Haiti’s Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor
It takes money to make money.
It’s the most basic tenet of business. Any entrepreneur, from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates, can tell you that.
Any business needs capital: for inventory, for equipment, for facilities, payroll, maybe even to see a little profit at the end of the day.
But what if you have no capital? No means of getting what you need to run your business? Even for such modest needs as a simple reed basket and a few pounds of rice? If you could not afford even so little as this, who would ever consider lending you money?
This is a basic fact of life in Haiti. Where there is more than 80% unemployment, there is, by necessity, more than 80% entrepreneurship. Nobody is going to give you a job, for there are virtually none to give. If you want food in your belly, you must find your own way to put it there.
It’s the most basic tenet of business. Any entrepreneur, from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates, can tell you that.
Any business needs capital: for inventory, for equipment, for facilities, payroll, maybe even to see a little profit at the end of the day.
But what if you have no capital? No means of getting what you need to run your business? Even for such modest needs as a simple reed basket and a few pounds of rice? If you could not afford even so little as this, who would ever consider lending you money?
This is a basic fact of life in Haiti. Where there is more than 80% unemployment, there is, by necessity, more than 80% entrepreneurship. Nobody is going to give you a job, for there are virtually none to give. If you want food in your belly, you must find your own way to put it there.
Maybe you know a man who makes sandals; you take every last cent you have and are able to buy four pairs. You go into the market and, it may take you all day but, you sell them and at the end of the day you have enough profit from those four pairs of sandals to buy half a pound of rice and beans,dinner ...
Yet hope, and opportunity, do exsist. They exist because of FONKOZE, the Fondayson Kole Zepl or the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Foundation, Haiti’s Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor. FONKOZE has provided hundreds of small business development loans to micro-entrepreneurs which, along with basic business skills training, are enabling them to better provide for their families and build for their futures.
Thus, for FONKOZE, mirco-credit is only one aspect of their services. The core of FONKOZE’s mission is sustaining democracy through economic development. In most parts of Haiti the only infrastructure, public services, and often even legal framework, available to the peasant population are provided by their own grass-roots organizations.
FONKOZE is not just a ‘bank’, it is an economic alliance of more than 650 of these peasant organizations, cooperatives, women’s collectives, religious communities and solidarity groups of Ti Machaan (women street vendors) It is an organization of organizations, rather than of individuals, and is operated by its members, for the benefit of its members. It has made close to US$1,000,000 in loans to it’s members and has received more than US$650,00 in savings deposits.
And FONKOZE offers banking and money transfer services to the Haitian diaspora community throughout the world providing a safe and economical means of transferring some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in support sent annually to individual Haitians from friends and family abroad.
© 2002, David Fonda
