DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has joined efforts with the Batey Relief Alliance (BRA) for the fourth time to distribute, over a period of twelve months, 187.6 metric tons (more than 9 million rations) of Breedlove dehydrated lentil blend food product. The beneficiaries will be 25,600 food insecure and earthquake-affected people living in Haiti’s border communes of Anse-a-Pitres, Thiotte and Grand Gosier and the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane “batey” communities and urban and rural barrios.

BRA’s regional intervention, for which USAID donated $716,000, through the generous support of the American people, will benefit those in critical nutritional need, including households caring for Cholera victims and people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs) and orphans/vulnerable children (OVCs) impacted by HIV/AIDS, earthquake-related internally displaced people (IDPs), pregnant/lactating mothers and children, and the elderly.

More than 15 local USAID and BRA partners, including the Dominican Ministry of Public Health, Haiti Ministry of Health, and Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative and dozens of community health promoters will be part of the distribution campaign and educate targeted communities about health crisis and nutritional deficiency prevention techniques.

This food aid program complements two other BRA initiatives: providing temporary food assistance to more than 7,000 farm workers and their families now involved in a new USDA-funded agricultural/cooperative development; and providing food supplements to 62,000 children receiving multivitamins and anti-parasitic medicines and to PLWAs receiving antiretroviral treatment and potent medicines to fight opportunistic infections.

Prior to the January 2010 earthquake, the UN World Food Program classified Haiti as a low income food deficit country with an estimated 2.4 million food insecure residents. Haiti relies heavily on imported food (48 percent), with international food assistance comprising five percent of the national food supply. 24 percent of the population is chronically undernourished. Meanwhile more than two million (27%) of the Dominican’s 8.9 million inhabitants are undernourished. Dominican authorities recently estimated that approximately 65,000 children under the age of five (8% of the population) suffer from chronic malnutrition. These children and the most difficult living conditions can be found in border regions along neighboring Haiti.

ANSE-A-PITRES, Haiti. – Funded by the Development Grants Program/United States Agency for International Development (DGP/USAID), the Batey Relief Alliance (BRA) implements a three-year Women’s Empowerment project that identifies and organizes 30 local women organizations in training of 600 women around issues of gender inequity, health, food insecurity, domestic violence and extreme poverty. “The project aims to create an environment where Haitian women have the skills, assets and social capital to advance their own interests,” said Ulrick Gaillard, BRA’s CEO.

The project is being implemented in Haiti’s Southeast Department border communes of Anse-a-Pitres, Thiotte and Grand Gosier, in collaboration with regional NGOs such as FONKOZE, Catholic Medical Mission Board and BRA Dominicana. Gaillard added that at the end of the project in 2012, 150 women who have demonstrated the skills for durable employment and/or asset formation will be awarded micro loans to start small or develop existing businesses.

The project expands on two other BRA programs in food security and health providing the women with further opportunities for independence and growth: access to critical health and laboratory services and free medicines and free food supplement to meet their temporary nutritional need while engaging in long-term cross-border agricultural production activities.

BRA, a new member of the Clinton Global Initiative, hopes to use that new international platform to identify new partners to help advance its work in Women’s Empowerment for the women of Haiti.