As Haiti’s Caracol park grows, residents demand housing, roads, health care

CARACOL, HAITI – Ten years after breaking ground on the Caracol Industrial Park in Haiti’s Northeast Department, its main financer the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), announced new investments in infrastructure, workforce development and environmental sustainability.

Local residents and their advocates, however, say infrastructure improvements in the surrounding region should also take place along with growth inside the industrial park, which largely contains textile factory jobs.

“We expected that with the implementation of the park, we would get infrastructure like roads, schools and health care,” Wilson Menard, a former farmer who resides in the commune of Caracol, said through a translator during a phone interview. “It’s sometimes a shame to see a big project like this [and] people are unable to have roads.”

Read the full article here.