Monthly Archives: September 2007

Challenges, Challenges

Helping poor women gain access to the financial services they need to change their own lives can be challenging work. A recent visit to the Fonkoze branch in Sodo highlighted some of the obstacles that have to be faced.

Here is the front of the Sodo branch:

The most important action at a branch, whether in Sodo or in any of Fonkoze’s 32 branches, doesn’t happen at the branch office, but in credit centers that can be quite a distance from the branch.

A credit center is a collection of 25, 30, or 40 women. Often even more. They might meet in a local church or in a school, but they might just meet under a large tree. The women are organized into groups of five who take their loans and make their repayments together. The centers meet twice-a-month, once for reimbursement or disbursement of credit, and once for discussions. They also host Fonkoze’s education programs. Fonkoze might offer two or even three different educational programs simultaneously in a credit center, depending of that center’s needs.

Here are some pictures of the spot on Savann Long where one of Sodo’s larger credit centers meets. The members built the structure for themselves in one member’s front yard.

Now Haiti is roughly the same size as Maryland, so with 32 branches – 36 by the end of the year – you might think that credit centers would never be that far from a branch. In a sense you’d be right. They aren’t far. But their proximity doesn’t help you if the roads are bad enough.

And in the Sodo area they are bad enough. On Tuesday, we had to go to the center in Savann Long on horseback, over four hours each way, and on Wednesday we went to another center in Zoranje, a long hard motorcycle trip from Sodo.

One challenge was crossing the river that separates Sodo from most of the communities it serves.

Crossing from Sodo was much easier than crossing back. On the way back, it was well past dark and raining hard. We had to gallop just to reach the river before it rose to high to cross.

The man carrying this schoolgirl is a professional river forder. He charges about three Haitian gourds (less than ten cents) per child. He gets them across without their dirtying their uniforms.

The river isn’t the only barrier. The roads just aren’t good.

We passed a local market on the way.

Logistical aspects of Fonkoze’s work, like transportation, present only one small piece of the overall challenge. I hope to write more about other pieces soon. But for two hard days in Sodo, transportation seemed like enough of a challenge to me.

Beyond Microcredit

Fonkoze’s standard solidarity-group microcredit has been proven to be an effective tool to help poor women help themselves out of poverty. Groups of five women organize themselves to receive and reimburse their loans together. They act as guarantees for one another, eliminating the need for collateral and for someone to cosign.

Loans start at about $85 and can increase to more than $1400, and the success women have at managing increasing loan amount is only one small sign of the progress they make. Fonkoze has a battery of data that demonstrates clients’ progress out of poverty by showing how their standard of living improves: better houses, more children in school, and better nutrition are typical results.

But microcredit is not the answer for all of Haiti’s poor. Over 50% of Haitian households function on less that $1 a day, and some of these are so poor that they would not be able to absorb and make good use of a sum as large as $85. For some of these, Fonkoze has created a special program of mini-microcredit, with even smaller loans – they start at less than $30 – shorten repayment periods, and closer accompaniment from specially trained credit agents. It’s a six-month program that prepares a woman to enter standard microcredit by giving her some additional structure.

Even this program, however, can’t reach the poorest of the poor. It depends, after all, on a woman’s capacity to take $30 and invest it immediately into a business that will enable her to make repayments and generate profit. But if a woman has no business, has never had a business, then she can hardly invest money in one. If her children are consistently hungry, she cannot even be expected to invest money that comes her way. She needs to buy food.

Fonkoze is now experimenting with a program designed to help these poorest of the poor, It’s called “CLM” or Chemen Lavi Miyò, which is Creole for “the Road to a Better Life.” It features education, close supervision, some subsidies, and the transfer of income-generating assets. At the end of 18 months, participants have sustainable incomes, small bank accounts, and can move into regular microcredit without need of further subsidies. It’s based on a program that has been developed of the course of ten years of research and practical experience in the field by BRAC, one of Bangladesh’s large NGOs. Fonkoze is piloting the program with 150 participants in Haiti, spread out through three locations: Lagonav, Boukan Kare, and Twoudinò.

I spent the day yesterday on horseback, slogging through the deep, black mud of Boukan Kare, meeting program participants. It was stunning.

Anyone who’s spent even a little time in Haiti has seen poverty of a sort that we in the United States are unaccustomed to. But CLM participants endure poverty that is even harsher that what one generally sees in Haiti. They have no income-generating assets of any kind. They own no animals. They own no farming land. If they own a home, it’s one room, with a mud floor, walls of woven sticks packed with mud, and a straw roof. They might go a day, even two days, without eating. They tend to have large families, but none of their children can go to school. What little they have comes from begging. They are, of course, sick all the time.

Adeline can serve as an example. Her mother was chosen through an exhaustive, three-step selection process to be a program beneficiary. First, Fonkoze organized a meeting in her neighborhood at which community members identified the poorest households in their area. Then, Fonkoze field workers visited the homes of the families the community had identified as its poorest to complete detailed surveys of each household and create a preliminary list of recommended participants. Finally, Fonkoze’s CLM Program Manager visited each recommended household to confirm that it qualified for the program.

Adeline’s mother was selected. She had Adeline and six other children to support with a husband who wasn’t helping her. She had no income except what she could beg. She would go, as Adeline told me, for a week at a time without lighting a cooking fire.

And then she died. Adeline was the oldest surviving child. A couple of older siblings had died. Her father was ready to send her away to live in domestic servitude in Mirebalais, the nearest city. Instead, Fonkoze offered her the chance to participate in the program in her mother’s place. She would have to become the de facto head of her household at the age of only 14, but she would get to stay with her little brothers and sisters and have the means to help them to a better life.

So she received extensive training in the care of goats and chickens. Those are the two businesses she chose to enter. Then she received seven chickens and three goats. Her weekly visits from her Fonkoze Case Manager include coaching directly focused on her businesses, but also lessons in nutrition, hygiene, and health. They also include literacy training – Adeline’s never been to school – and lots and lots of encouragement. Fonkoze is helping her repair the dilapidated shack her family lives in, and is partnering with Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health to guarantee them free access to essential health care. Finally, she receives a stipend of just under $1 a day to free her from begging to support her siblings so that she has the time she needs to take care of her animals and go to school. She’s starting first grade this fall.

Adeline is excited to be part of the program. Her goats are doing well: There are four of them now, and one of them is pregnant. She’s been managing to save almost $1.50 per week of the stipend she receives. That will be important down the line as she prepares to enter microcredit. And she and her siblings now eat every day.

She still has problems. One is her father. He’s been unwilling to help her at all, even by just building a simple coop to protect her chickens. Several have died. And it must be awkward for both of them as he watches her assume responsibility for her own and his other children’s lives. And make no mistake: She is still very, very poor.

But already her life is very much better than it was. That’s what she says. The question for Fonkoze is whether that improvement will sustain itself beyond the program’s 18 months. Is CLM a short-term relief from hunger, or truly the road to a better life? If the experience in Bangladesh is any indicator, it will be very much the latter. BRAC has been able to help a high percentage of participating families there remove themselves from extreme poverty. But Haiti is Haiti. It should work here as well, but only time and experience will tell.

Liberal Education by Other Means

I was educated in a tradition that sometimes calls itself “liberal”. The word, in this instance, does not refer to the fact that my parents and grandparents were Kennedy and FDR democrats. It refers to my formal education, which was in the liberal arts. I studied some philosophy and some literature, but also some math, some political theory, some experimental science, and even some music. I insist tiresomely on prefacing each piece of my education with “some” to point to the fact that the education was not designed to make me a specialist in any particular area.

In fact, it was designed to make me free. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as a “liberal” education: because it was designed to liberate me. The motto of St. John’s College, my //alma mater//, is “I make free men from boys by means of books and a balance.” The motto comes from a time before the school admitted women, and sounds better in Latin than in English.

When I ask myself what it was designed to liberate me from, I’m left saying something like “from the shackles of ignorance.” It’s an answer that sounds dated, perhaps, but I think it holds up pretty well to closer examination.

Most of the people I work with in Haiti seem to have more urgent problems than those shackles. Not only that, but the leisure that the sort of education I received – and am very grateful for – requires is almost entirely unknown. The sort of work we undertake here together is very far removed from the seminars I attended all those years ago. But I want to say nonetheless that it’s often liberal in the very same sense that my own education was: It makes those of us engaged in it free.

Here some examples might help.

It’s back-to-school season in Haiti, as it is in the States. The most important difference is, perhaps, that many Haitian children are sitting at home waiting for their families to organize the tuition money they’ll need to send their kids to school, or the money to buy uniforms, or for some other necessity. Some children are already in school, but others will wait until October, November, or even January to get started. About 50% won’t go at all.

Ti Kèl and Mackenson started last week at the public school in Mariaman, so we got back to work on Sunday. The two of them are my neighbors, now 16. We spend Sunday mornings whenever I’m available doing math together on the blackboard on my front patio. They’re good students, but only in sixth grade. For various reasons, they both started late. We’re a little worried, because there’s a rumor going around that public high schools will no longer accept students over 15 into the seventh grade. They’re pretty confident that they’ll be able to pass the national primary school graduation exam next June, but if they can’t get into the public high school in Pétion-Ville, it may be the end of their education. Neither is in any position to pay for seven years of secondary education at a private school.

We began reviewing some of the stuff we worked on in May and June. Arithmetic with fractions, for example. We worked on all four operations. I thought it would be a good place to start because they were starting to get good with fractions last spring when we stopped. Ti Kèl aced them on his final. I saw his corrected exam. It helped him shock his entire school by coming in fourth in his class, much higher than he ever had. Mackenson, who is generally first in their class, did almost as well. He did better than Ti Kèl on other parts of the final, and so came in first once again.

But I added a twist, and it exposed the fragility of what they knew. I gave them some problems with mixed fractions, and Mackenson in particular was put off. It turned out that he, quite literally, did not know what he was doing. He remembered, for example, that to multiply fractions he need only multiply numerators and then multiply denominators, and that to divide them he need only flip the second of two fractions upside-down and then multiply, but he wasn’t clear enough about what a fraction is to be able to convert mixed fractions into simple ones – like 3 2/7 into 23/7 – much less to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them.

He was frozen, imprisoned, by a certain lack of understanding. He was able to manage well enough when he was on familiar ground, but he lacked the flexibility, the freedom, that real understanding could give him to attack problems that are partly new.

So we spent some time just talking about what fractions are, and he seem to make progress. I’ll know more about how real that progress was in the coming weeks.

I spent part of last week in Pointe des Lataniers. It’s a small fishing village on the very western corner of Lagonav, the large island across a small bay from Port au Prince. I have friends from Lataniers, and we had decided together to organize an experimental literacy center in the town.

As in most parts of Haiti, where official literacy rates are usually given at around 50%, illiteracy is a problem in Lataniers. But, also like other parts of Haiti, Lataniers has various other problems as well: access to safe drinking water, loss of fertile land to erosion and salinization, lack of schools, and more. Our goal was to help organize a literacy center that would also become an engine for community action.

The approach the center would use would be built around REFLECT, a method I’ve written about before. REFLECT is designed to help participants organize knowledge they already possess in a manner that helps them face it, and so make use of it. (See: Learning to REFLECT)

That’s exactly what I saw on Thursday. Participants spent most of class tracing a calendar on the ground as they stood in a circle. The calendar was a listing of each of the ways they make money. For each of their income-generating activities, they went month-by-month, noting when the activity in question would bring in more money, and when it would bring in less.

They made several discoveries, but one that was especially striking. They all agreed that goats bring in much more money in December than in any other month. A very well educated Haitian was with me, and he explained that the demand is higher in December because of the New Year holiday, when lots of people like to eat goat.

But the participants countered that he was missing the real point. Goats are more expensive in December because there are none to be bought. People don’t sell them. And then they explained: They sell goats when they need money. In December, they don’t need money because that’s when they sell their peanut crop. So they don’t sell goats.

As soon as they explained this, they were ready to say that it was silly. They might not need the money right at that moment, but they would be able to make much more money by selling their goats in December anyway. They said they’d do so starting this year.

It’s important to note that every one of them already knew perfectly well before the meeting that they would get more for their goats if they sold them in December. But they had never faced that knowledge in a way that enabled them to make use of it. Talking about the fact with one another, in a conversation about the problems they have earning the money they need to get by, put their own knowledge in front of them. It liberated them from the ways they habitually look at things, and so made them freer than they had been.

Bainet to Lavale

One of Fonkoze’s most successful branches is the one in Lavale, a rural town outside of the city of Jakmèl. To say that the branch is “in Lavale” is true, but it doesn’t tell the real story. The branch serves credit customers throughout a large region in southern Haiti. Credit agents on motorcycles ride over two hours to get to centers as far away as Bainet and Côte de Fer.

These photos are from a recent visit to a credit center in the hills outside of Bainet, in a very small community called Montoban.

The trip to Montoban, through the mountains around Lavale and Bainet, was beautiful.

Here is the center. It meets inside a church/schoolhouse. There are roughly 85 members, each of them a businesswoman who supports her family with the enterprise her Fonkoze loans enable her to build.

Like all Fonkoze credit centers, the one in Montoban is led by a center chief, a woman elected by her fellow members to help Fonkoze’s staff coordinate center activities. My visit was not part of a scheduled meeting, and the message that we were coming was never delivered. But she heard our motorcycles and rushed down to meet us. Within five minutes, she had procured a megaphone, and was calling her women to meet. Within 15 minutes 25 women were there. By the time we left a 45 minutes later, there were over 40 women present and others were still arriving.

Here’s the Montoban center chief, flanked by the Fonkoze staff members who serve her center: her credit agent and her education coordinator. She was pretty remarkable.

I spoke with the women about the educational programs they’re receiving right now from Fonkoze. Here’s a photo of their most recent literacy lesson up on the blackboard.

I did some interviews with participants. I spoke to Madlèn, for example.

madlèn

Here’s my write-up of what she had to say:

My name is Madlèn. I’m from Montoban, a rural area outside of Bainet. Bainet is a city on Haiti’s southern coast.

I am a businesswoman. That’s not to say that I have a shop or a store that sits in one place. My business moves. I go to Bainet to buy beans, rice, sugar, cooking oil, and the other things I sell from wholesalers. Then I bring my merchandise to the different rural markets in the area where I live.

I’ve always needed credit to make my business work, but it used to be that I borrowed from local moneylenders. They would charge 20%, 50%, or even more every month. But a couple of years ago a friend told me about Fonkoze. I joined right away, almost two years ago, and am now on my third loan. It’s for 5000 gourds [$143 U.S.]. I’m really seeing a difference in my profits since I joined Fonkoze.

When the woman we elected as chief of our credit center said there would be literacy classes, I was very excited. I never learned to read and write. I really hated having to just make a cross and leave a thumbprint when they ask me to sign my name.

So I joined the literacy class. We finished one session and are now in the middle of a second. I was so pleased when I took my last loan and signed my own name on the contract.

My children are happy to see me go to school. They’re proud that their mother is learning, and they want to help. But I like doing my homework myself. Learning to read and write is something I’m doing for myself.

I hope that I can continue learning in our credit center. I think it will help me make my business grow. Thank you Fonkoze.

Here’s her signature:
Madlènsigns_2

It is not easy for Fonkoze staff to get everywhere they serve, and Montoban was a rough ride. Here’s a short video that can give you some idea. The ride was about two hours, over mountains, across rivers, and through other difficult terrain. I’m on the back motorcycle with the credit agent. He’s shouting advice to the literacy coordinator, Manise, who’s on the front motorcycle. She’s just now learning to ride.