General Policy Declaration of Prime Minister-designate Jack Guy Lafontant
- Records the fiscal ground the incoming government says it starts from: a budget envelope of 131 billion gourdes in 2013, equivalent to 3 billion US dollars, against 122 billion gourdes for the 2016-2017 exercise, which is close to 1.8 billion dollars, so the envelope grew slightly in gourdes and fell by about 40 percent in dollars.
- States the sector-credit anomaly plainly: agriculture has been more than 20 percent of GDP over the past five years and received less than 1 percent of bank credit in 2015.
- Cites Hurricane Matthew damage of about 2.7 billion US dollars as part of the context the program has to absorb.
- Sets measurable environmental targets rather than intentions: raising vegetation cover by at least 2 percent a year, and protected areas covering at least 5 percent of the area of every commune in the republic.
- Puts sanitation as the binding constraint on water: 65 percent of the population has access to an improved water point but only 27 percent to sound sanitation, described as the lowest rate in the Caribbean, with more than 60 percent of wastewater generally discharged into the sea.
- Sizes the education problem by state coverage rather than by school count: 36,467 establishments for 7,653,622 pupils, but MENFP figures for 2013-2014 show only 21.67 percent of children, 1,301,872 of 6,006,034, taken in charge by the Haitian state.
- Frames poverty as feminized, with women the most vulnerable category among the 23.8 percent of Haitians in extreme poverty in 2014, and commits to the 30 percent quota for women at all levels of national life.
Under the 1987 Constitution a Prime Minister-designate must present a general policy declaration to Parliament and obtain a vote of confidence on it, which makes this document the most authoritative statement of what a Haitian government intends to do. This is the declaration of Jack Guy Lafontant, appointed after the inauguration of Jovenel Moïse in February 2017, running to some forty pages. It is explicitly framed as the implementation of the measures the President had proposed for 2017-2022 for the development of Haiti, and quotes his call for the country to be restored to a place among nations. The declaration is organized by chapter, opening with the political agenda: justice, public security and national defense; relations with political parties; the public administration; and economic policy. For political-economy work the value is that it fixes, at a datable moment and in the government's own words, what the executive committed itself to - a baseline against which later performance, budget allocations and the ministerial road maps issued in the same period can be read.
How to cite
Office of the Prime Minister of Haiti, 2017, General Policy Declaration of Prime Minister-designate Jack Guy Lafontant, http://www.sgcm.gouv.ht/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Politique-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale-du-Gouvernement-1.pdf