 We've talked a lot about opportunities and challenges today and I think the panelists are guarded optimists and I think that's a good way to frame it. We had, I think many of you know, we had President Martelli here I guess about 10 days ago now and I was particularly impressed with him and his team and I think that they are, they understand the challenges of trying to create jobs and also trying to meet some of the social deficits that are in Haiti and I know that President Moreno of the IDB was talking recently about the importance of having 6% growth and that it was possible to have 6% growth in Haiti and that that's what needed to happen. So we're going to have three entrepreneurs and also folks from the public sector talking about the role of the private sector and private investment in the Haitian economy. You have their biographies in front of you so I'm not going to go through them but I'm going to just cede the floor to each of my fellow panelists and we'll take it from there. We're going to first hear from Brad Horwitz who is one of the, is the President and CEO of Trilogy International Partners who's the owner and operator of WALA in Haiti. Many of you who've been to Haiti of course are familiar with WALA, one of the prominent cell phone companies there. Brad, over to you. Okay so the arrows, is that how this works? Well terrific, well thank you. Thanks Dan and thank you for being here today. A quick word about who we are because I'm pretty sure nobody has ever heard of Trilogy. We're a private company. My partners and I have really only done one thing in our entire career and we've been involved in the wireless business. With the breakup of AT&T back in 1982, we thought that if you could walk around with a phone we could probably sell a lot of them. We embarked on the non-wireless side of the business, built up a company to be the largest cell phone company in the world. We sold that business to AT&T in 1994 which subsequently sold to Singular which subsequently AT&T bought back. It had kind of gotten into our blood and so we formed a trio of additional companies under the banner of Western Wireless. One was a business focused on servicing rural America in a technology agnostic manner. One was a company that we thought would be the first to bring the GSM technology into the US. That company was called Voice Stream. The third was a portfolio of international assets with a particular focus on markets that were out of the mainstream of the bigger players. We would say places that you would never want to go on holiday but we thought that there was an opportunity there. In 2000 we sold Voice Stream to a company which is today T-Mobile which ironically AT&T is now trying to buy. We sold the Western Wireless business, domestic business to a company called Altel which subsequently sold it to Verizon. We were left with a portfolio of 13 international assets which we sold off to a myriad of players around the world when it came down to the last few orphans if you will which were the countries of Haiti and Bolivia. The line of people looking to invest in those countries was pretty short. And so my partner John Stanton, his wife and I personally bought back the companies from Altel. That happened in 2006. We're based out of Seattle, Washington. We're a small private company, our own capital, capital from our friends and families. We're licensed today to provide service in four different countries, over 33 million people with a focus purely on wireless. When it comes to Haiti, we have been there 12 years as an operating company but actually 14 years as a company being there. We didn't start out or plan to be the largest U.S. investor in the country but we are today. Today we have over 1.2 million customers, over 540 employees. Over 20,000 indirectly Haitians are employed or earn their living through the marketing of our products and services. A hallmark of our company and one of the real reasons that my partner and I bought the business back was the unique opportunity that we saw that you could do well in business by doing good. Our CSR activities have always been a hallmark of the company. We've always felt going back to the early days that giving back to the communities that you serve is a smart thing to do and a good thing to do and never did we see the opportunity to put that into play than we did in Haiti. We were humbled and extremely honored to win the ACE award from Secretary Clinton which is the award for corporate excellence, largely completely due to our work in Haiti, and that we also had in effect legitimize the Voila Foundation. We had it by name before as the vehicle in country that would be the vehicle with which we fund these initiatives. After the earthquake, my partner and I decided to make this a legitimate 501C corporation. My partner funded the company with over a million dollars. We committed over three million dollars in products and services, made a handful of calls to friends and family and actually turned the foundation into a multi-million dollar foundation that continues to support the various projects and the needs of the country. Little bit about the sector in Haiti, the telecom sector which is arguably one of the few robust opportunities in the country. Today there's about 3.75 million wireless subscribers. The business is almost exclusively prepaid which means it is a cash business. It's also a business that is very dependent on the diaspora. Figures somewhere between 20 and 30% of the official GDP of the country comes in via the diaspora. For us, however, and for our competitors in the country, it's also a significant source of revenues given the international traffic that flows in and comes through us. Not only is this a significant source of our overall revenue, but in a country like Haiti where the currency is not where there's no forward market and there's certainly no hedging of the gourd, this in effect serves as a currency hedge for the revenues that we generate. We have found, we believe in Haiti and we believe this everywhere in the world that any economic development in a frontier or developing market can only occur if there is basic infrastructure in place in the country. There is a market and dramatic increase in the GDP of a country once this is established. We believe that Haiti today is poised with the appropriate amount and an ongoing growing amount of infrastructure being developed to actually see that GDP start to rise. The networks themselves in Haiti lend themselves to new economic opportunities, new technologies that will come into play, such as the mobile money product that we'll talk about in a bit. The sector today is one of the largest investment sectors in the country and one of the largest sources of tax revenue there. The sector today creates over 50,000 jobs directly and indirectly. I believe it's the largest private sector employer in the country. To put that a little bit in perspective as I was seeing some of the other presentations when they were talking about jobs and income, and averages are just that in average. Our average employee in Haiti makes about $850 a month overall, which when you think about that relative to the minimum wage and everything else, it's a pretty strong base for the country that's there. Over one and a half billion dollars has been invested in the telecom sector through this year and kind of a telling tale and a little bit of a scary tale when it comes to the government and it comes to revenues between ourselves and our competitor. We contribute about 25% of the total tax revenues into the country. This is two companies that is generating this kind of deal, which is both a little, it takes your breath away a little bit because it sort of magnifies and exemplifies the challenges that the government is going to have in ever attaining self-sufficiency through historically a tax base. Never has the role of wireless been more pronounced or more important than with what happened at the earthquake a little over a year ago. Aside from the obvious abilities for the Haitians to communicate and for messages coming back in, the infrastructure that we had in the country became instrumental for the Army, for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, for everybody that was trying to provide relief services into the country. The working network became absolutely a lifeline for the country. It also created a number of innovative services and applications that have been helping the aid organizations and the NGOs more efficiently and better direct their efforts. We worked with the Red Cross to develop an application that could target specifically on a cell site by cell site basis, specific messaging to the affected population of various areas, whether it was related to cholera as to where the nearest clinics were, whether it's related to a hurricane as to what direction the storms were coming. What this really allowed us to do as the private sector is to very efficiently support the agencies that were working to support the country in a variety of ways. Really the most important and innovative thing that is coming out of Haiti is the implementation of the mobile wallet solution, the mobile money, it's called M-PASA in Kenya. It goes by a number of different names around the world, but this simple application of technology in the case of Haiti, we believe will be one of the strongest foundations of improving the overall economic environment of the country. For those of you not familiar, it's simply the notion of using your cellular telephone as a wallet to receive money, to transfer money, and to purchase goods and services. I was told by one of the larger NGOs in the country that up to 40 cents on the dollar in distributing cash and relief efforts in Haiti goes towards the logistics of moving cash around. This application of this technology absolutely eliminates it. Everybody who's got people working in Haiti that's trying to process payroll or to write checks or to deal with the banking system knows specifically how unproductive and how inefficient this is. Today we are providing payroll services to thousands of employees and to thousands of cash for work programs by utilizing this technology, which is secure, it's safe, it's quick, and because of the applications driven by the cash for work programs and grant programs, we've worked very, very closely in developing this with Mercy Corps. It has taken the learning curve and the training and the trusting element of adoption to this up to a much quicker grade, and we think this is going to be one of the most significant things to drive efficiencies and to bring banking services back to a much larger part of the communication. 3G and Internet access? Well, you know, technology keeps going. It is our belief that Haiti is going to be on a worldwide basis, a country where the predominant method of accessing to the Internet is going to be over mobile devices, whether they're pads, whether they're smartphones, whatever they are, the applications there are going to dramatically accelerate and surpass, we believe, most of the developed world. This requires, however, a doubling down. And so we are embarking this year as our competitors in dramatic and expansion upgrades to the network. There's a lot of talk going on about taking access out to the rural areas, particularly challenging in Haiti, that's largely an economic issue. Given the cost of building and the affordability of this, we're finding some very creative ways to develop this and deploy this with some of the NGOs such as Nvenio through collaborating and private public partnerships to the mutual benefit of everybody. This sector, however, has significant challenges. The first couple of points here don't just apply to our sector, but it really applies to everyone there. The infrastructure in Haiti, as everybody knows, doesn't work. Is in sorely need of reparation. The ports, the roads, when we have to put a site somewhere, we have to build a road to actually get to it. Those of you who are involved in shipping everything in know what it's like dealing with the ports of power. My entire network in Haiti runs on generators 24 by 7. I will spend $8 million this year buying fuel to keep the power. And ironically, given the pricing, the government set pricing on power today, that's actually cheaper than buying what scarce fuel, what scarce power is actually available today. The logistics involved with this, the security involved with this, you know, turns a business model generally upside down in how these things are done. In fact, the recent activity in the Middle East, which now has translated into the government, which mandates and controls the price of fuel, that just cost me $2 million this year, just based on what that increase in fuel pricing is going to be, given what's going on, you know, around the world. Security, obviously security is an issue, fuel is a very desired commodity. So every one of these sites that has generators and fuel has to have security. You've got to have security for the security guys, you know, because they can be entrepreneurial, you know, as well. In our case, it's in the regulatory environment, you know, that's there. There is not, there's a lack of sort of global expertise in how to manage this sector. It's been mismanaged in the past, the historical, natural resources of a government, of a country as it relates to spectrum, needs to be appropriately and sufficiently allocated. That's always been a challenge there. There's a lack of due process, obviously transparency issues, you know, courts, you know, they're as a practical matter, there are no courts, you know, the notion of contract sanctity and all that are sort of interesting ideas as it stands today. These challenges, again, go beyond just my sector. Conflicts of interest, well, you know, the government, the previous government prior to the earthquake privatized the telephone company, but maintained a significant stake in it and so you've got this bizarre situation where the government is now a competitor and managing the regulatory body of the telecom sector in Haiti. That's just like a bad idea on so many levels, you know, that needs to be addressed. Taxation, you know, it is a, we are a successful company in Haiti, our competitors are a successful company and so we are often and consistently the target of new ways of generating revenue, you know, for the country. If you go back to my earlier bullet point on the slide where we're already producing 25, 28% of the tax revenues for the government, it's like, you know, how much, you know, how many times can you squeeze this goose, you know, before, you know, yeah, come up empty. Specific obstacles to us relates to technology, relates to, you know, access to the internet. There is no viable undersea cable service that there's today. There is one that's owned by the Bahamians and the government, but commercially, it's basically unrealistic and unavailable. Fraud is an enormous issue in Haiti, in my world, in my sector, with telephony, with coming in, with gray routes, gray market, technology to a large degree facilitates that. Anyone with a computer in Haiti and access to the internet certainly bypasses, you know, traditional long distance and calling routes, can't stop technology going in, but the illegal marketing and the lack of enforcement capabilities within the government is one of the things that, you know, constantly pounds at us as part of, as part of being there. In spite of this, we continue to invest in the country. We'll continue to bring new technologies into the business. We'll continue, you know, to support the new government and do everything that we can to bring additional investment into the country. Everyone who reasonably could have a phone today in Haiti has one. You know, the thing that nobody sort of really understands of the almost 4 million customers in Haiti today, half of those customers spend about $1.50 a month. Given the challenges with security, power and logistics in that country, that network costs about $3 a subscriber a month. And so what that really tells you is that a very small percentage of the population in Haiti is contributing a very disproportionate amount of revenue. And it's also a business, just as the business developed in the U.S., that is being in effect subsidized by the international traffic, you know, that's coming in. Beyond the, beyond this, the fixes that need to happen, I think everyone has been talking about them, but in terms of regulation and subsidies that have been in place, I think the new government needs to focus on bringing some of those elements to put some certainty back into the cost fractures of the business. You've heard talk about the new industrial park up in the north, a very comprehensive project that we're pretty excited about. We're trying to get an engagement involved in that. It's a project that also demonstrates the need for dramatic coordination amongst groups that need to be there. The opportunities, we had a chance to host a group that's looking at an enterprise fund down in Haiti. If you look just at my income statement, at my basic P&L, you can identify dozens of entrepreneurial businesses that can be developed into the country just to support my needs. I can support 22 small businesses just taking care of things that I can't get done today. You magnify that across the different sectors and there's phenomenal opportunities. But basically, Haiti's got to be a friendlier place. There's got to be security in the place. I'll never forget listening to former Secretary Colin Powell who said cash is a coward. You know, it is only going to go places where it feels safe. And the government needs to make investors and to make money feel safe through bilateral investments agreements, by putting a court system back into place, by giving investors some basic confidences that they have a reasonable chance of security, you know, for their money. Every challenge that we see in Haiti is fixable today with some sound policy, a solid game plan, private sector participation in this, and a government that is beholden only to the people of Haiti. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. Michael Ronan is the vice president for government relations and community affairs at Community Relations at Royal Caribbean. Royal Caribbean has been an investor in Haiti for over 25 years and is the owner of the Labadi private port and is going to tell us about the tourism sector. Michael. Excuse me, I'll stay here at the table. Unfortunately, I arrived here. My computer did, but my program didn't. So I'm going to try to piece it together here from a couple of emails if you don't mind. First of all, our thanks to CSIS for allowing us to participate in the panel today. It's an honor to be here. It's been an honor to be in Haiti for over 25 years and talking with some of our associates here. It's really pretty amazing when we think back about how many things have happened in those last 25 years. But unfortunately, it almost seems to be a cycle where you just about get ready to implement change and something else happens. And unfortunately, you get set back again to the starting point and sometimes worse, obviously in the case of the earthquake now. But I think the word today again was resilience. The people of Haiti amazingly have not only survived the 25. They've survived over 200 years of cycles in their life and they're still resilient. So I think they're the best example of what we should look to as we look forward. Just with a kind of a raise of hands, how many people have ever been on one of our ships visiting Labadi, Haiti? That's actually interesting, but scary. Okay? I definitely should have brought some brochures with me, but that's okay. We'll get to that. Well, again, then I'll see a little bit more about it than I might have otherwise. Haiti evolved out of a concept back in the 1980s where cruise ship companies, including Royal Caribbean Corporation, looked to purchase and or lease islands or sites in countries around the Caribbean where we could bring cruise ship visitors, create an environment, in some cases purely beach, like in the Bahamas, in others, cultural and beach and other environments, if we could, depending on the country. And these developed actually starting in the 1970s and then into the 1980s and 90s, and they continued to develop. We entered an agreement with the country of Haiti in 1986. It was a 50 year lease on the peninsula and the terrain around it. It's about 260 acres of land, of which we have to date developed about 100 acres of that land. It's a beautiful site for those of you that have not seen it. It's a bay with the peninsula, and the bay has beaches on both the ocean side and the bay side. You have the Labadi village is the closest population. Cape Haitian is about seven miles to the east, not very accessible by road. So effectively, it's been a plus and minus. It's an area we have been able to develop almost independently of the other country when that's been the way to do it. And we've had to survive some of the ups and downs of the government. It's made it very difficult when we wanted to grow and incorporate ourselves more into the society for those same lack of infrastructure facilities. So as I say, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. It is operated by a corporation called Solano, a Haitian corporation of which we're all Caribbean, is the sole owner. And we have a team on the ground there. The president of Solano is Maurice Kadar, who's been with us for many years. Maurice was previously minister of tourism for Haiti. I forget the exact period and I apologize. I think about 15 years ago. And what it is, it's a location where we have been able to develop a site where the cruise ship arrives for a day. We not only provide a beach experience, but over the years we've been able to add other elements to it, taking advantage of the elevations and the beauty of the site to include everything from zip lines as they're called today, where you jump on a climate tower or are taken to an elevation and you're strapped into a harness. We literally have a five-line zip line that you actually go from the edge of the bay over the water, over the ocean, and end up on the beach, on the opposite side. We have something called a dragon coaster, which is a dry roller coaster, which comes down the side of the mountain. These are things that were very adventure-driven, company, very innovative, and we found ways to integrate these into the property. But I think the important thing is what does this really mean for our relationship with the country and what we've been able to do to benefit the country of Haiti, not only our visitors to the country. What it means today is we permanently employ 260 local employees. This includes security staff, food and beverage staff, waiters on the beach, all forms of different professions in that area. These can lead to jobs on board our cruise ships if the staff show themselves qualified over time, because we see their customer relations skills and their ability to deal with our guests reach a point where we can move them on board our vessel if they choose to. Some of them have been with us for those 25 years, on board the ships and continue to become professionals, on board our vessels in significantly higher capacities on board. We basically are self-contained. We run 24-7 generators and water recycling process, and we basically do have housing for 50 people on the site, which includes security and a limited number of expats, mostly in the supervisory capacities and technical areas to maintain the physical plant and the management part of the process, even though we have brought management up through the ranks on the Haitian side and will continue to do so as we move forward. The site also very importantly includes significant areas for arts and crafts shopping, and I'll lead into this in another element as far as where it's going in the future. We presently have areas for 200 vendors at a time. There's a pool of 600 handicraft vendors that have been certified by Royal Caribbean, and we rotate them through the site 200 at a time on a regular rotation basis. We also employ approximately 40 people that are operating local shore excursions. These are people, entrepreneurs, that have purchased snorkeling boats or built sailboats or brought them in. They have been able, we've supported them financially so that they can assure that the quality is to international standards, and then they take over and completely wholly own those operations, and we basically pre-sell those products, and then the guests go on those excursions when they get to Labadi, and that again, the revenue stream is totally in the hands then of the local entrepreneur. We also have six troops of troubadours, local musicians and performing young men and women who are part of our entertainment program every time that we have a vessel arriving in Labadi. As far as our overall investment in the site, over the 25-year term to date, we have invested approximately $55 million, and the largest portion of that was in 2008, 2009. We agreed with the Haitian government that to be able to receive our largest cruise ships, which are the Oasis and Eluar class that carries 6,000 passengers per voyage. We needed to start docking the ships in Labadi as opposed to bringing them off in smaller landing craft or tenders, as they are called, which is what we had done traditionally. So we made a $22 million investment in the pier, and additional $20 million was invested on land to improve the site for the larger volume of pastures, including food and beverage facilities, the shopping areas and other areas of support, and the interesting part about that is that the result of that is that we also entered into one of the first private public partnerships with the Haitian government, in which they basically become 81% owner of that docking facility over time, and Royal Caribbean retaining 19% of that ownership. We did, as a part of the agreement, extend, with two extensions on our present agreement, which all going well will take us out to the year 2050, as far as our leaseholding in Labadi. The other part of it, and then I'll get into the future, and I'm trying to move this as expeditiously as I can, basically a very important part of our activities in Haiti have always been the CSR activities well before the hurricanes, and the earthquake, of course. We have had a Solano Foundation since the corporation was formed, and through that we have been able to direct both recyclable goods, and what I mean by that is not the plastics in glass, our ships are constantly being renovated, and in so doing, many times we are taking very, very usable materials, everything from computers to tables and chairs and furniture and beds out of our ships, medical supplies, and we then recycle those, make sure they're in good condition, and then channel those into institutions in Haiti, where they can be made of good use, whether it's in medical clinics, schools, hospitals, or whatever the case may be in Haiti. Mostly again, to date on the northern coast. During the, we've also had a special project with USAID and Focal, and invested $350,000 constructing a water system to deliver clean water into Labadi Village, which is right across the bay from the actual facility that we operate. When the earthquake took place, clearly for all of us, it was a huge shock, no pun intended, of course, but a couple of things happened. We corporately knew immediately that the role we could best play was to continue to call it Haiti with our cruise ships, and not pull out of Haiti and effectively pull out the only real active revenue generating activities in the country at a time when they most needed it. We took the criticism for it, we were blasted pretty hard at first in the press, and some pictures came up with obviously people laying on a beach and 100 miles away were devastated buildings, those are the facts, we couldn't change those. But I think over a very short period of time, fortunately, people came around and realized it was the right thing to do. We were supported from the very beginning by the Clinton Foundation. They came down and visited the site, and we all realized that by continuing to bring revenue into the country, revenue which is pumped into the economy, keep people employed, we brought economic activity to the northern coast, which was almost completely forgotten about initially because logically the attention was on the south coast where it was needed. We also were able to use our vessels to bring in supplies. We opened our vessels up to shipping of pallets of merchandise to the global community, and with PADF, with Food for the Poor, and others we were able to, on every one of our vessels, bring in as many as 200 to 300 pallets of supplies into Labadi and then coordinate their transfer to the needed locations around the island or around the country. So again, we believe at that time it worked out some difficult moments, but it went very well, and we were able to also, through our medical team, work very closely with the hospital in Milo that ended up receiving a lot of people coming up from Port-au-Prince, looking for medical aid, and we were able to support them substantially in being able to respond to those needs. Where are we now, right now in simple terms, Royal Caribbean pays a per-person fee to get to some of the financials to the Haitian government in the form of a $10 per person tax. That represents approximately $6 million a year in direct tax that goes directly to government. In that fee, we also basically pay in wages and other services approximately $9 million a year. That's including salaries, purchase of fuel, supplies, and other things for the operation of the Labadi site. Our projections are that we will continue to bring somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 to 600,000 visitors per year over the foreseeable future. It is, we are limited right now, we choose not to take more than one ship per day into Labadi, but it can handle two ships a day, so we'll see what the future brings. We are also in discussions with government to see if we will open it up to other cruise lines using it, if there should be a demand, and that's all part of our agreement with them regarding the build out of the facility to its larger capacity. Where are we going in the future? We have already been participating with IDB in some of the preliminary work on the Citadel project. We believe in it. Our CEO has made some comments about that. Personally, I can only add that I had the honor and privilege, a little bit unbelievably sometimes, to actually take tourists off of cruise ships to Labadi 40 years ago. Every week, we had two cruise ships visited Cape Haitian and on a very routine and very well-operated basis, we took tourists up to Milo and up to the Citadel and they thoroughly enjoyed their visit. Obviously all of that went away, but I think for personal reasons, I know what can happen and we know there's a lot to be done right now politically to see the structure that's going to come out to support it with the DMO, but Royal Caribbean stands ready apart from what we've already done to see what we can do to support that initiative. In the short term, I think it would be extremely important to use our critical mass in some of the small and medium-sized enterprises we've talked about. We have all of this craft vending on the site. Clearly there's a huge opportunity there if we can link with the right industries to create some new art, some valued art and work and crafts in Haiti, not the repetitive materials that we may be seeing today that are coming out of the enterprises and really be able to project that to a global market. Our guests are very international and believe me, anything that we can sell there and really raise the level of recognition and pride over those articles will have an international projection immediately. We are obviously marketed all over the world as the global company that we are and for us it would be just one other way that we would be able to support what has been a very long-standing and good relationship with the country of Haiti. And having said that, I'm just gonna kind of wrap up with that. Just one last comment, I did overlook and I apologize. We raised about $5 million between donations and corporate matching for Haiti right after the earthquake. One of those, one of the projects our chairman said that he definitely wanted is he wanted to make sure we got involved in education. We tried to partner with a number of institutions to get a school open by October. As we all know, that's frustrating to do things on a short agenda, short schedule. Richard's a bit impatient, our chairman. So he basically said, just get it done. The school opened on October 23rd. We are presently housing 200 students at the complex just outside of Labadi Village. And we're very happy that we were able to put the school into place. We still stand ready to work with other NGOs and private companies. We believe we've got a model around the way that school has been built and structured. We'd be happy to share that model and see if we can maybe reach out and build some other schools like it in other parts of Haiti. Thank you very much for the opportunity of being here and we'll look forward to the opportunity if we have a Q and A session. Thank you. Great. I would only add that when you go to Labadi, subtly disguised as a palm tree, is a cell site providing service to all of your passengers. I'm gonna seat the floor now to Augustine Aguirre who's the country manager for the Haiti crisis response team at the Inter-American Development Bank. IDB has been the lead agency on the Haiti response so I think we're gonna be very interested to hear Augustine's presentation. Thank you. And this final session was supposed to be actually three big global corporations working in Haiti, Trilojivwala, Royal Caribbean, and SEA. SEA is a Korean leading garment firm soon to be the anchor tenant of the industrial park in the north. So Chairman Kim couldn't come so I was called in the last minute to make a presentation. As you can see I'm not Chairman Kim so I'll try to present the industrial park project from the providers of the infrastructure perspective and Chairman Kim and next opportunity will surely talk about the garment business itself. I wanted to talk about the development program in the north in a more broad perspective rather than focusing exclusively in the industrial park maybe due to lack of time I should focus more on the industrial park. But one of the objectives of the government is to promote decentralization that's part of their constitution that's part of their obvious needs. And soon after the earthquake it soon became obvious that the best thing to do to invest in Port-au-Prince was to invest outside of Port-au-Prince and that's also a need in economic terms right now and that's one of the government's, the new government's objectives. The northern region is also one of the poorest in the country which is a lot to say and there are sound business opportunities there for many reasons, logistical reasons, manpower reasons, the Dominican border is closed, the land tight league is not as dramatic issue as it's in other places. So let me talk about what this northern development program looks like. And there are three big opportunities, there are three big sectors which are prioritized, agriculture, tourism and industry, especially the garment industry. The whole of this program adds up to about 1.1 billion dollars in investment, about 45, a little bit more than 45% of that is already secured by funds committed by the bank, by the government of the US, by Spain, by the European Union. The rest is private and the rest is yet to be obtained. But there's a big donor coordination between all of the actors and coordination has become sort of a hollow concept and there's integration. I think that we're all working under a single program providing funds to a single program and the work we are doing together with the government of the US is just amazing and a big learning experience. And the government of Haiti in many of its institutions is deeply involved there. What's this 1 billion, 1.1 billion dollar investment? 125 of those are the public side, the public investment for private sector development and Julie Katzman spoke throughout the, during lunch about this social investment fund and the different windows so I won't get into there. But that we think that leads to the creation or revitalization of the middle class, I think one of the biggest challenges in Haiti today. The rest infrastructure and we've divided infrastructure into the general transversal infrastructure covering most sectors. The basic infrastructure like housing, ports, roads, power. And then we have the specific infrastructure for the specific sectors, the irrigation for the agriculture, the heritage revitalization for the tourist and the industrial park for example for the garment industry. So let me get into, sorry, that's the north part of the country. Very close to the US. With a legal framework, the Hope Help legislation which makes it amazingly convenient for many products specifically the garment products to get into the US with a special tax benefits. There's over-abundant labor at cheap cost and social corporate responsibility and many of these companies are looking at Haiti for that purpose and hopefully most of them are looking at Haiti for business purpose and benefits. That's the more specific area which we are looking at. It's east of Capaicien, a place called close to Caracol and the Bay of Caracol, beautiful place by the way. And if you look at the more specific map, that's what the park will look like and that's where we are working in right now. Basically three big partners are working together on this. The IDB is dealing with all of the infrastructure inside the park from the fences in and I'll talk about that in a while. The government of the US is providing power and housing. We are expecting about 40,000 jobs to be created. That's about 200,000 people going to be living there around and the European Commission will be providing funds for the transport and the logistics including the road from there via Caracol to Capaicien and improvements in a second stage for the port of Capaicien. All this site is 250 hectares, 40 minutes away from Capaicien where you have the port and the airport. There has been a big effort of promoting this investment and opportunity. It's a big effort that has led to much more demand than the available funds can today satisfy. So it's already a success and so as access and an opportunity as there has been little in Haiti for the past years and the government is working a lot there. It's very complicated, trying to build and I've been working on this for the past six or eight months, trying to build this in Haiti with institutional problems in Haiti but with so many people looking at Haiti and different NGOs and different interest groups and pressure groups, it's tough. There are a number of studies that have been done. There are a number of studies that have been going on that are going on right now and today the first RFPs are being published. So hopefully in one, today that's happening as we speak. Hopefully in one and a half months we'll be receiving the offers for the building of the basic infrastructure plus the initial warehouses in about half of the park. This is not only SEA, this is SEA and three other companies that are signing contracts with the government of Haiti right now. But this will mean about 800,000 square meters of covered building space. This will mean 25 megawatts of energy that need to be provided and will be consumed. 90% of the workers will be Haitian workers. 5% will be supervisors and managers of Haitian origin. The other 5% will probably be foreigners. And this will be generating an increase of around 5% of the GDP in Haiti. This will also mean around 27 million dollars in tax collection, hopefully one of the big three. Please. There's one of the lines in the, in the MOUs that have been signed with these different contracts, with the different companies that relates to international labor, environmental and social standards to be observed. So there's big expectation everywhere. There's big expectation in the bank and we hope, and the commitment is that by March of 2012, next year, the first warehouses will be in place and the first two companies will be starting to work and to generate the jobs. So we are extremely optimistic about Haiti in general, optimistic about this challenging project in particular, proud to have been a part of it and still lots of work to be done. So thank you very much. And hopefully next time we come here, we will be showing photographs instead of drawings and people working instead of promises. Thank you. Okay. I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna collect three questions because I think our time is short and you've been extraordinarily patient. I'm gonna give the first question to the gentleman in the front row. I know we have some microphones up here if there's a gentleman up here in the front row that I'd like to hear from first. And then I know there's a woman in the back and if I can get a third one and we'll group them together. Okay, and the gentleman there. So we're gonna start here. Just a comment in front. If you would introduce yourself. If everyone could each introduce themselves. My name is Kessna O'Farrell. I'm an economist, Asian economist. In fact, by starting, you said that Haiti got to grow by 6% GDP. And we think it's too low because for the last 50 years, we get like negative growth, economic growth in the country. And on the demographic front, we're going by more than 2%. So we should go to more than 10% growth in Haiti to be able to catch up. And as the government put the United Nations in March 2010 after the earthquake, they want to have an emerging country that means $50 billion of GDP and more than $5,000 GDP per capita. So it'd be very important. But let's get some numbers to be quick. We get 60,000 jobs in the public sector. And Mr. Matéli came here in this building saying he wants to create jobs. He won't be able to do it at the public sector. So he has no choice. And this morning we were talking about how to change the trend from assistance to private investment. And I think Brad and Michael have just said it, the transaction costs are too high in Haiti. So if you can decrease the transaction cost as the best way to create jobs. And I will finish by just saying on the last competitiveness report that they made on Haiti. That's the sector of tourism, agriculture, construction, ICTs, manufacturer, government. And if you get the platform, electricity and telecoms, you can get more than 1 million jobs doing so by having less transaction costs by the government to create the environment, the business environment for that. That's my comment on what you've been saying. Thank you. The lady in the back, please. Marie Gabriel with Haiti Green Project. With the rising cost of fuel, I am wondering if you gentlemen are not thinking of using solar energy or wind energy to offset the cost, even in the case of Voila with their cell tower. If they're thinking of using solar energy or wind energy. And also I've listened to all the presentation during the day and I'm kind of sad enough not hearing anybody tackling the public transportation issue in Haiti because we're talking about decentralization and building better, but we're not talking about how we're gonna help people living in the outskirts of the major cities to go to work and get home. If we cannot attract a certain investment in the public transportation, however we wanna do it even by having a railroad, buses, the people are just gonna go back living closer to the wherever they can work. So even if we move the businesses into the northern side, we don't create the same kind of issues that we have in power points in K-Pation. Any other cities? Thank you very much. The third comment or question, if you'd identify yourself too, thanks. Daniel O'Neill from the Pan-American Development Foundation. My question was about the development up in the north. We're all very excited about this coming in. It's clearly a sign of the new Haiti. I wondered if it also includes upgrades to the other infrastructure like the airport, if there will be sewage facilities. How much more do we get out of this beyond just the factories? Thank you. So why don't I, maybe each of you might wanna take a piece of any of those questions. How about, Brad, I know you had a view on the solar and wind, would you just? Sure. The great question, Haiti clearly is a place where wind is prevalent, a couple of issues. We have experimented with both. We have actually built two towers today that to test the wind turbine to see if it actually generates enough power to run the site, it does. I mean, they're clearly in certain parts of the country where there's consistent wind, you can generate enough to do that. The challenge comes in building things to withstand the elements in Haiti. We build and we have to build, and it's what helped us dramatically during the earthquake, we have to build our infrastructure to manage and face 120 mile an hour wind. And so when all of a sudden you take the cost of building a supplemental tower to run a turbine to power the site, the economics really as expensive as it is to continue using ginsets and power, it wins out. On solar, the challenge of solar, which there's clearly plenty of sunlight in Haiti, the footprint of the panel that's required to generate enough solar energy to then run a site again leads to having to build additional infrastructure to support that panel. And so at the end of the day, with the challenges of land ownership of the cost of construction, continuing to use diesel still pans out. What we've been experimenting with are various new technologies and battery technologies that sort of turn off and on to minimize the amount of power and to recycle batteries more effectively. Well, you have the floor, any other comments on the other comments from the floor, either about the business enabling environment or about the infrastructure in the north? Well, in the north, I mean, the north is an unbelievable opportunity. If you take the numbers that they're talking about just in terms, and I believe of the numbers, 5% are gonna be sort of brought in from the tenants, another 5% are gonna be supervisors. You take that against 4,000 people. I was in K-Pation about a month ago when I sort of did a quick count. There's 109, and I'll use the term loosely, hotel rooms in K-Pation. The opportunity for someone to build housing, to build housing just to support the workers that are gonna be coming in, whether it's bed and breakfast, whether it's hotels, you know, are staggering opportunities for anyone entrepreneurial that aren't large scale projects that will do it. We are planning on putting a store out at that industrial park to service just the demands of the workers. Our banking partner in the mobile wallet is has committed to open a branch, and all of these things are gonna spur additional entrepreneurial opportunities, which will create more jobs and put in needed infrastructure. Thanks, Michael. Real quickly on the energy, we're a bit different obviously because the physical plant of the ship is self-sustainable. But what we are doing is we are driving the technology in our ships all over the world, environmentally processing, energy conservation. Any technology that we can take ashore, at least in the immediate Labbadi area, we're obviously doing. Some is practical, some is not. I mean, we use solar energy in our ships. Some of it works for small applications in Labbadi, but I think we are very technologically driven. We're very environmentally driven. So those two combine very well, and we're really doing everything we can to try to use that technology ashore where we can. Regarding the North Coast project, I'm very happy to see it. Obviously, looking at the tourism side of it, as I said, we see some tremendous opportunity on the North Coast. It existed there before. Even just as recently as a couple of years ago, there used to be large volumes of tourists that came across from the Dominican Republic to Cape Haitian, went up and visited the citadel, filled what were more hotel rooms than there are today, because you had the Montgélie, you had the Comeyar plage, you had other hotels. So we know that under the right circumstances, apart from the development, which will obviously bring in this larger volume of people, under the right master plan, the development of the tourism product on the North Coast has some tremendous potential. Not just to bring people directly into Haiti, but to bring people in from the Dominican Republic where you're already getting over 3 million visitors a year, plus the cruise ship side that we could augment from. So we see there's a role that tourism can play in a structured master plan program to really look at all the attributes and begin to build in the infrastructure to support it. Thanks. Augustine. Briefly, regarding the first question, energy and solar panels, we look at this from the public side and the public policy side. Energy in Haiti is a major challenge. Challenge is a major complication, and it stems from, I would say, three different pillars. First, the need for additional generation capacity, which is the easy part of the equation. You need to invest, invest wisely. Solar panels might be one of the solutions. Then you have another huge problem in the public utility, the way Edeash is running, the regulation of the sector, big problem. Then the third one is the, I would say, the general culture of non-payment. Edeash produces very little energy for a few hours a day for only a small percentage of the population, and still they only get under 30% of the energy. They recover the cost for only 30% of the energy they put into the net. Unsustainable. Okay, so every, and this generates a deficit of around 180, 150 million dollars a year, which is generously covered by the governments of the US and of Venezuela. So every additional mega you put into the network is additional million dollars that come into the deficit. So until you solve probably the third of the pillars, you won't be able to solve the second one. And until you solve the second one, every additional mega is a problem. The three of these issues are being covered. The government, the present government of Haiti has initiated under the SEMEP, which is a commission for the modernization of the state, which successfully modernized the telecommunication sector, is beginning a new process with Edeash and the energy sector, which we are a part of, the government of the US and the World Bank are a part of. Hopefully this will lead to changes there. Going to the second question, and sorry, I took a little bit of time there. Yes, the Northern Development Project should be an opportunity not only for the industrial park or for the tenants of the industrial park, it's an opportunity to develop infrastructure in general and to take their services in general. And there are investments expected in every single sub-sector. The power generation, the government of the US is planning, no, it's starting to build and it's hiring generation of 35 megawatt facility. They got an agreement with the government and as an exception for that program, that energy can be sold directly to the users, industrial or individual and not via Edeash. That's not the way usually things are running in Haiti. So that's one. You have roads, the European Union is putting a lot of money into developing the road infrastructure in the North and they will be investing in the port of Capoe-Cien as well. The government of Venezuela is rehabilitating the airport in Capoe-Cien and that's a major program. We will be working in housing in a few of the smaller towns in the North and in water and sanitation programs from one a month to the West. So there are a number of infrastructure investments that would benefit not only the small industrial park but the rest of it. I think we're gonna have to end it here. You've been a very patient audience. Please help me in thanking the panel. Thank you.