This is the second part of the interview with Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking author, Dr. Tim Schwartz. (Read the first part here.) MD: Is there a solution to what seems to be the logistics issues that came to the fore after the earthquake? Schwartz: Yes. And I am not the only one. There is a growing sentiment–as per Easterly and a less well know but equally astute guy named Owen Barder at the Center for Global Development–that we need accountability. Just as every other sector of the business community, school, church, the government, the NGO sector needs transparency, accountability, and feedback. That is not hard to implement and it would solve the problems of ineffective aid, cheating, embezzling, lying about the effectiveness of programs. Ultimately it would give way to the coordination of aid agencies, the deficiency of which was fantastically apparent in the miserable disorder that accompanied the earthquake relief. I was unofficially working on this with Paul Farmer and the Special Envoy’s Office but it got canned in December. The explanation they gave me was that they had decided that it was the Haitian government’s responsibility to monitor the NGOs. What I envisioned was a type of Standard and Poor’s of NGOs but with exceptional rigor. The fulcrum would be a small office with maybe six employees–young, hungry, idealistic and fit students of development. We would have an Internet site that listed all the NGOs in Haiti (no one knows how many are out there). On the website we would have the financial data, like Charity Navigator, but we would carry it further, as does the BBB’s charity evaluations. We would publish salaries and percentage of money spent on overhead and we would rate the organization on their disposition to provide us with data. Then we would go out and actually verify this, rate them on the accuracy report on field programs and if whether or not they were doing what they say they are doing. Right there you would expose a lot of bogus organizations and by making that information public donors could avoid throwing their money away. But we would take it even further. We would provide a small but representative and rigorously obtained sample of the opinions of the recipients of the aid. No one ever does that. The NGOs are supposed to do it. It’s in all the charters and stipulations for aid packages so what they do is send some paid consultant out, or one of their own employees, and they write up a report. You can imagine how that goes. As William Easterly said, “If I allowed my students to assign their own grades most would not study very hard.” All this would go into a rating system, made public, on the website, and updated bi-annually. There would also be rating open to reviewers, like the Amazon.com reviews. It all seems so simple and so logical. I am not saying anything that an 8th grade student taking his first business class wouldn’t think of. Why don’t they do it? That’s a different question. This system would also allow us to easily maintain a database of all the resources at the disposal of each NGO. Such a resource, indeed this accountability structure, could serve as a institution for coordination in the event of disaster. The single greatest problem with the earthquake was a total absence of coordination. It was absolutely mind boggling. MD: What percentage of the orphanages in Haiti are being run legitimately, being that there are actual children without parents with outside donations going to their clothing, room or board and where the state of the children is bettered by living there? Schwartz: In my honest opinion? This could get me in trouble. I suspect none; but there are very good reasons for this. And since you asked, here is a rather lengthy excerpt from an unpublished article I just wrote: There are simply not enough orphans–at least not enough to satisfy the aid agencies. There are those orphanage keepers who drive around before the scheduled arrival of overseas sponsors and round up street children to serve as temporary orphans (as a rule street children prefer to be free); but most orphanages provide children with access to education in exchange for fulfilling the role as “orphan” (I detail these finds in the book Travesty in Haiti). For Haitians, it is not a big surprise that orphans are scarce. In a USAID funded report that I wrote at the time of the research mentioned above I explained why. First of all, Haitians have large families. The average Haitian in the region where I worked had 10 full and half brothers and sisters; 20 uncles and aunts (including parent’s half siblings); about 35 first cousins (reducing the average lifetime total by a factor of 4); a maximum of 12 living grandparents (4 grandparents and 8 great grandparents); and a possible 40 great uncles and aunts (the siblings and half siblings of his or her grandparents). In addition to these blood relatives, a Haitian child has two fictive mothers and two fictive fathers (godparents). Any one of these relatives may be disposed, even eager, to adopt the child, especially in lieu of the labor value of children, the second reason why true orphans are scarce. Haitians–at least 65% of whom practice household livelihood strategies involving labor intensive agriculture, livestock and petty commodity production–place a high value on children for the labor they provide in the household survival strategies. This is nothing new to agricultural or pre-industrial societies. Children in early America were also valued for their labor. Pre-industrial subsistence strategies mean intense labor regimes, specifically fetching firewood and water, running errands, washing cloths and cooking. For example, just fetching water in the Northwest Department involves a 70 minute round-trip walk to the nearest spring. Children perform these tasks and in doing so free adults to pursue more gainful opportunities, such as