Port-a-Piment Watershed Program

The Port-à-Piment Watershed Program will be the CSI's first fully integrated development Program. Integrated program are unique in that they focus on a specific geographic area and cover all of the themes addressed in Thematic Programs, as well as all of the crosscutting issues.

The Millennium Village Project Model

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural communities can achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015. The MVP has been underway in Africa since 2005, and has seen great success. A total of 500,000 people, spread over 14 groups of villages in 10 sub-Saharan countries, have benefited from the model.

The project combines three interlinked components: (i) integrating the principle of community participation and leadership, (ii) using appropriate science-based innovations and local knowledge, and (iii) abiding by an action-plan designed to meet specific costs for the time-bound and trageted objectives of the MDGs.

The MVP model is based on sustained and stable investment in a specific geographic area. The Port-a-Piment watershed has been chosen as the site for Haiti's first MVP. Subsequently, the model will be rapidly scaled-up throughout Haiti upon demonstration of early impact and quick-wins in the Port-à-Piment Watershed Program. The Haiti MVP is a five-year community-based research project to investigate and document the effectiveness of the interventions needed to achieve the MDGs at a village level.

The overarching objective is to provide practical lessons for scaling up local-level interventions to achieve the MDGs and to strengthen th efforts of the Government of Haiti and its development partners in preparing and implementing MDG-based development strategies and policies. Equally important, the extensive technical development and monitoring and evaluation processes provide a robust, evidence-based decision making tool  for informing rural development at the local scale. Under the supervision of the United Nations, technical leadership of the Earth Institute and experts from Catholic Relief Services, the project will address the pressures and opportunities in agriculture, nutrition and health, education, energy, water and sanitation, environment, infrastructure, information technology, and disaster risk management.

ThePort-à-Piment Watershed

The Port-à-Piment watershed faces a series of challenges common throughout the CSI area, including high risk of large flood events with vulnerable populations, deteriorating ecosystems and decreasing yields with a high livelihood dependency on natural resource extraction.  

The watershed is defined and populations bound together by physical features not administrative boundaries. The intervention zone has a surface area of 106 km² and is highly mountainous with has an extensive river system. It has an estimated population is roughly 30,000 (including Port-à-Piment Commune and parts of two other Communes). Anecdotal reports indicated that substantial temporary in-migration to Port-à-Piment since the earthquake has increased the population, exacerbated pressure on natural resources, and led to food insecurity. In terms of social services, education and health facilities are limited and water is scarce away from the main streambeds.

Three quarters of the watershed’s stable population is rural, with the main economic activity being smallscale agriculture and charcoal production.  Agricultural techniques are primitive, lacking any improvements such as erosion control features, fallow periods or manuring, improved seeds, fertilizer or pesticide usage. Prior efforts to produce coffee and other cash crop have largely collapsed. The largest cash crop is charcoal, some of which is extracted illegally from Macaya National Park, which borders the catchment. Sea fishing incomes are negligible and aquaculture is inexistent.

The watershed’s major environmental challenges are summarized below:

• Extremely low yields for virtually all forms of agriculture
• Unsustainable and environmentally destructive livestock production
• Low agricultural diversity and minimal rotations and fallow periods, resulting in high vulnerability to market fluctuations and nutrient depleted soils
• Destructive cultivation of hillside steep slope zones in the absence of anti-erosion structures and appropriate long-term vegetative cover, resulting in massive erosion and permanent productivity losses.
• Unsustainable harvest of woody biomass, mainly for the charcoal market, resulting in deforestation and soil erosion
• Problematic land tenure, which constrains efforts to invest in land management and intensification
• Insufficient infrastructure to support market development and sustainable production.

Despite these challenges, two recent encouraging developments are evident in the Port-a-Piment commune. First, the main trunk route from Port-à-Piment to Les Cayes was surfaced in 2009, significantly improving access to the regional capital. Second, a small hospital has been built in Port-à-Piment, though it has not yet been equipped or opened.

Objectives and Areas of Intervention

The Port-à-Piment Millenium Watershed will target key areas of human and economic development including agriculture, business development, education, health and nutrition, environmental management, water and sanitation, and infrastructure and energy.

In the agricultural sector, the primary objective is to increase Port-à-Piment’s production capacity and internal resilience by promoting sustainable agricultural practices. Interventions will include demonstration plots, technical training program to improve agricultural practices (particularly soil conservation and erosion control measures), building local grain storage facilities, access to subsidies and credit for inputs such as fertilizer and improved seeds, and the establishment of farmer cooperatives.

The overall objective for the environment sector is to stop and reverse the trends of environmental degradation across the watershed. Interventions will focus on new techniques for sustainable charcoal production and rebuilding ecosystem services through innovative payment schemes and education campaigns. Interventions will include participatory mapping activities to promote better land use management, the establishment of tree nurseries, an anti-erosion training program, a disaster risk reduction program, and a community forestry and woodlot program.

Business development interventions will seek to improve livelihoods primarily by increasing farmers’ access to value-added production and small entrepreneurs’ access to credit for business start up. Interventions in this sector will include micro-credit program, business development training, and subsidies for seed and crop storage facilities

The objectives in the education sector are to ensure full primary school attendance and to improve the quality of education offered throughout the watershed.  The focus will be on improving school facilities, conducting capacity building activities for teachers, and strengthening the curriculum. Interventions will include a community awareness and mobilization campaigns, a teacher training program, a school feeding program, and gender-related activities (such as improved single-sex sanitary facilities and workshops on gender-based violence).

Within the health sector, priorities include improving access to medical services (particularly in the areas of child and maternal health), a comprehensive package of diagnostic and curative services for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, and improving the quality of healthcare both locally and regionally. Specific interventions will include a Community Health Worker programme, medicine and medical equipment provision programs, and improved health data collection systems.

Activities in the water and sanitation sector will build on ongoing projects sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, in order to encourage shifts in behavior and improve sanitation facilities. Interventions will include training local water committees and establishing WASH  (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) programs in schools and in the community.

The infrastructure and energy sector will focus on achieving sustainable charcoal production and promoting charcoal alternatives. Interventions will include a rechargeable LED lantern program, a household cookstove program, the development of small scale electric grids, and forestry programs geared towards sustainable charcoal production.

Cost-sharing structure

Funding for the Port-à-Piment Millenium Watershed will be shared between four sources: the CSI, the Port-à-Piment community, various NGOs, and the Haitian government. The projected contribution of each of these actors is shown below.