Jul 20 2010
Six months after the Haitian earthquake, $506 million of the $5.3 billion pledged at a donors conference in March has been disbursed to Haiti, according to Jehane Sedky of the U.N. Development Program, CNN reports in a story investigating the aid commitments. Only Australia, Brazil, Estonia and Norway have given money to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. "The United States pledged $1.15 billion to the commission. It has paid nothing, with the money tied up in the congressional appropriations process," according to the news service.
Former President Bill Clinton, a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said, "I'm going to call all those governments and say, the ones who said they'll give money to support the Haitian government, I want to try to get them to give the money, and I'm trying to get the others to give me a schedule for when they'll release it" (Johns/Fox, 7/15).
In related news, The Hill reports that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) "traveled to Haiti on Friday to observe the recovery efforts" amid "reports that the recovery and reconstruction efforts are lagging behind in the poor island nation." Corker, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was expected to meet with "Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, Haitian government officials, U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten and representatives of the United Nations and USAID, who are assisting relief efforts" (Fabian 7/16).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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