One year after the devastating August 2021 earthquake that killed more than 2,200 people in Haiti’s southern peninsula, a bleak assessment of recovery progress revealed that while some emergency needs had been addressed, the fundamental work of rebuilding homes, restoring livelihoods, and repairing infrastructure was far from complete. Tens of thousands of families remained in transitional or inadequate shelter, schools that had been damaged or destroyed had not been rebuilt, and the economic recovery of affected communities had barely begun.
Humanitarian organizations that had been active in the earthquake response published one-year assessments that documented both what had been accomplished and the scale of what remained undone. Emergency medical care had been provided to thousands of injured survivors. Temporary shelter had been distributed to displaced families. Food assistance had reached communities unable to access markets. But the transition from emergency response to longer-term recovery had been slow, complicated by the ongoing political crisis, gang expansion into some affected areas, and persistent funding shortfalls.
In the city of Les Cayes, images taken a year after the earthquake showed streets still partly blocked by rubble, damaged buildings not yet demolished or repaired, and families living in conditions that had improved marginally but remained far from adequate. The historic buildings whose destruction had been lamented were still ruins. The reconstruction of public facilities — schools, health centers, government offices — had proceeded slowly due to procurement challenges, security concerns, and funding gaps.
Survivors who had lost family members, homes, and livelihoods in the earthquake expressed frustration at the pace of recovery and at what they described as the international community’s short attention span. The earthquake had generated enormous initial response but sustained international commitment had proved difficult to maintain in the face of Haiti’s continuing political crises and other global demands for humanitarian attention.