Haiti : HACHO rural community development

funding from that date through 1979. The vicissitudes and impacts of HACHO - which soon became a focal point for local residents seeking help as well as for donors seeking a vehicle to provide assistance - are herein reviewed. HACHO, which began by providing health services in one small town, soon expanded geographically - into other parts of the Northwest - and sectorally - into community organization, road construction, and later, agricultural extension, irrigation, potable water, and handicrafts. The primary impact of the HACHO project lay in its provision of basic services where none existed before. Residents valued its health care, agricultural, and infrastructure programs, a road network constructed by Food for Work teams, and its development of community councils to facilitate service delivery and mobilize local resources and self-help. However, HACHO was also frequently called upon to coordinate donor response to natural disasters, and even though the project's design in later years tried to emphasize production-oriented programs and local capacity building, HACHO's relief activities tended to skew development efforts toward nonsustainable service provision. The community council movement was fraught with contradictory expectations (regarding self-help vs. dependency on external relief), and HACHO itself suffered from serious organizational and managerial weaknesses: a centralized decisionmaking structure with headquarters far away in Port-au-Prince, and an inadequate information system, resulting in lack of guidance, continuity, and evaluation. Several lessons emerge: the difficulty of achieving development and relief objectives within the same program; the need to clearly understand true costs and benefits in sustainable development activities; the necessity of long-term attention to management improvement, as well as long-term donor support, in developing an indigenous organizational capacity; and the vulnerability of integrated rural development projects to external, macro-level constraints.