A year on, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country is still reeling from the earthquake, and the international community's capacity to deliver and sustain aid effectively is being sorely tested.

The cold facts of one of the world's biggest urban disasters make terrifying reading: at 16:53 local time on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rattled the capital Port-au-Prince and surrounding regions. It only lasted 10-20 seconds but it killed around a quarter of a million, injured more than 300,000 and left more than 1.5 million homeless.

Despite billions of dollars of donations and aid pledges, a 12,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping presence and an army of U.N. and privately-funded relief workers, the debris that clogs much of the city and a million homeless people living in tents are blunt testimony to the unfinished recovery task.