Loans give single women a chance in Haiti

Vital Stats

Caroline F

Greenville, SC

  • people helped10
  • People Doing It 4

The Problem

A long-time advocate of women's rights, I am aware that it is often the women of the underdeveloped world who suffer most. Our Haitian counterparts are habitually devalued, subjected to rape and abuse, and all but excluded from the workforce. For a woman to go unmarried past her early twenties, or to be left a widow, almost guarantees a life of hand-to-mouth living. For many single Haitian women, the only way to provide for themselves and their children is to wait in the town market each day for someone to hire them for a day's work doing anything from gardening to cooking to manual labor. For each day they find work they are typically paid ten Haitian dollars (around 55 cents). Although Haiti has received more international aid than any other nation to date, much of the money is pocketed by corrupt government officials or mismanaged. Of the money that makes it to the people themselves, the vast majority is in the form of handouts that create a dependency mentality and only compound the problem. The recipients are also rarely single women.

Plan of Action

The best way to make a big change is to start small. So we've chosen 7 women from one Haitian community to be our pilot project. We chose the community of Lina, because last year I was a part of a similar micro-finance project for the men of Lina. The man who faithfully runs the male project, Mois Benoit, is honest and talented, and he has had surprising success. For this reason, his wife Madame Benoit and I have developed our own micro-finance idea specifically for Lina's women. The 7 women will receive small business loans they will have one calendar year to repay at a low interest rate. These women have no other opportunity to improve their quality of life. According to Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, at 98% payback rate, single women with no money and no land are globally the least likely to default on a loan. One theory for this is that they have no other options but to succeed-- no one is there to bail them out or give them a second chance. Our plan is this: Provide them each with $25 loans to fund their own independent business endeavors. The women have already presented me with ideas from selling local produce at a stand to providing Lina with oils and household essentials to starting a seamstress business. The loans will be managed by Madame Mois.
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Discrimination
Education
Human Rights
Homelessness and Poverty

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