Working from Amartya Sen's account of development as expanded freedom, Padgett and Warnecke treat national income growth as an unreliable proxy for wellbeing and put institutions at the centre of the analysis. Their evidence comes in two layers. One is Haiti's record: remittances that reached about a fifth of GDP before falling sharply after 2008, a budget financed almost entirely from outside and therefore bound by donor conditions, and so little sex-disaggregated data that accountability is impossible. The other is three cases from elsewhere, economic support for female-headed households in Indonesia, member-run health and childcare cooperatives organised by SEWA in India, and gender-inclusive consultation on post-tsunami housing in Sri Lanka. Each shows that involving poor women in programme design changes what gets built and who benefits. The authors close by arguing that inclusive policy is affordable for poor countries now, and that the recovery choices made after the 2010 earthquake will set Haiti's course for decades.