FIRMS

A challenging set of issues - it would be good to get someone from FAO CARICOM to respond with what is envisaged for Haiti fisheries. Technical measures relating to resource management and efficient fishing techniques may be helpful, but they will be insufficient. Deep poverty like this is nowadays generally addressed through large-scale central budget support, coupled with building both government and civil society capacity to deliver and demand effective public services. The growing use of mobile phones, in even these challenging circumstances, is an encouraging sign that ICTs are indeed relevant to people's development needs. A series of reports on Haiti's fisheries and coastal development is avaialble via UNESCO (in french mostly, with some English and what i presume is Haitian creole) http://www.unesco.org/csi/act/haiti/gonave2.htm FAO also has a fisheries country overview: http://www.fao.org/fi/fcp/fr/HTI/profile.htm To give an idea of a typical donor programme to address the kind of deep-rooted poverty described, here is what USAID are doing: http://www.usaid.gov/ht/ Incidentally, one of the observations from post-Tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, is that where there are large numbers of aid and relief agencies working, they invest in telecommunications networks to coordinate among themelves and communicate with their international offices, which gives a boost to local ICT usage which, in turn, helps with both economic develompent and future disaster preparedness. Thus, although there is seldom a direct intention to invest in ICT4D in these circumstances, an unintended outcome is that such investment takes place anyway, by people rebuilding their lives. Eddie