Being Poor in Haiti
- The article argues that poverty has become the standard external label for Haiti but must be understood through local spatial, social and economic experiences.
- The author reviewed 87 Haiti-related reports, press items and articles from January 2014 to October 2018 and found that only three avoided the formula of Haiti as the poorest country in the Americas.
- It uses ENMP 2011, ECVMAS 2013, ONPES work and 16 semi-structured interviews from 2016-2017 as core sources.
- The paper reports 2012 poverty at 58.5 percent and extreme poverty at 23.8 percent, with thresholds set in 2013 from ECVMAS.
- Extreme poverty is concentrated in rural areas: more than 80 percent of people in extreme poverty live in rural zones, and the rural extreme-poverty rate reaches 37.8 percent versus 4.6 percent in metropolitan Port-au-Prince.
- The article concludes that public policies since the 1990s have not produced socio-spatial justice and have often fallen into clientelism, demagogy and corruption.
Pierre Jores Merat's article, published in Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer in 2019, examines what it means to be poor in Haiti by treating poverty as a spatial, social and economic condition rather than only a national label. It draws on Haitian poverty studies, institutional reports, IHSI surveys, ONPES work and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017. The article reviews how poverty is perceived through Haitian Creole language and discourse, how it is lived through access to basic services such as electricity, education and health, and how public policies have addressed poverty and social support. It emphasizes large rural and spatial inequalities, weak social protection, informal employment, and the failure of many anti-poverty policies since the 1990s to deliver socio-spatial justice.
How to cite
Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer, 2019, Being Poor in Haiti, https://journals.openedition.org/com/9806