The Dominican Republic has a great deal to gain from job creation in Haiti. More jobs in Haiti mean fewer Haitians crossing the border illegally to find work in the Dominican Republic. Impoverished Haitian migrants are a major social burden for the country.
A major opportunity to create jobs isn’t working out as planned. A report in The Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O’Grady says that the Clinton Foundation and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been obstacles to the construction of the production workshops for the Caracol Industrial Park in the north of Haiti, initially built with US taxpayer money under the supervision of former US President Bill Clinton after the 2010 Haitian earthquake in southern Haiti. When it was launched, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton predicted that the park would create 60,000 much needed jobs in Haiti by 2020. South Korean apparel giant Sae-A had guaranteed enough work to create 20,000 jobs but has only created 4,500 jobs because of the missing factory shells. The first factories at the park opened in 2012.
O’Grady writes: “Apparel manufacturers in Haiti are hungry for production space but my sources say investors were not given an option to build their own workshops in Caracol. The Clinton planners – Hillary at State and Bill at the Clinton Foundation – wanted to retain that responsibility for reasons that can only be guessed. So now the producers have to wait”.
http://dr1.com/forums/haiti/148079-about-caracol-industrial-park.html
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/our-work/clinton-foundation-haiti/programs/caracol-industrial-park
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/10/a-glittering-industrialparkfallsshortinhaiti.html
http://www.usaid.gov/haiti/caracol-industrial-park
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marie-clarke-brill/too-quick-to-dismiss-crit_b_6481932.html
http://www.iadb.org/en/news/news-releases/2014-01-02/caracol-industrial-park-in-haiti,10717.html
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