The prime minister of Haiti said he would make postal services “a priority for the government” at a recent meeting with the UPU’s director general in Port-au-Prince.
Jean-Max Bellerive recognized the postal services’ role in “connecting communities” and helping his government “create the national unity” that is essential to his country.
Dayan, the first UPU director general to visit Haiti, stressed that the work performed over the past five months to re-establish postal services in Haiti “should not stop now”. He said that the postal sector should be considered a priority for the country’s development.
Josseline Colimon Féthière, Haiti’s minister of commerce and industry, assured the UPU of her commitment to developing postal services. She said modernizing postal services would be an important objective for the future. “We have an opportunity to rebuild and we must rebuild well,” she said. “We must do things differently and we must strive for modernization and new offerings for customers.”
The minister said products were needed to speed up postal services, to improve network interconnectivity and facilitate money transfers. “Every year, Haiti receives more than 1.8 billion dollars from Haitians living abroad. This is a market we must capture and the postal service, as a function of government, could offer this service [money transfers] at a lower cost,” she said.
Féthière also said she was touched by the postal community’s solidarity toward Haiti after the earthquake and appreciated the UPU director general’s visit, where he attended the inauguration of the new mail processing centre built by the UN agency in Port-au-Prince on July 6.