Haiti’s Presidential Working Group on Competitiveness releases a post-earthquake economic recovery roadmap with OTF Group support.
The January 12th earthquake is a catastrophe that Haiti and the Haitian people will never forget. In less than a minute, nearly 300,000 people died died, 1.3 million were rendered homeless and the country sustained total damages of somewhere between two and three times GDP. The private sector alone, sustained US $2.1 billion in damages. Yet, out of this unimaginable tragedy, the GC and OTF Group see an opportunity to build back both Haiti’s physical infrastructure and social fabric with focus on competitiveness that will create prosperity for all, not just the elite.
The Economic Recovery Roadmap (ERRM) seeks to forge a concrete medium-term economic recovery plan for Haiti. The ERRM proposes sectoral roadmaps for the five priority clusters that will be refined and validated by key government, private sector and civil society stakeholders over the coming weeks and months. The productivity of the five priority clusters will be reinforced by five cross-cutting clusters
Both the total investment and payoffs for the ERRM are significant. Based on our estimates, the five year investment costs will be US $1.5 billion plus an additional $4.5 billion for housing construction costs. We expect that this investment will generate an incremental US $3.59 billion in revenues, yield nearly one million jobs and funnel over US $1 billion in extra income to the bottom 90% of Haitian society by 2015.
Our next challenge lies in implementing the ERRM and creating the one million jobs envisioned by the plan. In the context of historic destruction and rapidly growing pessimism, this goal is ambitious, but achievable with the appropriate leadership and resources.
Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 2:41PM