The World Bank Group’s Board of Directors endorsed a new strategic partnership for Haiti covering the 2025-2029 period in early 2024, committing approximately $320 million in grant financing aimed at building resilience among Haiti’s most vulnerable populations and laying a foundation for economic and social recovery. The new strategy represented a recalibrated approach that acknowledged the depth of Haiti’s institutional challenges while maintaining the Bank’s commitment to engagement with one of the world’s most fragile states.
The strategy focused on four priority areas: improving food security and agricultural productivity, strengthening basic service delivery, building resilience of communities and households, and creating conditions for private sector growth. Each area reflected lessons learned from previous international development engagements with Haiti, including the recognition that top-down institutional approaches had consistently underdelivered and that community-level resilience building was an essential foundation.
The World Bank acknowledged in the strategy document that delivering results in Haiti’s security environment would require adaptive implementation — flexibility to change approaches as conditions evolved and willingness to work through community-based organizations and non-governmental intermediaries when state institutions lacked the capacity to serve as effective channels.
Haitian civil society organizations engaged in the strategy development welcomed the Bank’s continued commitment while emphasizing that $320 million over five years was inadequate to the scale of Haiti’s needs and that the strategy needed to be accompanied by effective pressure on the political conditions — security, accountability, governance reform — that would determine whether any development investment could produce sustainable results.