Until now, the same Internews team has been handling both its own responsibilities and those related to CDAC, but with the grant from OCHA it expects to hire two to three more people and split off a group that will deal exclusively with the latter. Ultimately, both Internews and CDAC would like to turn their Haiti operations over to entirely local staffs. “It’s about recognizing that people are agents in their own recovery and that they need to make choices – informed choices,” Wall said. “I hope that we will come out of Haiti never having again to make the argument that information matters in a disaster response, and that we will be able to deploy this service, CDAC, again and that it will gradually become a mainstream part of the recovery and relief efforts.”

[Clarification: The text of this story was changed to reflect that the Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID has been been Internews’s primary funder in recent months, and to reflect that the 9,000 radios it distributed were part of 55,000 total that were provided by the U.S. military.]

Curtis Brainard is the editor of The Observatory, CJR's online critique of science and environment reporting. Follow him on Twitter @cbrainard.