Raising Hopes in Haiti

Standing on a narrow street in Bel Air, one of Port-au-Prince’s most notorious slums, Clomène Etienne pauses from work to recount how, at age 47, she found her first job.

Ms. Etienne, who lives nearby in this community of one-story cement buildings, learned from a friend about jobs cleaning the city’s trash-clogged

streets. The $2 she receives per day — barely above local minimum wage but more than most Haitians earn, in this country where seven of 10 adults are unemployed — has helped Ms. Etienne pay debts and support her seven children.

“There is nothing to do but put food on the table,” she says, laughing, when asked how she spends the money.

Ms. Etienne is one of a 1,700-strong force of street cleaners employed through a partnership among the Pan American Development Foundation, CARE, and the Yéle Haiti Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by the Haitian-born hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean.

John Currelly, who directs the Pan American Development Foundation’s work in Haiti, took over the U.S. Agency for International Development-financed street-cleaning project in mid-2005 from another nonprofit group and soon pressed to extend the program deeper into Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighborhoods. His commitment grew after being taken hostage last year in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil, during a wave of kidnappings that followed the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He came away from the ordeal with a stronger desire to give some economic opportunity and hope to the impoverished areas often ignored by nonprofit groups.

But such an effort seemed foolhardy, as armed gangs threatened anyone who tried to penetrate the slums.

Enter Mr. Jean, a favorite child of this island nation, who won worldwide fame in the mid-1990s with his band the Fugees. Using his celebrity, Mr. Jean was able to persuade gang leaders to open up the slums to workers cleaning the streets, distributing food, and providing other aid.

And he has helped turn Pwojè Lari Pwòp, or Project Clean Streets, into perhaps Port-au-Prince’s best-known nonprofit program by outfitting its employees in distinctive yellow T-shirts and caps, writing songs about clean streets that are blasted from colorfully painted buses known as “tap taps,” and designing an American Idol-style hip-hop competition for young artists from the slums to create a theme song for the project.

“Even armed soldiers couldn’t enter Cité Soleil,” says Mr. Currelly. “But because of Wyclef, we go in every day through thick and thin, and we’ve never had one security incident.”

Putting Haiti ‘on the Map’

Pwojè Lari Pwòp is one of about a dozen collaborations between Mr. Jean’s group and charities in Haiti. Nonprofit leaders and other people who work in international development say the partnerships have been successful because they combine charities’ expertise with Mr. Jean’s ability to communicate across political and economic divides.

“Wyclef has put Haiti on the map with audiences who haven’t traditionally thought of Haiti,” says Caroline Anstey, World Bank country director for the Caribbean. “He has been able to sit down and talk to politicians, NGO’s, civil society, to ordinary people, to poor people living in the slums, to rural peasants, and really be a bridge across a number of different worlds.”

Yéle Haiti, which takes its name from the Creole word for “cry,” is not Mr. Jean’s first foray into the nonprofit world.

In the late 1990s, he started the Wyclef Jean Foundation to support school music programs in New York, to which he had immigrated at age 9. But the organization closed after a few years because of fund-raising and management challenges.

Today, Mr. Jean is working to revamp the organization and restart a music and arts program called Clef’s Kids. His plan is to start by serving young people in and around New York and in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami, and then eventually spread to the rest of the country.

The idea for Yéle Haiti came out of a 2004 encounter between the musician and Hugh Locke, now the organization’s executive director, at Lincoln Center, in New York. Mr. Jean was planning a concert in Haiti for later that year, but a lack of security threatened to scuttle the event.

After the concert fell through, Mr. Locke, who runs Orsa Consultants, a communications and management consulting firm in New York, helped the Haitian artist develop a more permanent way to help his home country.

“I realized in 2004 that the best way to help Haiti is to get awareness outside of Haiti and raise money outside of Haiti geared to specific projects for Haiti,” says Mr. Jean. “To get the diaspora in Haiti to respond, it’s almost like you have to make it bigger than life.”

Mr. Locke designed an organization that would use Mr. Jean’s star power to raise money and support for organizations already working in Haiti. He met with World Bank officials and others there to identify charities that Yéle Haiti might assist.

That assistance has come in the form of cash grants and donated products and services, like the type of marketing help Mr. Jean has provided to Pwojè Lari Pwòp. To date, Yéle Haiti has given out more than $1-million in grants, much of it raised from benefit concerts and donations from businesses like the Haitian cellphone company ComCEL.

Mr. Jean contributed $120,000 to get the organization off the ground, according to Mr. Locke, but his primary role was never to be Yéle Haiti’s benefactor. Instead, he is the organization’s idea man, focusing the group not just on helping to rebuild Haiti’s neighborhoods and provide jobs but also on raising hope among Haitians through music and other means.

“You might not be able to eat, but you can still sing a song,” Mr. Jean says. “Through music, you channel a whole new energy which comes from spirituality. That’s a new model for sustainable development, but it’s something we do anyway, naturally.”

His approach has gained support so far because the artist enjoys a reputation virtually unparalleled in this country. Born in 1972, Mr. Jean grew up in the town of Lasserre, a village so small, he says, that most Haitians probably don’t know it exists. He lived in a hut with relatives before moving to New York to join his parents, who had left Haiti eight years earlier.

But despite having spent more than two decades outside of Haiti, Mr. Jean has never given up his Haitian citizenship and has trumpeted his roots.

In 1997, when the Fugees won a Grammy for their album The Score, Mr. Jean appeared onstage to accept the award wrapped in a Haitian flag. A few years later, he introduced his American fans to his home country with the 2004 album Welcome to Haiti: Creole 101. Now he is working on an HBO comedy series that tells the story of his life as a Haitian immigrant.

“He is a celebrity, but he’s also a Haitian celebrity working on Haitian issues,” says Ms. Anstey, of the World Bank. “He has strong roots in the community, and the community sees him as a leader and a role model.”

New Projects

Since its founding a year-and-a-half ago, Yéle Haiti has won over nonprofit executives like Mr. Currelly, who were at first hesitant to work with a group that had so little experience. And the organization continues to attract new nonprofit groups and governmental organizations that want to collaborate.The Inter-American Development Bank, for example, is considering using Yéle Haiti’s marketing to help build support among rural populations for water and sanitation systems.

But some observers think the group is taking on too much. The 14 charities and multilateral organizations Yéle Haiti works with run projects in Haiti as diverse as rehabilitating child soldiers, educating people about HIV/AIDS, and providing film festivals to the rural poor.

While Yéle Haiti has already done good work, its ambitious agenda could backfire, says Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, in New York.

“They very quickly spent their clout and their money by channeling it into so many areas,” he says. “When results and returns are not as expected, then the potential to lose credibility is there.”

Mr. Jean agrees that his organization has taken on a lot, but he says that is only fitting given the extent of Haiti’s problems.

“In the course of taking on too many projects, Yéle Haiti has changed the way Haitian kids think in one year,” he says. “We feel if we don’t take these projects on, who is going to do it?”

But if the projects are numerous, many of them share one theme: involving poor people and donors alike in finding a solution to Haiti’s entrenched social problems.

Danel Georges, a former economist for the government, shares that vision.

Driving through the chaotic streets of downtown Port-au-Prince, where elderly women and young boys peddle every imaginable item — plantains, gummy candy, bottles of fluorescent detergent — Mr. Georges is greeted by men who shout “Father of the poor.” Many of them have received small loans from the group he helps run the Movement for Community Unity Through Integration.

Yéle Haiti expects to give Mr. Georges’s organization more than $200,000 to offer small loans to participants in Yéle Cuisine, through which women will get money to start their own businesses cooking food for students at schools in Port-au-Prince.

Mr. Georges is also working with Yéle Haiti to deliver rice, oil, and other food provided by the World Food Programme to slum residents twice a month. In order to help gain entrée to the slum areas, the program employs local hip-hop artists to hand out the food.

“You have to help the poor help themselves,” says Mr. Georges. “Wyclef understands that.”

Philippe Léon, a co-founder of the Seguin Foundation, a Haitian charity, says that all Haitians need to have a hand in fixing another of Haiti’s most visible problems: deforestation.

With help from a $40,000 grant from Yéle Haiti, his organization is running environmental-education programs for both wealthy and poor children from the cities and the poor from the countryside so they can learn about how government neglect and agricultural practices fueled by economic desperation have made Haiti a symbol of environmental degradation.

On a weekday morning in the mountainous town of Seguin, several hundred Haitians await Yéle Haiti and Fondation Seguin staff members who bear avocado plants and radios, gifts they hope will provide food to residents of this remote locale and help them gain access to new information.

Even those who don’t know of Mr. Jean have been told by Fondation Seguin leaders or friends about his nonprofit work. Some of them bring letters, thanking him for his support and asking for more.

Not everyone here is a fan of Yéle Haiti’s decision to engage even gang leaders in the nation’s future. After Mr. Jean put his arms around two of Cité Soleil’s chief gang members, during a visit to promote Pwojè Lari Pwòp this year, the Pan American Development Foundation received irate phone calls.

But Mr. Jean says that approach is the only way to bring development to the slums. “You can’t go into someone’s house and not say, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’” he says. “That’s the extent of my relationship with the people, the so-called gang leaders.”

Mr. Currelly agrees that including the gang leaders in development can help move Port-au-Prince away from the violence that has roiled the country since Mr. Aristide’s departure.

“You have two choices: You can work with them or you can go in and kill them,” he says. “If you go in and kill them, there will be 20 people to replace him. There’s a nursery of young men just waiting to take over.”

‘Publicity Stunts’

On a Saturday night here in Port-au-Prince, in a television station owned by Mr. Jean, Mr. Currelly watches the culmination of one of the many marketing projects for Pwojè Lari Pwòp: the hip-hop competition in which hundreds of Haitians have voted for their favorite rap song about cleaning the streets.

One of the winners is a 21-year old from Bel Air who calls himself Mad S. Clad in a T-shirt depicting Tupac Shakur, the late American rapper. Mad S. nevertheless sounds exuberantly Wyclef Jean-esque as he exhorts the hundreds of people who are watching the show — on screens that Yéle Haiti has set up near the slums — to pick up their trash and embrace nationalism, rather than regionalism.

But offstage, Mad S. — whose name was changed by Yéle Haiti staff members from the less explicit “Mad Ass” — is a handful.

A few days before the competition, he and other participants threatened to spend the money that Mr. Jean had donated to outfit the singers in new clothes on other purchases. Employees worry they may have to scrap a plan to bring him and the two other winners of the hip-hop contest on tour with Mr. Jean.

The hip-hop competition, like some of Mr. Jean’s other ideas, strays far from traditional economic-development work. Earlier this year, Mr. Jean appeared in a parade for Carnival with a lion in tow, and he plans to ship one of his antique Rolls-Royces to Cité Soleil, to display it in the midst of the slum.

“Some of the publicity stunts he’s been involved in with respect to Haiti are not that productive,” says Mr. McCalla.

But Mr. Jean believes such examples send a message of empowerment to Haitian youth. “If you’re in the States and you become a big rapper, the greatest thing you can do is buy a new car and bring it back to the ghetto, and all the kids will jump in the car,” he says. “When these kids jump in the car, they think in their minds, one of these days they are going to make it.”

The hip-hop competition, he says, has already brought hope to some of Port-au-Prince’s youths.

“Nine times out of 10, these kids feel like there is nobody who will ever come here. I’m like, you guys are big, you are super-talented, all you need is means. That’s why we have this competition….That’s why we purchased the television station and are doing different things like that.”

Indeed, for groups that have paired with Yéle Haiti, Mr. Jean’s unconventional ideas have paid off. Mr. Currelly’s Pwojè Lari Pwòp has just received $1.9-million from the Haitian government to more than double the number of street cleaners, which he credits in part to the publicity generated by Mr. Jean.

Meanwhile, the Pan American Development Foundation is beginning to use the trust it has won from gang leaders to take on larger-scale programs, like rebuilding schools, community centers, and sewage systems.

Along with Yéle Haiti and the World Bank, the organization is working to apply a model of community-driven development, by which the poor have a say in rehabilitating their own neighborhoods, to the Port-au-Prince slums.

Like many nonprofit workers here in Haiti, Mr. Currelly is riding a wave of optimism that has followed the relatively peaceful election of René Préval to the presidency in February and the subsequent outpouring of millions in foreign aid. Foreign-policy experts say Haiti may just have a chance — probably its last — to break the cycle of violence that has long kept it the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The financial support Yéle Haiti is providing to charities here is minuscule in comparison with the aid that foreign governments are suddenly channeling to bolster Mr. Préval’s government. But Mr. Jean has something to offer that few politicians have thus far been able to muster.

“Everyone likes Wyclef here. He is an unconventional person. He is what he is,” says Moïse Ariot, supervisor at Pwojè Lari Pwòp. “If the politicians could show affection for their country the way Wyclef does, things could be better.”