Haiti's Dire Situation in Graphs (2025 Edition)

I’m falling into an unfortunate tradition of annually updating the graphs of how bad Haiti’s situation is. Here’s last year’s.

Let’s start with the good news.

Reported kidnappings have fallen significantly. There was a huge increase from 2022 to 2023, but almost all of that was erased in 2024. It’s still absurdly high. But at least there’s an indicator trending in the right direction.

Homicides, on the other hand, isn’t looking great.

There were just over 5,600 homicides in 2024. This is close to an additional 1,000 fatalities over 2023. If there’s any good news, at least the rate of increase has slowed down.

My final graph is an underreported story. But that’s probably because the data aren’t as clear.

This graph shows remittances to Haiti. The top line is remittances as reported by the World Bank. I tried to find a good definition of the variable and its sources. As far as I can tell, it’s supposed to be total remittances. But I’m skeptical, as I’ll explain in a minute.

The World Bank data shows that remittances to Haiti have peaked. The drop looks relatively small, but remittances to Haiti are declining.

To get better data, I pulled the remittances from Chile to Haiti directly from Chile’s Banco Central. In 2020, Chile became the second largest sender of remittances to Haiti. It’s far behind the US, but it’s the largest sender for which I can get data from the source. The data from Chile show why I’m skeptical of the World Bank’s data: https://vodoueconomics.substack.com/p/how-did-30000-haitians-get-to-texas, but there’s no sign of that movement in the World Bank data.

Even though the data series are not in harmony, they report a similar trend in the last few years: remittances to Haiti are falling. The Chilean numbers, which I believe are more accurate, show a very steep decline.

It’s hard for me to know if the decline is specific to Chile, or if it represents a shift in sending funds to Haiti. Chile became more stringent on Haitian immigration in 2019, and the fall in remittances could represent a fall in opportunity. But I can also imagine that the diaspora is less certain about sending money to Haiti. Just this week the Haitian Times reported that transfer agencies have become a source of racketeering. This is unfortunate because the country’s situation means that money is desperately needed.

(Edit: These figures are not adjusted for inflation, which means the decline in real terms is even greater.)