We have two credit centers in Mabriyòl, a two-hour ride eastward from Marigo along the main road to Belle Anse and Thiotte. The older office in Jakmèl established Fonkoze’s presence there, several years before the Marigo office opened. Jakmèl is about 45 more minutes to the west, so the existence of a Jakmèl credit center in Mabriyòl reflects how little distance from an office was considered in opening up new regions during Fonkoze’s initial phase of growth.

The two centers were originally a single center, but they flourished so successfully that it became necessary to divide them in two. Mabriyòl is a relatively populous, very rural area in the mountains above Belle Anse. It has a small, one-room health clinic and a public primary school, but little else. The population isn’t concentrated in a center of town, but spread more-or-less evenly across the hillside.

It’s hard for me to get to Mabriyòl. It’s not that it’s especially inaccessible. We have centers that are farther, harder to get to, or both. But it meets on Monday mornings. I try to spend as many Sundays as I can at home in Kaglo, and if I leave by 3:00 AM on Monday, I can get to work around 8:00. But the credit agent who works in Mabriyòl leaves our office at 6:00. Going with him requires me to spend Sunday night in Marigo, something worth doing now and again, but not every week if I don’t have to.

My first visit to Mabriyòl was a happy occasion. We were to improvise a surprise graduation ceremony for two of our borrowers. In this context, “graduation” means moving from solidarity-group credit into individual loans.

It might be hard to appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment. All solidarity-group loans start at 3000 gourds. Individual loans begin at 50,000 gourds. So the two women who were ready to take this step had managed to borrow and repay about ten loans of increasing size, over the course of five or six years, through floods, droughts, hurricanes, political upheavals, a deteriorating economic landscape, and other impediments. And they did so while living with one of the poorest regions in Haiti on one side of them and a small coastal town with only a small marketplace on the other. They worked and continue to work by traveling back and forth to Port au Prince, carrying produce in one direction, and manufactured goods in the other. Transportation in Haiti is always a challenge, but these women persevered. They are the distribution network that links their very rural community with Port au Prince, Jacmel, and the world generally.

They had just received their new, individual loans, and they are no longer required to come to meetings. They now receive their loans and make their repayments through an entirely different mechanism. But had come to the center meeting because they know they still have a role to play. They are leaders among the Mabriyòl women, both by the example that they offer and the central roles they choose to play. One was the center’s long-time elected chief. Since their center has been struggling with poor attendance and loan delinquency, they aren’t ready to simply turn it over to its new chief.

They both belong to the center in Upper Mabriyòl, and we went to the one in Lower Mabriyòl first. It’s a smaller center, but its troubles are a little more serious. I wanted to have a look. Our first step towards strengthening weak centers was to hold workshops for the centers’ chiefs. We feel, first, that they are the ones best positioned to draw women back to the centers and, second, that once attendance is regular, repayment issues will be easier to solve.

I was especially anxious for this opportunity because I hadn’t been able to attend the workshop for Mabriyòl and neighboring centers. A credit agent who had attended one that I led had had to lead it himself. So I wanted to see whether his workshop would have an effect.

The centerpiece of the workshop was our sense that center meetings were no longer either interesting or fun. They had become long and boring because entirely dominated by the mundane details of giving out loans and collecting repayments. Our twin priorities would be to quicken the repayment process by better organizing it and to create and use space within meetings for activities that are pleasant and useful to center members. The meeting in Mabriyòl had very little reimbursement scheduled, so it would mainly b a chance to see how the center chief and credit agent would use some free time.

I could hardly have been more pleased. The recently elected center chief had gone to the local health clinic to research family planning. She gave a detailed report to members of the options locally available, and then asked her fellow members for their thoughts as to whether to use planning and which ones they would prefer. The lively conversation that ensued lasted about 45 minutes. The women ranged in age from older women claiming to be interested more for their children than for themselves to young women who might have their first child – planned or unplanned – at any time. They all got involved. When the credit agent asked, in closing, what the women thought of the meeting their chief had prepared for them, they answered with loud applause. Though attendance at the meeting had been characteristically poor, more meetings like that might be the best way to draw the women in.

We then moved to Upper Mabriyòl. It meets in a public school building, right next to a Baptist church. The building is under construction. Work was going on even as we met. And the church was hosting a prayer meeting. So almost no one was ready when we arrived. Some members were preparing the prayer meeting, while others were hauling water for the masons working on the school.

We started the meeting with a very short award ceremony. We had come with certificates, congratulating Mabriyòl two graduates. The women accepted them with big smiles to the cheers of the other members present. There was not, however, much else we could do to make the meeting fun. Disbursing new credit for some of the women and completing new loan requests for others took up most of the time.

The latter process takes some time. Borrowers need to be ready for new credit, and the complexities of the special hurricane credit we are now moving out of mean that, even within a solidarity group of five women, we might find some who are ready and others who are not. A few groups had members who don’t yet have the cash on hand to repay their loans completely, but who fear holding their fellow group members back. They were hoping to make withdrawals from their savings accounts to finish repaying their loans, thus releasing themselves and their fellow group members for new credit. They themselves would then wait as they rebuilt their savings through deposits before they ask for new loan, while the other members of their group would be free to move forward.

But making withdrawals is normally difficult for the women. Credit agents are not authorized to make withdrawals in the field. They don’t keep withdrawal slips with them, nor do they keep extra cash on hand. They do not operate like roving tellers. They handle only disbursements and reimbursements of loans and savings deposits for borrowers. For members of a center as far from Marigo as Mabriyòl is access to savings is hard to get. Transportation costs to and from the office to make a withdrawal are high. They stand to lose too much of the money as a transaction cost.

So I did the following: I wrote letters authorizing Fonkoze to make savings withdrawals for reimbursement for each woman who requested one. I asked each of them to sign her letter, and then asked the new center chief to sign as witness. I would make the withdrawals in the office, and then send the receipts back to the center on the credit agent’s next visit. This would accomplish two goals: It would, on the one hand, create an above-board means of enabling women at this distant center to conveniently eliminate their debt. On the other, it would reinforce the center chief’s sense of responsibility within her center. Everyone seemed satisfied. I made the withdrawals and the reimbursements and deposited the authorizing letters in our files when I got back to Marigo.

I would have left the center with a good feeling except for a problem that I could not resolve. I met with one borrower who was the only member of her group to be ready for new credit. The others had not made much of an effort at reimbursing their previous loan at all. She was very anxious to get a new loan, and began asking the other women who were make new loan requests to let her join their group. None were willing. Whether they felt they didn’t know her well enough or knew her too well to be willing to take a risk, I can’t say. In a sense, I had to be pleased at the sign that women wanted to take membership in their groups seriously. On the other, I was sorry to see a borrower in need getting left out. I’m not sure how I can help her any time soon.

That’s pretty much the way of things these days. I spend my days, as a colleague at my home institution put it to me, seeing silver linings in cloud after cloud. Sometimes we feel progress. Our portfolio is now smaller and cleaner than it was when I arrived, but we are very far from being out of the woods.

We were down to one working motorcycle. Our credit office has three, but two were collecting dust, unusable because of various problems. With three credit agents making visits into the field every day, and some of those visits hard to accomplish without a motorcycle, we were really struggling.

So we attacked the problem in a couple of steps. The first involved repairing one of the two bad motorcycles immediately by exchanging all its bad parts for good ones in the other bad cycle. We were lucky: It turned out that they had very different problems. We thus concentrated all the bad motorcycle parts in one place, and won a second good motorcycle for ourselves. It cost nothing but a few hours of a cheap mechanic’s time and the price of a little bit of grease. It was a big step forward.

We thought of the motorcycles as we were considering what to do in Marigo.

We serve a large swath of southeastern Haiti. Our credit agents ride two or more hours from our office to get to credit centers. But one of our largest credit centers is right where the population is densest, directly across the street from us in the middle of Marigo. It has 17 solidarity groups, and some of them have relatively large loans.

It’s also one of our worst credit centers. Few of its members come to regular meetings, and the delinquency rate is high.

Our situation in Marigo might be extreme, but it is not uncommon among Fonkoze offices. Many find that they have an easier time managing more rural credit centers than they do the ones that are closest to them. It may be that women living farther from concentrations of population feel a stronger need for our services. It may be that they have deeper roots in the communities they live in and, so, that their reputations in those communities mean more to them.

In Marigo, our immediate concern is not the important theoretical question as to why rural centers tend to be stronger. It’s what we should do about one center that is in bad shape. So we decided to look more carefully at the composition of the center. It turns out to consist of two distinct groups. There are women who live and work in Marigo and others whose homes are in Marigo though they spend most of their time in Ansapit, the large market town to the east, right on the Dominican border. These latter women earn their living through border trade of various sorts.

My neighbor and landlady in Marigo, Emerit, can serve as an example. She supports eight children and two step children in three households in Haiti by buying fresh fish in Ansapit, packing it in ice, shipping it to Marigo, and selling it to buyers that come from Port au Prince and Jakmèl. It’s a big business, and it keeps her on the move.

For the most part, the Ansapit women repay their loans well, but they don’t come to center meetings. They talk about the long and expensive trip from Ansapit, and say that they can’t always make it to meetings.

Fonkoze has credit centers in Ansapit. They are run out of the office in Tyòt. So I asked the women whether it wouldn’t be better for them to take their loans right in the market where they work. But they were very hostile to the idea. Their roots, they explained are in Marigo. They are not interested in belonging to an organization whose roots are in Ansapit or Tyòt. More importantly, their children are in Marigo. The trips they make for reimbursement meetings allow them to see their kids and to leave them the money they need to feed themselves.

Emerit comes to Marigo every couple of weeks and whips her house into shape. She makes sure that the cupboards are stocked, and provides a couple of slaps and a couple of words of encouragement to children who seem to require them. She repays her loans on time, but attends meetings irregularly.

The Marigo women, however, are another story. Most of them neither repay their loans nor come to meetings. As we look more and more careful at the women in this group, we’re finding that several of them are without any commerce at all. This happens occasionally, especially when new credit agents are desperate to recruit the minimum number of borrowers they are expect register during their probationary period before they become full members of the staff. If a branch manager is not careful to control the agents’ work, they can slip into taking shortcuts, like offering credit to unqualified borrowers. The consequences can be serious both for the borrowers and for Fonkoze.

As we’ve watched the condition of the Marigo center degenerate, we’ve worried more and more that we would lose our own backyard entirely. We felt we had to do something to establish a foothold. So with the management of our motorcycles as our model, we went to work.

We decided to split the center in two. We would put all the solidarity groups that function well into a new credit center we would create with them, leaving all the problem loans and borrowers in a single center. This would mean having a special center, whose members would be, almost exclusively, women who live and work in Ansapit. For them, we would make a special arrangement: We’d ask them to make only one trip to Marigo per month, but would then meet with them on two consecutive days. The first would be their reimbursement meeting. The second would be the discussion. If they could show a commitment to this new structure, we would commit ourselves to giving them priority service.

The women loved the idea. Both because it promised to get them the loans they want more quickly and more effectively and because it would enable them to disassociate themselves from a center that they have grown ashamed of.

Wednesday, the new center had its inaugural meeting. Attendance was almost perfect, there was a hotly contested election of a new center chief, and a vote to give themselves a new name. I am optimistic.

In the case of the motorcycles, we were left with two that worked well and one in an extreme state of disrepair. But by investing in some new parts, and in some more of the mechanic’s time, we were able to get the third one up and running. The strategy thus proved a great success.

In the case of the Marigo center, or now centers, we have much work to do. We will need to invest a lot of time, going door-to-door, mainly on our days off, to start piecing the problem center back together again.

It will be hard. But we won’t be able to claim real success until we have two good credit centers in our neighborhood. We cannot afford to simply cast the troubled center adrift. Doing so would be bad for the borrowers it serves and bad for Fonkoze as well.

The key to straightening out the portfolio here in Marigo is to straighten out the solidarity that Fonkoze’s credit depends on. Fonkoze loans require neither co-signers nor collateral in any traditional sense. Borrowers just deposit 15% of the value of their loan value into their own savings accounts, and agree to serve as guarantors for one another.

That is, a group of five women takes a loan together. The five are called a “solidarity group.” Their loan is then divided among them in portions they’ve agreed to in advance. Fonkoze counts on them to help and encourage one another, even to pressure one another to ensure repayment. When the whole loan is repaid, the group as a whole becomes eligible for a new loan.

This has led to the creation of a precise new meaning for the phrase “showing solidarity,” or its Creole equivalent. At Fonkoze, the phrase has come to mean contributing towards paying off someone else’s debt. By helping with your fellow member’s repayment when she has a problem she can’t solve by herself, you can facilitate on-time repayment of your group’s loan and, so, ensure that you get your next new loan on time.

At least that is how it is supposed to work. And it does work that way in the many Fonkoze offices that function well. Borrowers can have all sorts of problems that we barely hear about because members handled them through internal loans within their solidarity groups or their centers.

It doesn’t work that way in Marigo, however. Fonkoze members here have shown a hard reluctance to solidarity. They don’t want to help each other out. I was at a meeting at the center in Ravin Nòman, and we were talking some about solidarity. One of the women said, “My mother carried me for nine months, and I wouldn’t pay off her loan. So I’m not paying anyone else’s either.”

A striking sentiment. I admire the honesty. But examples of the problems it creates are likewise striking. Our most distant center is in Koray Lamòt. The first time I visited it with Jean Claude, its credit agent, one of the members was 20 gourds short on her repayment. 20 gourds is a pittance for most of our borrowers, less than 50 cents. Normally, her solidarity group would handle that easily with an internal loan. But none of the other four members of her group showed up at the meeting, and the members of the credit center who were present wouldn’t come through for her. Since she wouldn’t have another chance to pay off the 20-gourd balance until Jean Claude returned in two weeks, she was stuck with a 120-gourd lateness penalty. Ridiculous.

So we don’t really think we can repair the Marigo loan portfolio unless we can recreate at least part of the protection against inevitable bumps in the road that solidarity is supposed to provide. But it’s not easy. It’s like pouring spilled milk back into the carton. Generally, you just wipe it up instead.

And the way the Marigo portfolio has been managed for about a year only makes it harder. Early in 2008, Fonkoze decided to try an experiment in several branches, Marigo among them, where the repayment rate on loans was poor. We would try to address the needs both of borrowers who were falling behind in their repayments and of the members of their groups who were ready to take new loans by separating them, on paper, into distinct groups. A solidarity group of five members might thus be divided into a couple of loan contracts: one contract restructuring debt for those whose loans were delinquent and another contract getting a new loan to one, two, or three members whose loans were fully repaid. I wrote about the initiative at the time. (See: New Structure.)

One key aspect to the approach was supposed to be that the separation was to be on paper only. Solidarity groups would retain their importance. Groups of five would remain groups of five.

In Marigo, however, this part of the message got somehow lost. When Fonkoze’s more capable members discovered that we were giving them new loans on the basis of their individual performance, they understood themselves to be receiving individual loans. For many of them, this meant solidarity be damned. Every woman for herself. And, of course, for her family.

It’s understandable enough. Though they entered Fonkoze solidarity groups with friends and neighbors they had chosen by themselves, their goal had not been neighborhood development. They had joined to improve their own lot. They are businesswomen trying to increase their earnings, fighting to lift their families out of poverty, and are right to choose the route that seems to them the quickest. We tell them that if they help their friend today, she will be able to help them tomorrow, but they tend to be so unfailingly optimistic that it’s hard to convince them that they might someday need the help. Even when the evidence seems clear. Haitians say, “We live in hope.”

And the problem that these new individual-seeming loans create is even greater than one might imagine. In the old groups of five, each woman put up 15% of her loan as collateral. If one woman has a disastrous inability to repay, her loan could be written off, and Fonkoze could take her savings and the collateral from the other four women to offset the loss. Since the percentage of write-offs has tended to be very low, Fonkoze had generally found itself to be well protected. But these new loans are individual on paper, and so they are secured by only the one woman’s 15%. Losses can thus be quite significant.

The core issue for management is thus to take steps towards recovering as much of the principle of solidarity as can be saved. We need to help the women see the advantages of solidarity and to get as many women back into the groups that offer Fonkoze the protection it needs.

Ideally, I’d like to meet with each solidarity group individually, but there are hundreds of them. So I have to attack the problem another way.

I decided to begin my approach by acting in the sphere where it is easiest for me to have the biggest effect and move outward from there. I mean: I would start by working with the three credit agents whom I’m with more or less every day. I would move together with them to re-educate the center chiefs, the elected leaders of the forty or so centers the Marigo branch serves. Finally, the credit agents would work with the center chiefs to re-educate solidarity-group leaders and the groups themselves.

The work with credit agents has been proceeding well. I’ve been spending almost all my time with them since I came to Marigo, and it appears to have paid off. They had become undisciplined in their work. Just to cite two examples. First, they had ceased entirely to collect penalties for late payments. In the three months since I arrived, they’ve collected almost four times the penalties collected in any other branch.

Second, they had been allowing borrowers’ loan amounts to increase much too significantly from loan to loan. A member who would get five-six thousand for her second loan would get 12,000 or more for her third. Members were getting more credit, much more credit, than they could manage, and that was pushing them almost directly into trouble. They latest round of loan amounts they’ve proposed have shown only small increases, and these increases have only come to borrowers who have closely respected the conditions under which they get their loans.

More importantly, when I see the agents with our member/borrowers, they are firm but friendly. They listen. They advocate for the women in front of me. They show every evidence of wanting to do things right.

Our next step is to begin re-educating the credit agents’ most important partners, the women whom credit centers elect as their chiefs. This work has begun already, but will intensify and accelerate over the next month with meeting that the agents and I organize for groups of five-ten chiefs at a time. After that, the agents and chiefs will work with group leaders.

So the work of putting the branch’s work on a stronger, more orderly foundation is well under way. But the goal is not to set up a branch that seems to operate well, but one whose members make sustainable progress out of poverty. Their progress is what will eventually make the branch’s operations sustainable, and this will in turn enable us to serve more women in the long run. And it is much too early to say whether the apparent results of our work are leading to real results in the impact we have on women’s lives.

But, we live in hope.

It’s more than puzzling. It’s a little concerning.

I was in Chodri on Friday, a very rural area, high in the mountains on the way to Belans. It’s just above the main road, where it starts to turn away from Segen. The credit center in Chodri has the typical problems: Attendance at regular meetings has been poor, and payments aren’t coming in on time.

At the same time, it’s a center that I have hope for. The center’s elected chief never appeared to really understand what Fonkoze expects from her, but she seems to be getting clearer and seems motivated to take her share of the responsibility for turning her center around. She’s beginning to take a hard line with women who are late or absent, changing them a small penalty. Moïse, the credit agent I was with, and I were a little late ourselves. We had rushed there from another center meeting that lasted too long. And she made us pay the penalty as well. She was active during the meeting, intervening in the conversations between Moïse and the other members, explaining him to them or them to him. Attendance at the meeting was the best we’ve seen in the center in some time, and she could tell us where the absent members were. And the reimbursement was better than we’ve been seeing in Chodri as well.

But I was disturbed to discover that a number of the women didn’t know exactly how much they owed. They didn’t even seem sure of the regular repayment amount. They would hand Moïse a sum of money, but when he would ask them how much they owed they would tell him that he was the one who could answer that question. “Se ou menm ki konnen.” They trust their credit agent implicitly, and that’s encouraging in a sense.

But it’s not what we’re really looking for. Borrowers who will be successful in the long run are women who will manage their own affairs closely and stick up for themselves when they think Fonkoze is wrong. And sometimes Fonkoze is wrong.

I met Josane in Fonjannwèl, a populous coffee-growing region on the way up the mountain from Marigo towards Segen. We have three credit centers there, with something like 120 members.

Josane was one of several women who had made a special appointment with their credit agent so they could pay off their loan a little early and apply for a new one. Moïse went patiently through their files with them, one at a time, taking their repayments and confirming that they were ready to make their request.

When he got to Josane, he found a problem. Her file showed that she had been late with two repayments, and she had paid a lateness penalty each time. Since our procedure is to collect penalties before repayments, each of those two repayments had thus been incomplete. What’s more, the resultant overdue balance continued to accumulate lateness charges. When she came once more with what she thought she owed, she was still left with a balance, so she wasn’t ready to apply for new credit. Moïse explained the situation to her patiently, and she was disappointed, but she said she understood.

She was determined to get a new loan quickly, so she said she would come to the office the next day to pay off her balance. She would then be able to make her loan request the next time Moïse visited her center.

She was good to her word. The next day we saw her in the office indeed. I greeted her as soon as she arrived, but then went about my business. My attention was drawn, however, to an argument that ensued between her and the teller. The teller was explaining how much Josane owed, but Josane didn’t want to believe it. Since I had spoken to her the day before, I took the file from the teller, asked Josane to sit down with me, and then prepared to start explaining.

That’s when I made a discovery. Josane had signed a 12-month contract, but when her previous credit agent had filled in her loan amount he had calculated it as though she would repay in six months. Perhaps he did so because she had announced her determination from the start to do just that, and so get her new loan more quickly, but it was a big mistake.

She began her program of double repayments. A remarkable achievement. The sacrifices she had to make were very real. She was dealing with a situation that was difficult to start with. She lost not only her business but all her livestock in last year’s hurricanes. She lost a harvest and some of her farmland as well. So she would need to cut her expenses drastically to make her repayments on her already-reduced income.

And she wasn’t willing to trim her budget in any old way. She herself can not read, but is all the more determined to keep paying her children’s school tuition. She has six, and the oldest are mid-way though high school. The one place she found to cut expenses was her food bill. And as she explained to me how hard it had been, she lifted her shirt to show how thin she had become.

Her effort was heroic, but barely enough. She fell a little behind her accelerated schedule, but she was still well ahead of what she owed to Fonkoze. But since her repayment amount was wrong, her credit agent and our teller thought she was behind. They assessed the lateness fees that made things worse for her.

She had been listening to our explanations patiently, without really understanding them. It wasn’t until she really insisted that we explain everything to her that we saw that we were wrong.

She was quiet and polite through the whole conversation. That’s not always the case with our members. They sometimes get angry and loud. Even when we are right and they are wrong. But we continually encourage them to get as angry as they feel they need to get. Their willingness to insist on her rights is of great value both to them and to Fonkoze.

Here are some photos I took around Fonkoze credit centers in Ravin Pal, a fertile agricultural area of Segen, the most important town in the mountains above Marigo. Fonkoze has two large credit centers in Ravin Pal, three others elsewhere in Segen, and several more nearby.

The trace of blue on the right is the Caribbean. I took the picture looking east towards Belle Anse.

Heading north from Ravin Pal takes you farther up into the mountains. There’s a pine forest there. Several of the members of the center in Ravin Pal live in or beyond the forest.

This is not the ravine that Ravin Pal was named for. In fact, this one appeared after a recent rain turned a natural drainage ditch into a torrent.

The building, which is both a school and a church, does not look long for this world. Neither does the house we met in, which is just through the trees on the right.

But even getting to Ravin Pal, and the other centers in the mountain, will be increasingly challenging. Recent rains cut the main road in two by washing out what had been a bridge.

The destruction of this road, which is the principal route from Marigo to the east and, more importantly, from the mountainous region above Marigo, through Marigo to Jakmèl and Port au Prince, will have hard consequences for many Fonkoze members. Crops that they were counting on shipping to Port au Prince will probably spoil in their hands. On the way up the hill towards Ravin Pal, we saw large baskets of oranges beginning to show signs of rot and mold.

And the rainy season is just getting underway.

Nan Kwende is almost a two-hour hike from the crossroads at Nan Otè. This time of year, it’s through mud and wet, slippery rocks. Closer to Nan Otè the mud is orangey-red. As you hike up, down, and along the ridge it turns brown and then black. The farther you go, the thicker the vegetation. There’s little sign of the deforestation that has left most pf Haiti bare once you approach the first stream. And by the time you cross the second and, so begin to near Nan Kwende, you recognize the prominence of large trees that is typical of regions, like this one, that produce a lot of coffee.

Nan Otè itself is a little over an hour by motorcycle from Marigo. So the trip to get to the credit center in Nan Kwende is one of the longest ones we make. It would probably be the longest, except that Plantiyon is another half-hour walk – down a steep slope, across a waterfall, and back up the other side – beyond it. Jean Bellande, the credit agent who serves these centers, is not someone who needs to look for ways to squeeze additional exercise into his life.

Most of the women who belong to these centers have small businesses that move from rural market to rural market. There’s a weekly market in Nan Otè, another up the hill and along the ridge after Plantiyon, and a third that’s almost a straight shot up the mountain in Kajak. Few of them can make it without wandering from market to market, because the footpaths that crisscross around their homes have too little traffic to create a client base.

Most use their credit to buy sacks of this – beans, rice, sugar or flour – or cases of that – tomato paste, cooking oil, laundry soap, or shampoo – that they can then sell in smaller units. It is a steady income, though not a big one. It’s a good way to complement the less regular, riskier business of farming that they all engage in as well. If they manage their money well – which means discipline, but also a lot of luck – they can invest some profit in livestock to create a third independent income stream.

When they have crops to sell, they load them onto their heads, and hike past Kajak all the way to Kenscoff, the market town that overlooks Pétion-Ville and Port au Prince. That’s a six-seven hour hike for someone who walks fast, and the women do it with loads so heavy that they don’t have the arm strength to lift them onto or off of their heads. If they want to stop for a rest, or even just need to go to the bathroom, they have to wait for someone to come along and give them a hand.

They are tough, dynamic, hard-working businesswomen. Exactly the sort who make the most promising members of Fonkoze.

And their credit centers show a lot of promise as well, even if they are not yet where they need to be. Attendance has been steadily increasing in both centers. Delinquency in Plantiyon is minimal. It’s much higher in Nan Kwende, but appears to be sinking there as well.

But one key to putting the centers on solid ground will be making center meetings into useful investments of the women’s time. Though the women appear to recognize more and more that Fonkoze really does require their attendance, we cannot yet claim that this requirement is more than an imposition.

They understand the importance of attendance for Fonkoze. We always explains that, especially in centers that are carrying a delinquency, we need to stay in close contact with members so that we can remain hopeful that they will eventually pay their debts. But we believe that these meetings should be even more important to our members than to us. And most of that importance is still lost on them, because the meetings are not functioning the way they should. They are not yet serving our members well.

This is the centerpiece of the challenge I face in Marigo. My assignment to Marigo follows from a double hypothesis. Fonkoze supposes, first, that one can straighten out even a malfunctioning office like Marigo by fixing its credit centers and, second, that the key to fixing those credit centers is to make their meetings engaging and productive for the members who participate. That is why putting a classroom teacher with no management or banking experience, but some experience in popular education, in charge of an ailing branch seemed as though it might just be a good idea. My primary charge has been to help credit agents learn to run good meetings. The hope is that, once that’s done, much of the rest of the office’s problems will take care of themselves.

But the road to establishing the right ambiance in center meetings puts one squarely in the middle of a catch-22. What can make a meeting useful to the members who participate is if they have the chance to talk with one another about the common problems they face. Creating space for such dialogue means, in turn, freeing the meetings of the time-consuming work of chasing don delinquent loans that dominates them. We think, however, that fighting delinquency requires the very conversations we are hard-pressed to hold.

The centers in Plantiyon and Nan Kwende illustrate the problem well. Jean Bellande and I left our office at 6:00 AM for a 9:30 meeting in Plantiyon, and we arrived a few minutes late. Few of the women were there to greet us. They don’t have watches or clocks. In many other centers, women wait for the sound of a credit agent’s motorcycle to start to assemble, but Jean Bellande walks to Plantiyon.

So by the time the meeting got started, it was 10:30. It was a reimbursement meeting, not a discussion. So things should all be pretty quick. The center has six solidarity groups, so all Jean Bellande is supposed to do is take the reimbursement from the leader of each of those six groups, and do it under the watchful eye of the center’s elected chief. The group leaders should have already collected repayments from individual members, and have an accurate account of any reimbursements that are short. If there are reimbursements that are a little but short, Fonkoze shouldn’t even know about them. The women are supposed to take care of that with small internal loans between themselves. This can be harder with bigger problems, but there the center chief can step in. In any case, even if a payment issue cannot be resolved right away, everything should happen pretty quickly, because the credit agent only needs to deal with group leaders and their center chief.

But the system can’t work if the women don’t know how to manage these responsibilities. The credit agent can have to talk to individual women, and it takes a lot of time.

In Nan Kwende, where there are many more members than Plantiyon and more delinquency as well, the situation is much worse. Things started off badly because we ourselves were late. We had spent more time in Plantiyon than we should have needed to. Nan Kwende has a promising but very new center chief, so most of the work she should have been doing had to be handled by Jean Bellande instead. Dealing with the problems of the members of nine disorganized solidarity groups is frustrating and time-consuming. Every delinquent borrower has a story to tell, and you want to listen to them all.

The visit to Nan Kwende was not a scheduled reimbursement meeting. It was supposed to be a discussion. But as long as women have late payments and penalties to pay, discussion has to take a back seat. We were there for a couple of hours. It tried Jean Bellande’s patience and the women’s patience as well.

But there are encouraging signs. Center chiefs in both centers seem anxious to assert more control, and we have time scheduled in the next month to give them some of the additional training they need. Reimbursements in both centers are coming in at an accelerating pace, even if they are still doing so more slowly than they should. And the loud and angry arguments between individual borrowers seem entirely without hostility. Jean Bellande recognizes that the women are defending their interests, and they recognize that he’s just doing his job. The loudest and angriest borrower he fought with in Nan Kwende caressed his head fondly as she send good-bye at the meeting’s close.

So we can’t pretend to say much about results we’ve achieved in almost three months in Marigo. But we can hope that the signs of a comfortable and serious relationship between Fonkoze’s Marigo members and Fonkoze, signs we see at meetings almost every day, point to a future that is bright. If we can help center chiefs, groups leaders, and Fonkoze’s credit staff manage the time they spend together more efficiently, they can make more of that time as well.

But here, too, time is anything but on our side. Members are increasingly willing to come to centers because we say they must, but it won’t last. We’ll need to sell them on the value of the meetings before their tolerance runs out.

The first sign that something was decidedly right about the credit center in Mablanch was evident the moment we arrived.

Mablanch is one of the most distant centers that our Marigo office serves. It’s an extremely rural, agricultural region in the mountains overlooking Belans, the isolated coastal town to the east of Marigo. A fast motorcycle needs about 90 minutes to get to the path that turns off from the main road to head up to Mablanch. The path is steep, winding, and rocky. A lesser driver than Moïse, the credit agent I accompanied, would be in for trouble. As it is, the cycle slipped out from under us a couple of times – there’s been a lot of rain – but Moïse was up to the challenge.

It is also the strongest of the Marigo branch’s nearly forty credit centers. It has about seven solidarity groups, and a little over thirty members. The members there are 100% up-to-date with their repayments, and center meeting attendance is, if not perfect, at least very good.

When we got Mablanch, the women who belong to the center had already gathered on the patio where the meeting was going to take place. There were a half-dozen assorted men and boys on the patio as well, chatting with the women and with each other. But the minute Moïse and I showed up, the women sent the men away. A few of the older men left immediately, without being told. Then the women politely but firmly told the others they’d have to go. These women were distinctly in charge of their center.

Fonkoze works towards developing the necessary underpinnings of a democratic economy in Haiti. That means providing the poor with the financial services – and other accompanying services – they need to improve their own livelihoods. But a crucial aspect of Fonkoze’s mission is that it works especially with and for Haiti’s women.

We often explain this by saying that, in typical Haitian households, especially in poor households, women end up with an ultimate responsibility for seeing their children clothed, fed, educated, and otherwise cared for. Many households have men that contribute, even significantly, but typical Haitian gender roles leave women with some money in their hands – whether they earn it through their own work or receive it from their partner – and the responsibility to turn that money into all that their family needs. So, Fonkoze can support the progress of whole families most directly by dealing with women.

But that’s only part of the story. In Haiti, as elsewhere, women live with men on very unequal terms. This is, in part, a consequence of Haiti’s poverty, but it is also a cause.

Fonkoze has learned a lot about this, for example, from its experience with the poorest of the poor, whom it serves with Chemen Lavi Miyò, an 18-month program designed especially to combat extreme poverty. The women in that program start with no income-generating assets of any kind – no land, no goats, no chickens, no small commerce – and are living on as little as 50 cents per day. It is not unusual for them to have seven, eight, or nine children, acquired with multiple different fathers, because they have sought, by joining themselves to one man after another, to find someone who’ll help them support their kids. Instead of support, they end up with additional children to fend for on their own, and their poverty only intensifies.

Even less extreme examples are striking enough. I attended a ceremony held in Boukankare for women who were graduating from Fonkoze’s Ti Kredi program, the one designed for those better off than Chemen Lavi Miyò members, but not strong enough to enter into standard solidarity-group credit.

The main speaker was one of the graduates, and you can find her speech on youtube.

http://youtu.be/otfP4yzSEOw

Her central message is clear: Women love Fonkoze for helping them escape the humiliation they are subject to in their lives with men.

So a second reason Fonkoze has for prioritizing women in its work is that the world, and Haiti within it, is sexist, and justice requires that women are able to establish their own independent sources of income.

But it’s not easy. There is no easy way, for example, for me to replace Moïse with a woman to work with the credit centers he serves. The Marigo branch can count itself fortunate to have one woman on staff who rides a motorcycle well and can get to the least accessible credit centers to work with members. Her name is Judithe, and she supervises Fonkoze’s educational programs for us. But such women are hard to find in Haiti. So though our tellers are women, all our credit agents are men. Fonkoze has very few women credit agents at its 40 offices throughout Haiti.

And when Moïse arrives at even a strong credit center like the one in Mablanch, they treat him with all the traditional gestures of respect we show for those we view as more important than ourselves, even though there are those among the women more than old enough to be the twenty-something Moïse’s mother. He sits in a comfortable chair, while they sit on benches or stones walls. They call him “ajan”, or agent, turning his job title into a title of respect. They tell one another to shut up whenever he opens his mouth. It’s a problem that we will have to fight to overcome.

But if only it was the only problem of domination by men that we face, we be in pretty good shape. Though it’s probably the most pervasive form of domination we see, it might be the least grave.

I recently wrote of a man I called Jean. He attends meetings at a center in the Belè neighborhood of Segen, making repayments for his two daughters, who have loans in their names. It is now clear that the girls never had access to credit at all, that they don’t even have businesses, but that their father was simply using their names to gain access to credit he’s not entitled to. At the last Belè meeting he informed me that he would be withdrawing his girls from the credit program at the end of their current loan, and he spent a lot of time going over and over his reasons. When some of the women at the meeting asked him to leave so that they could take care of their business, he blew up at them. He informed them that they have no right to tell him to leave, that he in fact can tell them to leave because he has a position of authority in the church that let’s the women meet in its building. And for all I know, he can just cut of access to the space whenever he wants. Most of the women, in any case, seemed to feel they had to put up with his boorishness, even if they complained to me about it once he finally did leave.

And Jean is by no means the worst of the worst. On Wednesday, I visited a very remote center in an area called Kajak. Kajak is high in the mountains, beyond Segen, at the entrance to one of Haiti’s national forests. The women who belong to that center walk hours to get there. Many of them live closer to Pétion-Ville, on the other side of the mountain, than they do to Marigo. Most sell produce in the markets in Kenscoff, Pétion-Ville, and Port au Prince, with side businesses in the little rural markets near their homes.

Their credit center was established by Fonkoze with the help of a community leader named Dickenson. He introduced the women to Fonkoze’s credit agent, and that’s where his participation, his leadership, should have stopped.

But the reality is that he is much closer to the women than Fonkoze can hope to be, and he has used that fact to his own profit.

We spoke with a couple of dozen of the women at length on Wednesday, and learned that Dickenson had been assessing them various fees in exchange for their participation in Fonkoze. They paid him a registration fee and a fee for each new loan they received. Those who came to Marigo to receive hurricane credit, who needed help badly enough to make the long and expensive trip, had to deal with Dickenson first. He arranged transportation – for a high fee. He served them a meal on the way – an expensive one. And he charged them a fixed price for the credit Fonkoze gave them. We knew none of this at the time.

What’s worse, he began actually collecting reimbursements, promising to turn the money over to Fonkoze. And the money remained in his hands. So, many of the women are carrying debt that they believe they’ve paid.

It’s a mess. If we can straighten it out at all, it’s going to take time. And even if we recuperate some of our losses, it is unclear whether we can continue to serve these women, as badly as they need us, because we don’t know how to prevent a scoundrel like Dickenson from preying on them and us.

But helping women take control must remain a priority, even if we consider only our own operation. It is surely no coincidence that the best-functioning credit center we have in Marigo is the one in Mablanch, where the women have the largest measure of control.

I try not to be naïve. There is more to the inequalities that women suffer every day than the unequal economic conditions that structure their lives. But helping women develop their own income stream seems like a necessary and significant first step in the right direction.

Chrismise is a former member of a solidarity group called “Dye la”. That means “God is present,” and it’s a none-too-unusual name for a five-woman solidarity group. Hers had been part of Fonkoze from 2005 through the end of 2007. They were members of a credit center in the Belè neighborhood of Segen, the agricultural market town in the mountains above Marigo. The center had been established by the large but distant Fonkoze office in Jacmel even before the Marigo branch was opened, but it was transferred to the much closer office in Marigo at the beginning of 2007.

I’m not sure why she had dropped out of credit. But she had come to the meeting to speak with me about re-joining Fonkoze. I said what I always say in such instances: I would go back to office and look at her file. If everything looked good, I could arrange for her to visit a credit center – there are now centers a good deal closer to her home than Segen – and see about getting her back into our program.

We were speaking in front of the Belè center – we had both arrived early for the meeting – when a passing woman muttered under her breath that she wouldn’t take credit from Fonkoze. Chrismise stopped her, and asked her why. She replied that she was afraid of debt. Women that borrow money just get themselves into trouble, she explained.

Chrismise answered that it all depends. Credit does become a problem for some women, she explained. Generally, they are women who borrow money and then put it somewhere other than into their business. Either they feed their household or buy new clothes. They don’t make money, and so they can’t repay their loan. Soon enough, they are left with a debt that they can’t manage.

Then she told her own story. She had used 2000 gourds of her first Fonkoze loan – the loan was for 3000 gourds or about $75 right now – to buy four bags of cabbage seeds. She and her husband planted, tended, and harvested the crop, and she sold it for 6000 gourds. Meanwhile, she was investing the other thousand gourds into her business. By her second loan, she had made enough money to buy a calf. It grew up, and had a calf of its own. She was able to sell the two of them for almost 15,000 gourds. “Even if Fonkoze doesn’t take me back,” she concluded, “I will never say that Fonkoze has done nothing for me.”

There is a problem with her story, though. Fonkoze’s loans are for commerce. Though one might hear a lot of talk about the importance of national production, talk that is true enough, the most reliable way for poor Haitians to develop a consistent and growing source of income is commerce, buying and selling in the marketplace.

Haiti and its limited infrastructure have yet to produce a Sam Walton. The market women who travel back and forth between the cities and the towns, and between the towns and the countryside, are the only distribution network this country has. They add significant value to the goods they sell just by getting them to where someone wants to buy them, and their profit margins are high.

What’s more, sales can be relatively steady throughout the year. There is some seasonal variation, and many effective market women will shift businesses several times a year to respond to those changes, but their income is much more constant than farm income can be. Farmers can go months without selling anything.

And though commerce entails risks – bad weather, traffic accidents, thievery, an occasional bad purchase – those risks are nothing compared to the ones that farmers face. Haiti’s deteriorated and deteriorating environment leaves crops exposed to frequent drought and frequent floods. Rain or wind on the wrong day can eliminate a bean harvest by stripping of fragile buds. Pests of various sorts can ruin a good crop. A couple of years ago, to cite one example, a bumper crop of pumpkins in my area was destroyed by a bumper crop of rats.

Fonkoze does not know how to work with borrowers who have no steady income. Monthly repayments require regular sales and regular profits. And it has no resources to help borrowers manage the risks inherent in farming. So we generally just insist that loans be used for commerce.

But that insistence hasn’t taken root in Segen, and the consequences are as one would predict: We have some borrowers who have managed to steer themselves through the hazards on all sides of them, and a lot who haven’t. The delinquency on loans in May, as the women wait for harvests in June and July, is high. And that delinquency will be expensive for women who’ll have substantial lateness charges when they finally do repay.

I’ll cite just one example, an extreme one perhaps, just to illustrate how hard things can be. Dieula is a member of the center with a good repayment record. She came to yesterday’s meeting unhappy about her growing debt. She is not used to falling behind. She made almost three full payments on her current loan on schedule, but that leaves her almost two repayments behind. She wept as she told her story in the center.

The crop she planted last summer was washed away by the hurricanes. She tried to make up for the loss by buying some sacks of peas that she would send by truck for sale in Port au Prince. But the men working the truck loaded sacks and sacks of cabbages on top of her more fragile peas. The truck was slowed by heavy rains, and by the time she got her load to Port au Prince it was unsellably rotten. So she went back home, took the last four turkeys that she had saved from the storms, and loaded them onto a basket that she carried on her head for the eight or nine hours it takes to walk to Pétion-Ville.

When she arrived, she began walking the streets, looking for customers. Suddenly, she felt a blow to the back of her head. She turned around and watched in horror as men claiming to work for the Pétion-Ville mayor’s office killed her turkeys and threw them into the back of a truck. The mayor of Pétion-Ville is trying to clean up the streets. She seems to believe that market women are a big part of the problem. Her strategy has opened them up to all sorts of violence and theft.

Dieula wandered around downtown Pétion-Ville until she found her brother, who sells shaved ice in the streets, and she borrowed the money she needed to get back home. Her loss was total.

Fonkoze will need to find a way to work more effectively with women like the ones in Segen or we will have to prepare for the losses that their losses entail. We could insist that we do not provide loans for agriculture, but the genie is, in a sense, already out of the bottle.

Sunday the 19th was election day. Haitians voted on replacements for the senators whose terms ended back in January. The day passed with hardly a hitch, except in one part of Haiti. Unless non-participation counts as a hitch. Few Haitians chose to vote.

As I spoke yesterday with Manita, the election was on her mind. “I wish I could have voted for Fonkoze,” she said. “They’re the ones who actually help me.” She went on to explain how Fonkoze’s Hurricane Credit had enabled her to keep her business alive.

Manita belongs to a credit center in Bwanèf. It’s at the end of a 45-minute hike along a winding narrow path. You go up and a couple of slopes, cross two streams, and pass a lovely waterfall that empties into a series of rocky pools. It’s a tough walk. And just getting to the mouth of that path takes another half-hour on a fast motorcycle.

Manita sells fried snacks at a small stand right where the path branches off from the main road. There are two primary schools nearby, and when one or the other is letting children go, her stand swarms with little customers. They seem to like her work.

She had borrowed 6000 gourds from Fonkoze last June. That’s about $150. It was a six-month loan, her second with Fonkoze. She made her first two payments, but in August and September the storms were shutting down the local economy. By October, she was having real trouble. She was left with a balance of about 2200 gourds, and little sense how she would repay it.

Fonkoze took that balance and re-lent it to her without interest. We added a new loan, for another 6000 gourds, that was also interest-free. Her total debt was thus about 8200 gourds, more than she had ever managed in a single loan to that point, but it was all interest-free and she’d have twelve months to pay it back.

She points to that loan as the crucial assistance that enabled her to get her business back on its feet. Manita is starting to flourish again. She makes her payment two at a time, because she’s determined to repay her loan in six months and apply for a new and larger one.

But many of the borrowers in the area are having a much harder time. The area around Marigo is one of those hardest hit by the hurricanes that tore through Haiti last year. Floods and landslides destroyed whole communities. Fonkoze’s borrowers were badly damaged. They lost their businesses as their merchandise was swept away.

Those who did not lose their merchandise immediately continued to be at great risk of losing it in the aftermath. Both the main route between Marigo and Jakmèl and the mountain route from Segen to Pétion-Ville and Port au Prince became treacherous. The mountain route in particular, which winds through a sparsely populated national forest, was closely watched by robbers, preying on the market women depend upon it.

But even women who did not lose their merchandise, could lose their business. Their neighbors’ suddenly increased poverty left them without a client base. Sales plummeted. Many borrowers who made a first repayment were left struggling to make a second and a third as their hoped-for income failed to materialize. Those who started repaying best could be at greatest risk if repayments prevented them from leaving sufficient capital in their business to ensure its on-going operation.

And there’s another aspect as well. Repaying loans is never easy for Fonkoze borrowers. They are poor. They lack the safety nets that many of us in the States and elsewhere are accustomed to. Their livelihoods are fragile. They are rarely more than a prolonged sickness or a death in the family or an accident of whatever sort away from losing what they have.

I wrote recently about a man I called Paul, and his situation illustrates the point. (See: DealingwithMen.) Many successful Fonkoze borrowers count on their businesses to a substantial degree, but not for everything. They farm. They raise animals. They might do odd jobs. Or they may have husbands or partners that do something to earn extra income.

But the hurricanes wiped out crops and swept away livestock. Families that had been able to solve occasional business problems by selling a goat or a sack of sweet potatoes, had more and more serious problems in their businesses and few or no resources to fall back upon. All the little problems they have had were leading them straight to delinquency. It’s a tough situation.

We can help them by re-writing their loan contracts, giving them more time to repay, but so far not one of the women I have suggested that to has accepted. They do want to see their progress toward their next loan slowed, and they remain optimistic that something will soon go right for them and enable them to get caught up.

The wisdom of such optimism is hard to see. Women who are carrying growing delinquencies regularly point out that “nou pat konn bay pwoblèm.” That means “we haven’t caused problems in the past.” It’s their way of saying that they always dependably repaid their loans. They recognize that something has changed, but not clearly enough to draw what appears to me to be the most reasonable conclusion, that they need to restructure their debt. And I am reluctant to impose a solution that the women do not want. For now, I can only keep talking to them and make sure they know we will be ready to address their problems whenever they themselves are.

Edeline had provided one of the most memorable scenes of my first visit to Djomond. She is a young woman, probably in her twenties, who said that her business is in Ansapit, a Haitian market town on the Dominican border. Ansapit is, together with its Dominican twin city, an important center of trade.

What made Edeline so memorable was the way she screamed with rage and despair as I made it clear to the members of the Djomond credit center that I would be charging all the women who were late with their reimbursements the standard lateness fee of ten gourds per day. They had known about the fee, but the Marigo staff had become so lax about it that members like Edeline had come to see it as an empty threat.

Edeline’s response was filmable. I don’t mean to take it lightly. I cannot judge whether it was her sincere, heartfelt reaction to what was for her very bad news or a theatrical performance aimed at getting me to relent. But she yelled and cried and appealed to everyone within earshot. She explained: It wasn’t her fault. How could Fonkoze assess a penalty when someone had simply drawn away all the money she made in Ansapit? “Drawn away all the money,” is a rotten translation of what she actually said because it conveys nothing. What she said was “yo te rale tout kòb la.”

“//Rale kòb//” is something Fonkoze hears frequently from market women. It refers to a belief that someone with the right magical powers can siphon the money out of whatever purse or bag a market woman keeps it in. It is a standard explanation for an unprofitable day at the market.

Generally speaking, market women who participate in Fonkoze’s Business Skills class come to realize that no magic is involved. The truth is that they hadn’t kept track of their expenses. They knew how much they had paid for their merchandise, but not what they’d paid to transport it. They hadn’t recorded money they spent on food and drink during the workday. They had forgotten about the couple of gourds they gave their godchild when he or she came by to say “hello.”

Once Fonkoze members learn to keep close track of their income and expenses, once they begin separating the money in their business from the money in their household, Fonkoze hears very little further talk of money drawn away. Helping women understand their own business clearly is a basic objective of the Business Skills class because it is the key first step that can eventually enable her to make that business grow.

When I returned to Djomond yesterday, I was able to put Edeline’s explanation in context. She had come with her reimbursement and also with a friend’s. She brought exact change for her own, but the friend had given her 1000 gourds to pay a balance of 970. I gave her back 30 gourds, and asked her to verify whether the change was correct. She couldn’t. She had to ask other members to count it for her. She couldn’t distinguish different bills accurately.

It’s easy to imagine why Edeline would think her money had magically disappeared. If she can’t identify the different bills she receives, then a dishonest client could easily give her smaller bills than she is owed or talk her into paying out more in change than she should.

This is especially true in Ansapit, where commerce involves both gourds and Dominican pesos. It even can involve dollars, since moneychangers generally won’t go between gourds and pesos in a single transaction. Market women can have to change gourds to dollars and then dollars to pesos. Edeline could have been cheated in either of those transactions as well.

I’ve written about how microcredit depends on discipline and solidarity, but it depends on clarity as well. The small business women who take Fonkoze loans needs to see what they are doing clearly, otherwise their businesses are almost certain to fail. That is why Fonkoze struggles hard to provide educational programs to accompany its credit. Money alone is not enough.

It’s a struggle in two respects. On one hand, the programs, though inexpensive, are not free. It costs about $25 to provide one woman with one four-month class. With more than 50,000 members, the cost of providing it to all of them would be significant. As the credit operation grows increasingly profitable, it will be able to take over much of the expense. But, for now, Fonkoze depends on fundraising. On the other, offering the programs depends on the existence of credit centers where women are willing to come regularly to participate.

It’s true that the programs can sometimes serve, in fact, as an incentive that brings women together. Members can initially find it hard to understand why they should come to their center more than once a month, when a reimbursement is due. They can even want to send their reimbursement in with their husband or a child. They resent anything that takes them away from the market. That sentiment begins to change as they see that the meetings are valuable. Most eventually see how important their regular discussions with their fellow members can be, but educational programs offer value that is easier to see.

At the same time, in really dysfunctional centers, in centers in which any sort of regular contact with members is hard to maintain, it’s hard even to establish the educational programs that could eventually bring them back together. It’s a challenge.

But it’s one that needs to be faced and overcome. Members like Edeline, with all the best goodwill, will never prosper until they learn to see their businesses clearly. And their growing prosperity is both the end that Fonkoze seeks to attain and a key piece of the means that can further us towards that end.