Six-Month Progress Report on MADRE's Response to the Haiti Earthquake

MADRE has worked in Haiti since the early 1990s. When the earthquake
struck, we immediately reached out to our sister organizations. Thanks
to your generosity, we were able to provide them with life-saving
support.

Humanitarian Relief 

MADRE
supported the formation of, the International Feminist Solidarity Camp,
a network of women's rights activists and organizations in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic and the broader Latin American and Caribbean region
that came together in response to the earthquake.

MADRE worked
with the International Feminist Solidarity Camp to provide crucial
health services and supplies such as medicine, clothing and hygiene
products, and to respond to the need for shelter through the
distribution of 20 large tents. This support enabled the creation of a
maternal/infant health clinic and shelters for elderly people displaced
from a nursing home and children displaced from an orphanage.

Reproductive Health Care

When
the earthquake struck, there were an estimated 63,000 pregnant women in
Haiti. With extremely limited access to emergency obstetric care,
including a severe shortage of skilled midwives and maternity clinics,
many pregnant women were forced to deliver their babies in the street.

MADRE
partnered with Circle of Health International (COHI), an organization
that addresses maternal health in disaster settings, to support
multiple delegations of Kreyol-speaking midwives who provided critical
reproductive health care to more than 350 women a day and trained
Haitian midwives to deliver on-going care.

One such delegation
included an epidemiologist, a family health care practitioner and a
certified nurse-midwife. The team trained 15 earthquake survivors to
perform a women's health needs assessment and to provide evidence-based
recommendations for women's health services in Haiti. MADRE
incorporated the results into our advocacy work at the United Nations
to ensure that the health needs of women and infants are met in
governments' responses to the earthquake.

MADRE also continued
to work with SOFA, a national Haitian women's organization, to rebuild
the capacity of Klinik Famn, a clinic that MADRE and SOFA co-founded in
1996, after the clinic was damaged by the earthquake. The clinic was
one of the few places equipped to treat injuries and illnesses after
the disaster.

Advocacy

Ensuring that Haitian Women Have a Voice in Rebuilding Haiti

MADRE
helped launch an international initiative to ensure that Haitian
women's voices are heard in all phases of reconstruction in Haiti.

• In
  advance of the March 31 Haiti Donors' Conference at United Nations
  headquarters, MADRE issued an open letter calling on governments to
  enact a human rights-based response to the earthquake.
• MADRE
  contributed to a Gender Shadow Report released in conjunction with the
  Haiti Donors' Conference. The report offers donors, international
  agencies and other stakeholders policy guidelines to promote the rights
  of Haitian women
• On March 31, MADRE organized a press
  conference to call for the effective participation of Haitian women in
  the rebuilding process. The press conference featured Edwidge Danticat,
  a Haitian writer and long-time friend of MADRE; Marie St. Cyr, a
  Haitian human rights advocate and MADRE Board Member; and
  representatives of UN agencies working in Haiti.