Water and Sanitation Services: Rural or Urban Haiti First?

The decision by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan to use 99% of their Facebook shares to fund charitable initiatives over their lives is an overwhelming statement of generosity. The massive challenge for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be how to achieve the most good with this money.

Individual philanthropists play a vital role in development, not least because – unlike political initiatives or groups dependent on fundraising – billionaires can afford to ignore lobby groups and popular attention.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a single development investment that tackles one of Haiti’s biggest death-tolls and at the same time combats deforestation and pollution. That is what one contribution to the Haiti Priorise project suggests.

While some depictions show Haiti to be almost entirely deforested, recent work finds that up to one-third of land is covered in trees. In any case, having more trees can help Haiti, because it can prevent erosion, aid pollination, and improve water-flow.

By Nicholas Newman, Oxford Prospect.  Increasingly, we are hearing the term that something must be done to solve the world’s almost never-ending ending crises. The media is full of pressing appeals that every problem is urgent and must be tackled immediately, with often little regard to the economic and social costs involved. Unfortunately, for policy makers, the real world of geopolitics and budgetary issues forces politicians to prioritise decisions. Often such policy decisions will be both tough to make and politically unpopular with the public at large.