News stories by Correspondents* - IPS/Haiti Grassroots Watch

More than 100 Haitian families now have new housing, thanks to the support of two non-governmental organisations working on reconstruction following the country's devastating 2010 earthquake.

Almost half of the emergency shelters distributed by the British organisation Tearfund in the mountains above Léogâne remain uninhabited six months after they were built.

Complete with gallery and garden, the 534 wood and plasterboard houses are arranged in neat rows on a gravel plot of former sugarcane land northwest of the capital.

When the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission failed to approve, or even respond to, a proposal by the University of the State of Haiti (UEH) for a unified campus to replace the nine destroyed or badly damaged faculties in the capital, Vice Rector Fritz Deshommes was not surprised at the silence.

Two years after the earthquake, and despite the proposals written, the consortiums organised and the foreign delegations entertained, the University of the State of Haiti (Université d'Etat d'Haïti or UEH) still has not seen any 'reconstruction', and the proposal for a university campus that would unite all 11 faculties remains a 25-year-old dream.

Ever since being elected earlier this year, Haitian President Michel Martelly and his team have been betting Haiti's reconstruction on foreign investors.

'Haiti is open for business.' That's what President Michel 'Sweet Micky' Martelly said at a recent ceremony as he and former U.S. president Bill Clinton laid a cornerstone for a giant industrial zone being built in northern Haiti.

Despite, or perhaps because of, a host of international actors, 2.5 million U.S. dollars in funding and five years of empty promises, residents of some of Port-au-Prince's poorest neighbourhoods have yet to see running water in their vicinity.

2.5 million U.S. dollars to supply water to several marginal neighbourhoods in the capital. Approved in 2006. Five years later the water has yet to run. Children are still in the streets bearing bottles and buckets.

Almost 17 months after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and three other cities, reconstruction of the capital’s downtown appears stalled, and over 800,000 people still live in tents — some 30,000 of them right across from the collapsed National Palace.