A decree defines what a non governmental organisation is in Haiti

On 13 December 1982 the Haitian state published a decree defining non governmental organisations as private, apolitical, non profit bodies proposing programmes and projects capable of improving living conditions. It required them to register with the Ministry of Planning in order to hold legal status. The bodies being regulated had arrived for reasons the decree did not mention. Agriculture had produced about ninety five per cent of national output in the nineteenth century, and the agricultural share of the product fell from about forty four per cent in 1950 to twenty eight per cent in 1988. Between 1900 and 2008 Haiti had sixty disasters, twenty three of them hurricanes and tropical storms, twenty eight major floods and seven droughts, which the government counted as more than nineteen thousand dead and 6.8 million people affected. The third reason was the dictatorship itself, which drove out the people who might have built something.