The United Nations now estimates that 3 million Haitians—a third of the population—were “badly affected” by the magnitude-7 earthquake that ravaged the island nation on Jan. 12. Providing shelter, sanitation and preventing cholera in Port-au-Prince are critical challenges, but so are food shortages in rural areas. An estimated 500,000 former residents of the badly damaged capital have migrated to the countryside.

Photo: Odebrecht Construction

At Work Odebrecht retrained 30 local airport service employees in basic construction skills and hired them to work on refurbishing airport-terminal passenger and cargo facilities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for American Airlines, which assisted with procurement and logistics. Commercial flights resumed on Feb. 19.

“The particular complexity of an earthquake on this scale is that we need to embark on early recovery, even as we provide emergency relief,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Feb. 18, announcing that the U.N. and its aid partners have revised the amount of relief they seek for Haiti over the next year to $1.4 billion.

The revised figure includes a $577-million “flash appeal,” which was issued just days after the earthquake and originally intended to cover a six-month period. That appeal was oversubscribed by $41 million, but it is now being expanded to meet needs for a year. John Holmes, the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and the U.N. relief coordinator, told the Security Council that the new figure takes into consideration the need for stepped-up early-recovery efforts as the hurricane and rainy seasons approach.

The U.N. says it is the largest-ever humanitarian appeal launched in the wake of a natural disaster. A U.N. donors’ conference is being planned for March 31 in New York, but according to a spokesperson for the secretary-general, “there aren’t many details to share at this point.”

However, an industry conference is being organized for March 9 and 10 in Miami. The conference is being put together by U.K.-based Global Investment Summits and the Washington, D.C.-based International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), a trade group founded in 2001 to promulgate a code of ethics for relief and reconstruction around the world in the “peace and stability operations industry.” The organizations were holding a reconstruction summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on business opportunities in Afghanistan on Jan. 20 when they decided to put together the conference on Haiti as rapidly as possible.

“The timing was to make sure it wasn’t at the same time as the U.N. conference,” says Doug Brooks, founder and president. “This is more nuts and bolts...who has the resources, who has the capabilities, the engineering skills. We hope to have a big engineering presence, but we are still piecing everything together.”

Information on the conference as well as a list of the member companies of IPOA is online at www.ipoaworld.org. Michelle Fitzgibbons, senior events coordinator at Global Investment Summits, says she expects a high-level networking event. “We are looking to have a lot of global organizations that are currently out there. [We want to source] different suppliers for construction, sanitation, security and logistics, to name a few areas. Registration has been absolutely excellent,” she adds. “People are phoning us to attend.”

Brooks says he expects a definition of the scope of the effort to be one of the outcomes of the conference at the U.N.

Meanwhile, reconstruction is beginning. Coral Gables, Fla.-based Odebrecht Construction has completed repairs at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, allowing American Airlines to resume commercial air service on Feb. 19. The contractor is currently performing more than $1 billion in construction at Miami International Airport’s North Terminal, where American Airlines is the primary carrier.