Blog: Haiti

It’s not that big of a
surprise that Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, also has the hemisphere’s
worst telecommunications system. There are just 140,000 landlines and 540,000
cell phones in the country of more than 8 million people. (I wrote more about Haiti’s cell phone penetration here.)

Our client Haiti Innovation recently received a Google Grant and we’ve been helping them on their AdWords campaign. In the past few months they’ve been blogging pretty aggressively to try to increase website traffic, and it’s worked. So when they came to us looking for ways to put their grant to use, we thought what better way to capitalize on what is already driving people to their site than to post ads that pertain to their daily blog posts. Now in addition to ads that appear when people search using phrases like “Haiti news,” Haiti Innovation’s ads appear in more specific keyword searches like “Haiti kidnapping” and “sustainable environment.” And they’re updating them with each post.

Blogger Kathryn Cramer has uncovered an incredible story about a
U.S.-expat owned company allegedly spying, undermining democracy, and
detaining whistleblowers in Haiti. She says the company is
providing covert surveillance at Haiti’s presidential debates, in the
form of operatives disguised as reporters. And she says the U.N. is
aware of this and shows a U.N. PowerPoint referencing
the company and their actions on her blog.

The other day Development Seed gave several old cell phones to Matt at Haiti Innovation
to take down to Haiti to give away since handsets are quite expensive there. And apparently cell phones are not only very popular in Haiti, but they're common too. I found this very surprising. Since my last post on Haiti, I've been looking into the cell phone penetration of the country and everything I've seen has put it very low. The largest numbers I've seen are that 4.7 percent of the population has a cell phone, according to the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas. To give some perspective, in the Dominican Republic, Haiti's island neighbor, 28 percent of the populuation has a cell phone.

In a little more than a week In February Haiti is scheduled hopes to hold its first election since Aristide was ousted almost two years ago. So campaigning is in full swing. NPR reported that “the campaigning season has gotten under way, with posters, political rallies and candidate jingles flooding the streets and the airwaves. In a country where more than 50 percent of the people are illiterate, election jingles are one of the most powerful campaign tools.”

On one hand, it makes complete sense that in a country where an estimated 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and with such as high level of illiteracy, that these means would dominate campaigning. But at the same time I can’t believe how untechnical that is. I wonder, are any candidates using the internet or cell phones in their campaigns, and if not, why?