Haiti - Enhancing disaster risk reduction and urban resilience in Cap Haïtien

Context and Objectives

Cap-Haïtien is the second largest city in Haiti, with approximately 274,000 inhabitants and an annual growth rate of more than five percent. The agglomeration is extremely exposed to natural hazards, including floods, hurricanes, earthquake and tsunami. Most notably, it suffers from recurrent floods causing loss of human lives and important damages to infrastructure and residential dwellings. 

With this context, the Enhancing Disaster Risk reduction and Urban Resilience in Cap Haitien project supported the Government of Haiti (GoH) by integrating critical aspects of disaster risk management (DRM) into municipal development and urban resilience activities in Cap-Haïtien. The project's objective was to strengthen the technical capacity of the Ministry of Public Works in planning and conducting flood risk reduction measures in Cap-Haïtien, including large hydraulic engineering works and non-structural risk reduction measures in urban watersheds, including green infrastructure initiatives.

Main Activities

The following components were implemented under this project:

• Component 1: Supporting the delivery of flood risk reduction. This component had the following objectives (i) to strengthen the technical capacity of the Ministry of Public Works in planning and conducting flood risk reduction measures in Cap-Haïtien; and (ii) support the delivery of flood risk reduction activities, including sediment management, environmental management and technical design of dredging. 

• Component 2: Supporting collaboration in DRM between local stakeholders. This component strengthened collaboration between local authorities and the local community-based civil protection committees, on crucial activities such as integrating DRM in municipal planning tools, project identification, as well cross cutting support.

Results

Component 1: Technical support has been provided to the Government of Haiti for the development of environmental and social analyses and for hydraulic engineering technical inputs necessary for the implementation of flood risk reduction investments. 

Component 2: Activities were undertaken to develop selection criteria for investments in neighborhood risk management plans and by taking resilience aspects into consideration. New selection criteria were developed for a spatial analysis that took into account hazard maps and recent risk management plans, and resulted in the creation of 5 new data layers.  

Partnerships and Coordination

The project was implemented by the World Bank with key Haitian government institutions: the Ministry of Interior and Local Authorities, the Ministry of Public Works, Transport, and Communications, and the six municipalities in the metropolitan area of Cap-Haïtien targeted by the Project.