Ready for gold?: Haiti backgrounder
Assessing Haiti’s governance and regulatory capacity for large-scale mining
Industrial mining historically has been limited in Haiti. This situation is changing, and today, foreign investors have their sights set on developing and exporting Haiti’s subterranean gold, silver, and copper resources. The potential resource revenues to be paid to Haiti’s government in exchange for the rights to exploit these resources are deemed essential for Haiti to meet its persistent development challenges: widespread poverty, extreme inequality, weak institutions, high risks of corruption, and vulnerabilities to natural and man-made disasters. This promise of natural resource extraction to fuel human development is a common refrain: it is echoed in contemporary debates in Africa, Latin America and other regions.