PARAQ Case Studies
- The program covered 10 vulnerable neighborhoods, 8 in the capital and 2 in Petit-Goâve, and produced 9 planning schemes, benefited 170,000 residents and reinforced or rebuilt 1,000 homes.
- In informal neighborhoods there is usually neither a cadastral record nor a title, so operators inventoried land status and used a neighbor survey, called social certification, that has no legal value but gives a base for negotiation.
- At Carrefour a priority road required setting back or demolishing 70 houses in the first section and 90 in the second, and CARE offered materials in exchange for residents demolishing and rebuilding with trained builders.
- The planning scheme is described as one of the program's most important contributions to Haitian institutions, because it rests on a diagnostic that did not exist before.
- Operators started small works before schemes were validated, to show the project was real, because validation is slow and residents' expectations are immediate.
- More than 15,000 people were trained or informed on safe construction, including more than 1,300 building professionals and more than 5,800 families.
The case studies extend the capitalization study that the PARAQ ran in 2015 and 2016. The summary of that study sets out what the program learned, and this volume answers the question of how to apply it in the field. The cases come from the operators' reports and were discussed in a workshop of all PARAQ actors. The foreword describes a program financed mostly by the European Union with the public works ministry, the interior ministry's directorate of local authorities, the housing unit UCLBP and the CIAT secretariat, covering 10 vulnerable neighborhoods, 8 in the capital and 2 in Petit-Goâve.
The volume has six themes. Land tenure: in informal neighborhoods there is usually no cadastral record or title, so operators first inventoried the status of residents, then used a neighbor survey called social certification, which has no legal value but gives a base for negotiation, and negotiated from existing arrangements; the CARE case in Carrefour shows a road that required 70 houses to be set back or demolished in its first section and 90 in the second, with compensation in materials and builders trained in safe construction. The planning scheme is presented as one of the program's most important contributions to Haitian institutions, built on a social, economic and urban diagnostic that did not exist before. The remaining themes cover community participation, safe construction with cases from Welthungerhilfe in Petit-Goâve and GRET in Baillergeau, community management with sanitation and GOAL's community intervention teams at Turgeau, and relations with institutions.
The figures box at the start repeats the program's results: 9 planning schemes, 170,000 residents who benefited, 1,000 homes reinforced or rebuilt, more than 15,000 people trained or informed on safe construction, and 60 businesses created.
How to cite
European Union, 2016, PARAQ Case Studies, accessed via HaitiDocs, https://www.haitidocs.org/doc/ue-2016-paraq-etudes-de-cas
- Rights holder
- European Union