Oxfam Australia

In one of Port-au-Prince’s most earthquake-damaged districts, Oxfam is helping find land for residents to grow their own vegetables. As this slide show indicates, the project is already paying off in many ways.

Two years ago, Caroline Gluck was one of the first of Oxfam’s emergency team to fly to Haiti, arriving three days after it was hit by a devastating earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and left over a million homeless. Now she returns to see what progress has been made.

We visit Haiti, where an Oxfam livelihoods programme has provided grants, loans and training to small businesses, to help an econmy devastated by the earthquake of January 2010.

In Haiti, unemployment sits at an estimated 75% of the population. Finding work is especially difficult in rural areas, but a group of women in the picturesque town of Thomazeau is bucking the trend with Oxfam’s support.

In remote communities where the risk of death by cholera is heightened by rugged terrain, Oxfam is making water safer. This short video shows Patrick Paul, Oxfam’s public health engineer in Haiti, at work…accompanied by some rather playful locals!

In late May 2011, a new outbreak of cholera emerged in Haiti’s Carrefour area, south of Port-au-Prince. Oxfam is responding to the situation, coordinating our work with other agencies in the area.

Fewer people are living in Haiti’s camps now than at the peak of the earthquake crisis, but not all chose to leave. Many were evicted by landowners, finding themselves in worse situations than before.

In the camps where Oxfam works in Port-au-Prince, displaced people are beginning to pay for their own water, an important step towards empowering them to take responsibility for the resource.