Poverty in Haiti: A Poverty Profile from the ECVH Household Survey
- The report presents Haiti's first systematic poverty diagnosis based on recent household statistical data from ECVH.
- It finds extreme poverty far above the Latin America and Caribbean average, with 56 percent of Haitians living below the one-dollar-a-day extreme poverty line and 77 percent below the two-dollar poverty line.
- Poverty is geographically concentrated outside the capital: rural areas account for most extreme poverty and have both higher incidence and deeper poverty than the Metropolitan Area.
- The Nord-Est department has the most acute poverty profile, while Ouest has the lowest extreme-poverty incidence because it includes the capital area.
- Inequality is high, with the richest 20 percent receiving most national income while 80 percent receive less than an equal distribution would imply.
- The report links lower poverty risks to salaried employment and transfers, while rural poverty analysis shows broad access to land but very limited mechanized tools.
Written by Willy Egset and Pål Sletten of Fafo and published in Port-au-Prince in June 2005, this report presents what its introduction calls the first systematic diagnosis of poverty in Haiti based on recent statistical data. It was produced under the Ministry of Economy and Finance project 'Renforcement des Capacités de Production et d'Analyze des Statistiques Sociales', with the Haitian Institute of Statistics and Informatics and in coordination with the Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation, financed by UNDP and continuing a Fafo-UNDP collaboration in Haiti dating from 1999.
The report sets out its methodological choices and poverty lines, then measures poverty nationally and against other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and the world. It profiles poverty geographically - establishing that the great majority of the poor live in the provinces rather than the capital - and by demographic and economic characteristics, before devoting separate chapters to rural poverty (land access, owner-operator versus sharecropping tenure, basic tools) and urban poverty (inequality between Port-au-Prince and other urban areas, rural origins of the urban poor, and their economic insertion).
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF); Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE); Haitian Institute of Statistics and Informatics (IHSI); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, 2005, Poverty in Haiti: A Poverty Profile from the ECVH Household Survey, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ECVH-PROFIL-DE-LA-PAUVRETE.pdf