Not currently an operable trial site. Read the note before planning a study here.

Why Haiti

Haiti is CARICOM's largest member state by population and, in GHESKIO, holds one of the oldest and most accomplished clinical research institutions in the Americas. It is also, as of today, a country whose national teaching hospital has been closed since February 2025 and where roughly 70% of public health facilities have shut because of armed violence. We have written this page honestly rather than not writing it at all — and we are not currently offering Haiti as a recruitment proposition.

The disease burden

Haiti is a regional outlier in both directions. It has the lowest adult obesity in the Americas at 10.1% and the lowest overweight-or-obese share at 29.2% — yet the highest age-adjusted NCD mortality at 838.7 per 100,000 and the lowest hypertension control rate at 8.1%. This is a population with a very large hypertensive burden and almost no effective treatment coverage. The modelled diabetes estimate of 21.3% carries a very wide interval and is anomalous against the low obesity figure; we would not quote it to a sponsor without that caveat.

Sites and infrastructure

• Hôpital de l'Université d'État d'Haïti — the national teaching hospital, closed since February 2025 following armed attacks and arson
• Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais, operated by Zanmi Lasante / Partners In Health — closed April 2025 due to armed violence
• Hôpital Universitaire Justinien, Cap-Haïtien — in the north, outside the main conflict zone
• Faculté de Médecine et de Pharmacie, Université d'État d'Haïti — founded 1861
• GHESKIO Centres, Port-au-Prince, founded 1982 — an NIH-funded Clinical Trials Unit with Weill Cornell and one of the largest HIV and TB care providers in the Americas

Research heritage

Substantial, and the strongest infectious-disease research heritage in CARICOM. GHESKIO, established 1982, is the oldest AIDS research institution in the Caribbean, a long-standing NIH clinical trials network site with decades of HIV and TB trial delivery and a permanent Weill Cornell partnership. Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante has generated internationally cited implementation and TB/HIV research from Mirebalais and the Central Plateau.

Regulatory & ethics

• Comité National de Bioéthique — national bioethics oversight
• Direction d'Épidémiologie, de Laboratoire et de Recherche (DELR), MSPP — responsible for planning, promoting and developing health research; a National Health Research Policy was adopted in January 2020
• Named medicines regulator for interventional trial authorisation: not identifiable

The honest position: The governance architecture exists on paper and the research heritage is real. The operating environment is not. As of reporting current to mid-2026: roughly 70% of public health facilities had closed because of gang violence, affecting an estimated 4.4 million people; 35 hospitals closed after looting or arson and around 100 health centres were running at reduced capacity; there were 1,485 conflict fatalities in the first six months of 2026, 63.7% of them in the Ouest department that contains Port-au-Prince. These figures move fast and we re-verify them before any sponsor conversation. Public health spending of 0.43% of GDP and 43.5% out-of-pocket financing mean there is no standard-of-care backstop for trial participants. GHESKIO is the sole credible research asset and sits in the highest-violence department in the country.

Data quality: Thin — weak vital registration, all NCD estimates modelled with very wide intervals, and no recent national risk-factor survey.

How this site fits the network

Under review — the operating environment does not currently support interventional research.

We are not currently offering Haiti for interventional recruitment, and we would rather tell you that than take a feasibility request we cannot honour. This page exists so that our network coverage is stated completely and honestly. We keep the position under review and will say so directly when it changes.