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A innovative effort to reestablish both phone and banking services in Haiti. See Gates Foundation, U.S. Government Back Cell Phone Banking for Haiti

Haitian cellular provider Digicel has received a $2.5 million grant for a project to allow people in the impoverished and earthquake-stricken country to use their mobile phones for banking.

Digicel is the first recipient from a $10 million fund set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the project is designed to speed up the arrival of cell phone banking in Haiti. The effort follows other mobile banking projects such as the M-PESA program in Kenya.

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Jan. 7th,Still Shaky; A Year After the Earthquake in Haiti, the Key to Stability Is to Build the State. RAND report, Jan. 7, 2011. This short report focuses on the public administration of recovery, which is a very crucial issue in Haiti.

This is one of several articles that appeared today covering the non-recovery story in Haiti. One article cited Oxfam, the British Non-Governmental Organization, and criticized President Bill Clinton for some of the problems. The Oxfam website has an article critical of the Haitian authorities. Clearly there is lots of blame for all major parties involved.  Below is an article from The Economist (Jan. 6, 2011) titled  The year of surviving in squalor.

Even allowing for some unique difficulties, the efforts of the government and outsiders to rebuild have been disappointing. But when visiting journalists parachute in to Port-au-Prince for the anniversary of the earthquake, they will see few signs of progress and many of stasis. Rubble still blocks many streets. Even if the work of removing it goes according to the official schedule, less than half will be cleared by October. Only about 30,000 temporary shelters have been built. The National Palace, the emblem of Haitian sovereignty, has yet to be demolished, let alone rebuilt. The tent camps that dot the city look ever-shabbier, and their inhabitants thinner and more bedraggled.

This landscape of neglect and degradation mocks the widespread hope in the weeks after the quake that Haiti could “build back better,” as Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to the country, put it. The government’s promising reconstruction plan, unveiled at a donor conference in March, envisioned moving many people outside the swollen capital and injecting economic life into rural areas, as well as rebuilding Port-au-Prince.

The net outcome  has been a miserable year for Haitian victims.

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One positive and hopeful sign of recovery in Haiti is the plan to create a new, modern  university.  See New University to Rise in Haiti as Higher Education There In Collapse. Huff Post, December 2, 2010.

The mission of the International University of Haiti is Creating Global Leadership through providing students with a combination of Liberal Arts for critical thinking and Professional Development for specific skills toward building a New Haiti. Each student is strongly encouraged to major in one field and minor in the other. Fifty-two students are already enrolled. Tuition is set for US$600 per quarter for ten credits, with 120 credits required to graduate. A degree would cost only $7,200 over four years – affordable to those of modest means. The new university will cooperate with Haitian micro-lenders to accommodate student loans.

The need for the new university is especially apparent given the state of Haitian higher education post-quake.

What I cannot determine from the write up is whether distance learning techniques will be used. Given the huge losses in faculty resulting from the earthquake, it would seem a likely means to gain new faculty quickly.

Related Articles

• How Online Classrooms Are Helping Haiti Rebuild Its Education System (mashable.com)