Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
groups have successfully organized mass demonstrations and
exercised a degree of political influence.
The urban lower class operates primarily within the informal
sector. Access to water and electricity is controlled privately
rather than by official utilities. Fewer than 40 percent of Portau-Prince
residents have access to potable water. In the 1990s,
many unoccupied lands of the city were taken over for housing;
however, studies of Cite Soleil suggest that most residents are
renters not squatters. Sixty-seven percent of the housing is
rented or built on rented sites; however, rents are paid to a
class of speculative landlords who acquire land by taking over
unoccupied state land or other lands left vacant because of
exile, political looting, or theft.
A large percentage of the active labor force is self-employed,
working part-time, or working in the services sector—traditionally
the largest employment sector in the city. Perhaps 25 percent
of workers in Port-au-Prince are employed in domestic
service. Reports in the latter half of the 1990s indicate that 35
to 45 percent of actively employed slum residents are engaged
in commerce. An estimated 67 percent of the population lives
on less than US$25 a month. In the 1980s, a high percentage of
residents in the St. Martin slum district borrowed money at
interest rates ranging from 15 to 95 percent per month.
Gender Roles and Marriage
Haiti's population is disproportionately young and female.
Demographic data suggest a shortage of men in most agegroups
older than age ten—a tendency more pronounced in
urban than in rural areas. Females are economically active at a
young age, including an estimated 10 percent of all girls
between the ages of five and nine years old and 33 percent of
ten- to fourteen-year-old girls.
Rural-urban migrants are far
more likely to be women than men. Female heads of household
are much more common in urban areas. Official 1996
data indicate that 26 percent of rural households and 46 percent
of urban households are headed by women. By some estimates,
50 to 70 percent of households in Port-au-Prince are
headed by women responsible for their own livelihood. In any
case, Haitian women are the central figures in sustaining families
under the prevailing conditions of economic decline and
poverty.
In general, Haitian women participate in the labor force to a
far greater extent than is the case in other countries in the
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