What is Haiti Outreach?

Haiti Outreach is a US 501C3 non profit headquartered in Minnesota and a registered NGO (Non Governmental Organization)  in Pignon, Haiti

Our vision: For Haiti to become a developed nation.

Our mission: To collaborate with the people of Haiti to build and maintain community-initiated projects that advance their development.

Projects are focus primarily in rural Haiti on sustainable access to clean water and sanitation, including hygiene education.

Haiti Outreach was started by a group of us who already were working in Haiti with various organizations in 1997. We got together to see what we could collaborate on. Neil Van Dine who is still the Haiti country director, wrote up a proposal for doing community development using water as the organizing point. We began with a truck and a part time salary for Neil. We have learned a lot along the way, made many mistakes and have developed a program that is a model for all of Haiti (and the world).

Why water you may ask? Well think of this...imagine you had no access to water from the tap. So you had to go out and find water for cooking, bathing, drinking, washing...                 I have a pond in front of my house and so if I had no other source of water, I would have to go out to the pond(ewww) and get a bucketful of water and bring it home for cooking, cleaning and bathing. Maybe I'd make a few trips.

Now, have you ever tried to lift a 5 gallon bucket of water/or paint? I can maybe get  a 5 gallon paint bucket off the store shelf and into my cart but I could never lift it over my head to carry it even a few yards!! And I'd have to do that every day, maybe multiple time a day...and how dirty is that pond water??!! This is what is available in Haiti in may towns, villages and rural areas.

A lot of things happen at the river where people are getting water...washing the vehicle, animals drinking(and defecating), people bathing, washing clothes, mud from erosion...

Sustainable access to clean water within 500 meters of homes in Haiti is vital to achieving increased health and development. We realized that it shouldn’t be Haiti Outreach making these advances in clean water development alone, but that the key actors for sustainable development are the Haitian communities and government.

Our action plan for each community we engage:

1. Community initiates the process to work with Haiti Outreach
2. Community needs and current resources are assessed, along with a census taken by the community of homes and people who would be willing to pay for clean water
3. A volunteer community management committee is elected
4. Haiti Outreach animators conduct training on sanitation, hygiene, and well management over the duration of 3 months. This includes a piece on being responsible for the upkeep, management, ownership, and repair of their well.
5. Haiti Outreach drills the well and builds a well house around the hand pump
6. Well is inaugurated and the community gains full access to clean water
7. Community is fully responsible for management of the well. Haiti Outreach does monthly mentoring with the communities for 2 years after the well is inaugurated to ensure the success of the communities in managing their wells. 

Typical well committee that manages their community's well.

We require that at least half the members are women and they must be from diverse families, churches and elected by the members of the subscribers to their well.

 What makes Haiti Outreach different from other NGOs is the community development aspect. What we are really about is transforming the way people think and take responsibility for their communities, using water as the access point.

We monitor our wells to see how many are functioning each year and over 90% of Haiti Outreach wells are functioning after they are turned over to the community. That is compared to a worldwide statistic of 50% of rural wells continue to function. After the 2010 earthquake that devastated parts of Haiti, the Haiti Outreach wells were up and functioning within days compared to other wells in the area. This is because the Haiti Outreach communities had the money saved to fix them and knew how to fix them. 

Sanitation and pride for a clean community is stressed in the initial training of the communities. The people are encouraged to make sure every household has a latrine before the well is drilled. This becomes a sense of pride and often a community will have 100% of the homes having latrines (compared to maybe 25% having latrines before we begin training).

Often times in third world development, the thinking is that "these people are poor and we should give this away for free". However, we charge for the access to clean water(I pay for water, don't you?). The community determines the price(averages 50 cents per month per household) depending on various factors like how many subscribers they have, what people can afford, how much they want to save...). You ask how does this compare to the cost of living? A typical cell phone costs about 80 cents per month. We have found that pride, responsibility, and leadership increases when they pay. They take ownership of their wells.  The money collected is deposited each month into an account for the community to use for paying the salary of the guard, basic expenses like receipt books,and the rest is saved for fixing the well if it breaks down.

The Haiti Outreach Management Team in Haiti. They manage the 60+ employees

of Haiti Outreach including accountants, well drillers, 

animators(community development workers), etc.

If you want to read more about Haiti Outreach go to: haitioutreach.org

Tomorrow, Monday, November 14 we will live stream (as long as technology cooperates) the inauguration of a well on Haiti Outreach's Facebook page. An inauguration is the official passing of the key to the well from Haiti Outreach to the community. If you don't catch it live you can see it later on Facebook Haiti Outreach as a video.