PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The number of Haitians living in temporary settlement camps has dropped below 600,000 for the first time since the January 2010 earthquake, the International Organization for Migration said Friday.
In outlining a new program to move people into homes, officials of the intergovernmental organization said approximately 594,000 people are living in nearly 900 camps, a decline in total population of about 6 per cent from June.
Luca Dall’Oglio, the group’s chief of mission in Haiti, said most of those who left did so because of the poor living conditions and crime or because landowners or government officials evicted them or threatened to do so.
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“The number of former camp residents who departed without appropriate housing remains unacceptably high,” Dall’Oglio said.
In some cases, Haitian officials have paid people to leave camps.
But often, people have no place to go and end up erecting a tent or shanty in another of the squalid encampments that sprouted throughout the capital after the earthquake destroyed thousands of homes.
The migration agency said a new program it will help run aims to solve that problem by paying people’s rent in a new home rather than giving them resettlement money.
The program will use $1.5 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay rent for a year for about 1,200 families who now live in two parks in the Petionville area of the capital, agency spokesman Leonard Doyle said.
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