The sad truth is that the international community does not have a long attention span. Humanitarian relief efforts galvanize millions, even billions of dollars in the short-term, only to lose steam once the cameras turn off and the reporters go home.
In this regard, it’s crucial that we support organizations that were present in Haiti before the earthquake and that will be present long after. Fonkoze is Haiti’s foremost microfinance institution with hundreds of thousands of Haitian clients, many of who rely on Fonkoze to sustain their businesses and livelihoods.
Join with those who know Haiti best and support Haiti’s long-term recovery with Fonkoze – http://fonkoze.org
Watch a new video CGAP has produced about Fonkoze’s Chemen Lavi Miyò (Pathway to a Better Life) program for Haiti’s poorest. It will inspire you.
Today we begin a week of intensive training for the new group of Ti Kredi credit agents. We’ll be covering topics as diverse as micro-enterprise management, literacy, sexual/reproductive health, children’s rights, and environmental protection.
This is what is often referred to as “microfinance plus,” because of the additional focus on aspects of people’s lives that keep them poor (i.e. poor health, too many children, environmental degradation, lack of education, etc.). It is more than just offering credit and saying have a nice day, it’s a strategy to “accompany the poor out of poverty,” to paraphrase Fonkoze.
Filed under: FONKOZE, Haiti, Videos | Tags: Dominican Republic, FONKOZE, Ice-breaker, Peace Corps
When giving a long, formal training to someone who has never sat in a classroom, it’s always a good idea to mix in a little “fun.” The second video is a quick example of me trying to do just that for a group of Fonkoze’s CLM members. It’s a song and dance “ice-breaker” I learned while with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.
Why did we need to mix in a little fun? The first video shows why – it was shot a few moments before the ice-breaker. Tired students are not productive students!
For those interested: The song is about a magical rock that starts out the size of a pebble and grows each time you rub it while saying “A Massa Massa Massa.” By the end of the song, the pebble has become a boulder and is so big you fall to the ground! The lyrics aren’t in Haitian Creole nor Spanish, they’re just sounds that rhyme. The song is titled “Alele.”
Filed under: FONKOZE, Haiti | Tags: Central Plateau, CLM, FONKOZE, Haiti, Paul Farmer, Peace Corps, Zanmi Lasante
It’s 1:30 pm, the sun just passed its peak position in the sky, and it feels at least 100 degrees. Ès Fèanelus ducks out of from beneath the cool reach of a mango tree to greet a woman as she passes by; he asks about Lala, her cousin, and about the goats she’s breeding, reminding her to give them lots of water. In this heat a parched goat can be fatal and goats are like living savings accounts. He then dips back into the shade to finish his peanut butter sandwich, spicy of course, Haitian style.
Ès – pronounced like the letter S – is an ideal case manager for CLM, Fonkoze’s program for ultra-poor women. As a case manager, he is in constant contact with CLM members and is uniquely responsible for the program’s unprecedented success. During the now completed CLM pilot, Ès spent 18 months supporting, inspiring, and pushing the program’s women toward their ultimate economic and social empowerment. And today, as we search for the next group’s participants, he pulses with energy, clearly delighted by the task at hand.
But today is going to be a long day. There is a long list of families to visit. Nevertheless, as we trudge from house to house, with Haiti’s denuded hills foiling a break from the sun, Ès nimbly checks a few additional families off his own list. Ducking his head in he makes sure everything is as it should be. No lingering fevers? No diarrhea for the kids? Just last month, he arranged for a malnourished child to be accepted into an NGO feeding program. Today, smiling – grinning really – Ès pinches the child’s upper arm. “He looks good, right?” he says.
Across wide swaths of Haiti’s Central Plateau – famed for Zanmi Lasante, Doctor Paul Farmer’s hospital – there doesn’t appear to be a person Ès doesn’t know. Kisses, hugs, and best wishes follow him; he responds with gregarious greetings that border on goofy. Walk alongside him and you’ll quickly feel like an insider.
Many of Ès’s relationships were built years before joining CLM, when he worked for Zanmi Lasante as a community health agent. It’s a job he retains part-time along with his role as director of a local grade-school – his former grade-school, in fact, which he revived after finding it abandoned. Ès’s experience, affability, and charming silliness – not to mention an ability to walk for hours on end under a blistering sun – have prepared him well for life in CLM.
These days, as we lumber around the Central Plateau, I find myself frequently flashing back to what a Peace Corps recruiter told me before I signed on the dotted line: It’s going to be the toughest job you’ll ever love. Peace Corps’s slogan. Watching Ès skip from one CLM house to the next, all smiles, chatting up grandmas and infants alike, I can’t help but feel the slogan has been his from the start.
Filed under: FONKOZE, Haiti, Ultra-poor | Tags: Chemen Lavi Miyò, Development, FONKOZE, Haiti, Mango Tree Canoes, Reaching Vulnerable Clients
Beginning Monday and continuing for the next two weeks, I’ll be out “in the field” doing final verifications for Fonkoze’s program for the ultra poor, Chemen Lavi Miyo (CLM) or Pathway to a Better Life. The verifications consist of a team of CLM staff, including the program director, arriving at each of the 120 or so homes of pre-qualified clients for a 15-20 minute conversation. This conversation and the info it reveals determine who will be part of the 18 month program.
Because CLM is not just for the very poor, or the really, really poor, but for the ultra-poor – yes, beggars welcome – each client is questioned to verify that she (women only!) genuinely deserves a spot.
Getting to the homes is no picnic, to say the least. In order to begin the search for CLM clients, you’ll have to first cross a river, but not over a bridge, instead on hollowed out mango tree canoes. It’s just like the Native Americans used to do – although that wasn’t in the twenty first century. It turns out someone once had the wherewithal to try and build a bridge, but the canoe drivers protested with everything they had in their disposal – including Voodoo. But I digress…let’s just say the homes are quite a ways away, we’re talking hours by foot.
Here’s a photo of our “water taxi” and a woman who is well qualified for CLM.
Filed under: FONKOZE, MICROFINANCE, Videos | Tags: Development, FONKOZE, Haiti, MICROFINANCE, Reaching Vulnerable Clients, Ti-Kredi
While it is often claimed that microfinance reaches the world’s poorest, there are few microfinance institutions (MFI) that actually live up to the hype. Reaching the poorest is difficult and costly; it’s tremendously challenging.
Fonkoze is unique in the microfinance world for its uncompromising commitment to reaching the poorest, most vulnerable sectors of society. This is what motivated me to come to Haiti and seek them out.
This video is a compilation of some footage I shot on my way to visit with potential clients for Fonkoze’s Ti-Kredi or “little credit” program – the lending program aimed at Haiti’s near poorest sectors. It took just under two hours of hiking to reach these families and the video should make apparent their isolation.
The home visits consist of an informal interview to better understand the living situation of potential clients. Home visits are carried out on a community by community basis, with a 30% sample of potential clients visited and interviewed.
ENJOY!
Filed under: FONKOZE, MICROFINANCE, Ultra-poor, Videos | Tags: Chemen Lavi Miyò, FONKOZE, Ultra-poor
This is a brief video of Fonkoze’s CLM graduation (Chemen Lavi Miyò – “Pathway to a Better Life”). This is a program for Haiti’s ultra-poor women. It is not a traditional microfinance program and does not include a credit component. It is instead an 18 month intensive program where each woman is transferred productive assets like goats or chickens, given business and life-skills training, constant accompaniment and support from a Fonkoze case worker, and a small $7 a week stipend to help maintain economic stability. The program aims to radically improve not just living standards but each woman’s state of mind.
These are Haiti’s poorest women. Before the program begins they are literally women with broken spirits. Many have resorted to begging to feed their children. They often lack a male partner and none have any form of small business or productive assets, including no land to harvest. In self-evaluations, each woman invariably rates herself and her living situation as a one out of ten; they are on society’s lowest rung.
This program breathes new life into these women; it gives them hope and rejuvenates their broken spirits. It helps them overcome the fatalism that keeps them thinking they have no other options in life but to suffer this most acute form of poverty.
Here we have 50 women from Lagonav, a small island province a few hours from Port-au-Prince. Fifty out of 50 women successfully graduated and the data illustrates their leap out of extreme poverty. They have stable incomes, small thought they may be; they send their children to school; their health has improved; they have regained their self-respect.
Make no mistake, these women are still very poor, but the fire that a life at the bottom, that fear and failure had extinguished, is again burning in these women as they promise to “never go back” to extreme poverty.
