Provincial Haitian hospital to have year-round clean water thanks to UN project

A provincial hospital in Haiti near the country’s border with the Dominican Republic will now enjoy a continual supply of clean water thanks to the United Nations peacekeeping mission, just one of the 300 so-called Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) it has financed in the past three years to improve life in the impoverished Caribbean country.

Every year the Sainte Thérèse hospital in Hinche has faced a shortage during the dry season while floods during the rainy season can contaminate drinking water supplies.

But no longer. The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has funded a project to build a reservoir with wells to stock underground water and a series of gutters on the hospital’s roof to gather rainwater.

The project is the third such QIP related to water that MINUSTAH has financed in Hinche. Overall 68 of the 300 QIPs in the country have been water-related, for a total amount of more than $620,000.

QIPs are widely viewed as being among the most effective tools used by UN missions around the world to help local communities at ground level and at low cost, from repairing leaking roofs in schools in Georgia to opening a vocational centre in Liberia to refurbishing sanitation facilities in Burundi.

In Haiti, MINUSTAH, set up in 2004 to help re-establish peace after an insurgency forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to go into exile, has focused on a wide range of such projects, from resurrecting a provincial library in the in Fort-Liberté, the main town in the north-east, to rehabilitating schools and laying out sports fields in formerly violence-ridden neighbourhoods it has helped rid of armed criminal gangs.