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.
Filed under: Haiti, On Poverty, Ultra-poor | Tags: Chemen Lavi Miyò, Development, Doctors Without Borders, Dominican Republic, FONKOZE, Haiti, MICROFINANCE, Paul Farmer, Ultra-poor, Zanmi Lasante
To call someone ultra-poor or to say that she’s the poorest of the poor isn’t enough. It doesn’t do justice to the depths of her deprivation. The designation evokes only an economic understanding of poverty: it’s only a question of her income, which is invariably lower than everyone else’s. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Take Krismen, for example, I just met her Tuesday. She’s a sure-thing for CLM – Fonkoze’s program for the ultra-poor. She’s a single-mother taking care of 12 kids and two very aged adults; she lives in a home with mud walls, a dirt floor, and a thatch roof; she’s not harvesting nor does she own any land; she’s sick; her kids are malnourished and easy victims of preventable diseases; not a single child is in school because she can’t pay tuition fees; and on top of everything, she’s understandably depressed. Is it enough to say she has a low income?
Then there’s the fact that she’s poor in Haiti, an already impoverished country with inadequate social services. Haiti is a state in the minimalist sense. Eighty percent of children attend private schools, not out of choice, but out of necessity; there simply are no public schools for miles. Public hospitals are scant, located only in major population centers. Instead, it’s outside organizations like Doctors Without Borders or Paul Farmer’s Zanmi Lasante that provide health services.
If Krismen wasn’t living in Haiti – but even in India or South Africa – her income could be just as low, but her poverty wouldn’t be as deep. In either country, Krismen would at least find a state fulfilling its most basic responsibilities. Her kids would be in the public school system and her illness would find treatment at a public hospital. It’s likely that neither would be of notable quality, but the services would be there. She might have even found her way into a government-led home construction or seed distribution project to improve other areas of her life – both of which are common across the border in the lower-middle income Dominican Republic.
In Haiti – or Chad, or Afghanistan, for that matter – we are talking about the poorest countries on earth. The DR, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa, India, these are developing countries with great swaths of poverty, but still head and shoulders above the very bottom. It’s a difference that’s commonly overlooked when talking about “developing countries,” with all non-rich countries awkwardly lumped together.
Krismen’s case is not an exception, not in rural Haiti. She is no outlier. Still, take comfort knowing that for Krismen, opportunity’s unjust absence is over. The opportunity to send her kids to school, to earn a living, to be empowered and lead a dignified life, Fonkoze has knocked on her door to introduce such an opportunity. Over the next 18 months, with the help of Fonkoze, Krismen is poised for a grand transformation, a transformation so complete past CLM clients have called it a rebirth.
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: Community Development, On Poverty, Peace Corps, Ultra-poor | Tags: Development, FONKOZE, Haiti, Peace Corps, Ultra-poor
The poorest of the poor are what fuel the West’s development aid to the Rest. They are the faces we see when we are asked to spare the equivalent of a cup of coffee to vaccinate a child or pay to send her to school; it’s this sector that galvanizes large multilateral efforts to alleviate poverty worldwide. Even amongst the “bottom billion,” it’s they that compose the lowest rung.
Yet even with all this attention, many don’t seem to understand the depths of deprivation and injustice that the poorest of the poor have endured and how it affects their psyche and hence our development projects.
The poorest are timid, they lack self-confidence and they lack self-esteem. Besides not having productive assets, besides not having land to harvest, besides not having a formal education, besides being consigned to a general lack of opportunity, they often carry broken spirits. History, both across generations and in an acutely personal sense, has mistreated them. (more…)
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.
