Archive for: Ford Foundation

Fonkoze started  Chemin Levi Miyo, or Pathway to a Better Life in Haitian Creole, in 2008 to tackle rural Haiti’s extreme poverty in a holistic manner. The program is one of the nine pilots in the CGAP-Ford Foundation Graduation Program, a global effort to understand how safety nets, livelihoods, and microfinance can be sequenced to create pathways for the poorest out of extreme poverty, adapting a methodology developed by BRAC in Bangladesh.

The face of extreme poverty in Haiti is multifaceted, and this reality holds strong for the rural poor in Haiti. Macro-level constraints such as limited access to markets, a dearth of employment opportunities, absence in social safety nets, and virtually no social accountability at the local level contributes to the complexity of Haiti’s deprivation. Fonkoze’s graduation program provides five main areas of support: a cash stipend and provision of productive assets to help build sustainable livelihoods and food security; access to health services and savings to reduce vulnerability, close support of program staff who provide enterprise training, advice, and most important, moral support to help participants build skills, confidence and “agency”; provision of housing renovations, water filters, and school uniforms to improve social conditions;  social links with village elites to help build up social networks for the poorest.

Our final evaluation of the program six months after its end shows that poverty levels of members has reduced, and this is directly attributable to increased ownership of livestock (which went up by from 5% to 39%), improved housing conditions, and greater land cultivation. A very promising result is that the percentage of members suffering from food insecurity with hunger has declined by over 50% since the program start. In addition, health seeking behaviour (going to a health clinic in case of illness) has improved for over 40% of members. The number of participants reporting that all or most of their children are regularly attending school increased from 27% to 70%. In depth qualitative interviews also show that most members gained self-confidence, and say they have greater status within the household.

At the pilot stage, the program has demonstrated significant positive impact upon the lives of its members with 97% per cent of the 150 women that participated “graduating” out of the program. Seventy-five percent of them have continued on into TiKredi, a small loan program. In one site, all of the program members who graduated into TiKredi have already successfully moved on into Fonkoze’s larger loan product. However, things aren’t so bright for those who didn’t move into microcredit: we saw a slight decline in indicators for the 25% of participants who did not join TiKredi since our mid-term evaluation. This could well mean that, in the absence of other options, self-employment is the only real exit gate out of poverty in rural Haitian context.

Although the program’s achievements have been remarkable, the challenge of sustaining improvements is stark. When it scales up the programme, Fonkoze will have to address other challenges such as identifying more sustainable livelihoods for participants; for example, the most viable strategy pursued by many program participants in one site is charcoal production in an already heavily deforested land.  For those who are not ready to integrate into microcredit, finding alternative graduation pathways poses another challenge. Given the intense vulnerability of the population, there is always a demand for Fonkoze to do and provide more. While most graduation programs rely on the government to deliver health, education and welfare benefits, Fonkoze does not have this luxury. One can only hope that the silver lining amidst the tragic earthquake is an opportunity to re-build Haiti and provide the country’s most vulnerable with basic entitlements.

Trickle Up Six Months After Graduation

Last November, Syed Hashemi wrote about the Trickle Up Graduation Pilot Ceremony, during which 300 women sang and danced to celebrate their move out of extreme poverty. The Trickle Up Graduation Pilot in West Bengal is one of the most advanced sites in the CGAP-Ford Foundation Graduation Program—a global effort to understand how safety nets, livelihoods and microfinance can be sequenced to create pathways out of extreme poverty.

Six months after “graduation,” Trickle Up estimates that 94% of the participants in the initial pilot are maintaining their assets and still participating in the Self Help Groups. Trickle Up and its partner, Human Development Centre, are now helping the groups to link up with banks so that participants can access larger loans.

From the pilot phase, Trickle Up has learned many lessons, above all, that larger grant sizes help people go much further—the amount of the asset transfer will more than double in the next phase. In India, Trickle Up has now increased from its traditional USD 100 grants to an estimated average amount of USD235.  Janet Heisey, Trickle’s Up’s Program Officer for Asia says: “This pilot has allowed us to gain greater knowledge of the level of support that’s needed to help get a micro-business off the ground.”  Interestingly, this change is influencing all of Trickle Up’s activities. Bill Abrams, Trickle Up’s President, explains: “Over the past three decades, Trickle Up has supported approximately 10,000 businesses annually, typically through USD 100 grants. Our commitment to serving the very poorest is stronger than ever and, in order to refine our program for maximum impact, we are bringing the lessons from our Graduation Pilot into the mainstream of our work.  Among those refinements are larger and more flexible seed capital grants, as well as a three-year program instead of one.”

Some other changes in program design include an increased emphasis on savings, with systematic financial management training and a consumption support adapted to food cycles. In addition, the livelihood strategy design will include a greater focus on training participants in planning their livelihood activities, keeping in mind the local market‘s absorption capacity and working to ensure the participants link to available government services—both those that support the livelihood and those that support other aspects of the family’s well-being.

The Yemen Graduation Pilot is located in the governorates of Aden, Lahij, and Taiz.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East with an estimated 43% of its population below the poverty line. Currently about 1.5 to 2 million households receive support from a government safety net program. The government is interested in trying to link its existing cash support program with livelihoods training and savings services in order to help the poorest become self-sufficient over two years.

The government’s Social Fund for Development (SFD) and Social Welfare Fund (SWF) are launching the Yemen Graduation Pilot, with guidance from CGAP and the Ford Foundation. This pilot will reach 750 households in the governorates of Aden, Lahij, and Taiz.

The Social Funds have already identified very poor localities. Last week, CGAP met with the implementing team in Yemen to guide the selection of the poorest households in these communities.

Like other pilot sites, the Yemen Graduation Pilot has a sophisticated targeting process: the team first selects the poorest communities based local knowledge and gets a list of the government safety net recipients in the area. The Yemen Progress out of Poverty Index is then used to rank the poorest recipients of the safety net within these poor communities. Through household visits, field workers further narrow the list of potential beneficiaries to make sure only the poorest are included. Finally, supervisors visit all the households on the shortlist in order to minimize targeting errors. A consultant from BRAC has also cross-checked a sub-sample of targeted households.

The project partners are discussing a randomized impact assessment with Innovations for Poverty Action. The BRAC Development Institute will conduct qualitative research.