquake survey, which turned into this report. Anyone interested in randomized trials should partner up with INURED to run field experiments and collect data. The organization’s community-driven social science is pushing out the research frontier. Moreover, it’s one of the few organization that’s really trying to test what’s working and what isn’t in Haiti, systematically using local tacit knowledge to guide its research into things like mapping the (mis)allocation of aid funds. We’re here to brainstorm new research projects and new ways to connect Haiti to the outside academic world.
But also they have NO MONEY. All of us here at the retreat had to pay our own way. So everyone reading this should donate liberally to them. [Editor’s note: how??]
My whopping 24 hours of experience on the ground allows me, of course, to generalize and conjecture with impunity. Port-au-Prince’s economy exhibits many characteristics of a classic Lewis labor-abundance story. (Simplied version: imagine an overpopulated traditional sector, in which a big chunk of labor has no marginal productivity … but you should all read the original essay.) As in many countries, you see a lot of people here working at activities that could at best be called low productivity: men at the airport all grabbing your luggage and opening the door for you in anticipation of a tip, the ridiculously number of small-scale informal peddlers all selling the same thing, and the insanely excessive staff in every formal sector institution ... many of whom seem to be doing precisely nothing. The fact that you see these phenomena across poor countries brings a perverse joy to my heart; giving me hope in the possibility of social science.
"The fact that you see these phenomena across poor countries brings a perverse joy to my heart; giving me hope in the possibility of social science."
LOL! Dismal is in the eye of the beholder. I look forward to additional installments.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero | August 07, 2010 at 11:56 AM