CNSA Targeting

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3. Beneficiary Detection Strategies in Haiti
This section examines in the context of Haiti each phase of Beneficiary Detection Strategy
introduced above. Specifically, geographic criteria, beneficiary unit, beneficiary criteria, and
beneficiary selection. It evaluates the utility of each as we found them being applied Haiti, both
through reading reports and interviewing aid workers and beneficiaries in the field.
Geographic Criteria in Haiti
It is always very difficult to quantify malnutrition in Haiti. …the data available from actors
appears to show that, strictly speaking, there are no pockets of malnutrition.
ECHO 2011:24
Although partners in the World Bank and USAID sponsors programs Kore Lavi and Kore Fanmi
have targeted specific departments and communes based on CNSA vulnerability assessments (see
CARE 2013a), a longitudinal look at survey data suggest that, with the exception of the Port-au-
Prince metropolitan area and the Department of the West in which it is located, there is little
evidence to justify more than moderate application of geographical criteria in Haiti. Not if the
objective is to aid the most vulnerable.
Based on the 2001 HLCS, most departments have essentially equal populations of “extremely
poor” people (individuals living on less than US$1 per day), varying between 62 and 72 percent
(Figure 12). The only exception was the North East, with 84 percent of its population extremely
poor; arguably no exception at all because 67% of the country’s rural population at the time was
extremely poor and the North East was, at that time, the least urbanized Department in Haiti. In
other words, the proportion of the population that is extremely poor is essentially the same in all
of Haiti’s 10 Departments.
Using the Genie coefficient based on durable goods (assets) as an estimation of wealth distribution
(a value of 01 indicates egalitarian distribution and 100 total inequality), all the departments rate
in the narrow range between 37 to 43 points (see Figure 13; based on the 2012 EMMUS sample
of 13,388 households) In other words, the level of equality in distribution of wealth is essentially
the same throughout the country’s 10 Departments. viii
The same is true for variation among Departments regarding months of nutritional stress (Figure
14). Even variation among ecological zones yield small differences (Figure 15). CNSA found that
from October 2006 to September 2007 the population of households reporting insufficient
alimentation in six ecological-occupational zones fluctuated between highs of 52% and 64% for
each zone to lows of 15 to 36 percent; all tended to have the same lean months and the same
months of plenty with the one notable exception that agricultural mountain humid, agro-pastoral
semi-humid, and agro-pastoral plateau tended to have lower stress during the Autumn months than
agro-pastoral dry, mono-cultural plain, and dry agricultural and fishing. WFP’s Coping Strategy
Index (CSI), a 0 to 64 point measure of food deprivation and rationing varies between 20.8 for
coastal dry and 24 for Agro-Pastoral Dry, a fluctuation small enough to be attributed to natural
sampling error (Figure 16: Wiesmann et al. 2009 for an explanation of CSI). The same equality