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Billions pledged, but little rebuilt in Haiti
Three months after donors at a U.S.-sponsored conference pledged more than $5.3 billion to rebuild Haiti, only a fraction of the money has been disbursed, and a special reconstruction commission has barely started to function, according to U.N. and aid officials.
U.S. lawmakers and international aid officials have expressed mounting concern about the slow recovery of the hemisphere's poorest country, where about 230,000 people died and about 2 million were displaced in January's earthquake. Despite ambitious plans to "build back better," as U.N. and U.S. officials promised, the reconstruction has been hobbled by a lack of coordination and cash and by a virtually incapacitated Haitian government, officials and experts say.
The United States has not disbursed the roughly $900 million it pledged for reconstruction this year, according to the U.N. Web site http://haitispecialenvoy.org. Although the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions on short-term emergency aid, the rest of the funds are in a supplemental budget bill that has been held up in Congress by an unrelated dispute over state aid.
About 180 million square feet of rubble is still piled where it sat after the Jan. 12 quake, according to U.N. estimates; only 5,000 of the 125,000 temporary shelters promised by the international community have been built.