Reporting on Haiti: 10 Years After the Quake

press release: Presented by Jacob Kushner, Award-winning International Freelance Journalist, and LACIS and Journalism Alum

Wednesday, October 30th @ 5:30 p.m., Beefeaters (3rd Floor East), Memorial Union

About the presentation: Ten years after the deadliest disaster of our lifetime, what lessons has the world learned—and which has it chosen not to? This January marks the 10-year anniversary of the deadliest natural disaster in modern history. Between 46,000 and 316,000 people died, most in a span of about 90 seconds. To help Haiti rebuild, the United States pledged $4.4 billion dollars in aid—-more than for any global natural disaster before it. But much of that money wasn’t spent anywhere near where the earthquake struck. Instead, the U.S. made plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an industrial park and other projects in Haiti's North. By investing in free trade and manufacturing, the thinking went, the U.S. could help Haiti create jobs and boost its economy. It didn’t. An investigation by foreign correspondent Jacob Kushner (JOURN, LACIS ’06) reveals that one of America’s largest aid projects in Haiti has been quietly abandoned, millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent. Flawed from the start, that project embodied the same U.S. vision for Haiti that has failed the island nation for more than 200 years. One decade after Haiti’s earthquake, one of America’s largest, and last, attempts to help the country ‘build back better’ has quietly come to an end. Will one of the core tenets that drive U.S. foreign policy toward nations like Haiti die with it? Jacob’s presentation on U.S. aid to Haiti will be followed by a discussion/Q&A.

About the speaker: Jacob is a foreign correspondent who writes about migration, conflict and extremism and investigates foreign aid, corruption and extrajudicial killings in East/Central Africa and the Caribbean. As a Fulbright Fellow in 2017-18, Jacob investigated terrorism against immigrants in Germany. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic and elsewhere. Originally from Milwaukee, Jacob received his B.A. in journalism and Latin American studies from UW-Madison. He also holds an M.A. in political journalism from Columbia University. He spent two years reporting from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, starting off with help from a LACIS travel grant. His Haiti reporting is often supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. In 2016, Jacob was named among the world’s leading journalists doing solutions-based reporting by the Solutions Journalism Network. In 2018, he was named a Finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for Excellence in International Reporting. He is a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good.