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Marie France
For the past year, her business has been growing, thanks to loans that she has received from Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution. Fonkoze established a branch office in Marigot just last year, with funding from Plan International.
Marie France wanted to join Fonkoze right away, as soon as she heard she could get credit from Fonkoze at less than a tenth the price of what it costs to borrow money in the street. She got together with four friends and they took a single group loan with her. The five women act as guarantors for one another. They thus can get credit without collateral and without a salaried co-signer, traditional requirements for formal credit. Their borrowing is going well: They’ve been reimbursing on schedule, and are already on their third loan.
But in the last few months, she’s also been able to improve the way she runs her business thanks to the Business Skills class Fonkoze offers in her credit center. Fonkoze has always known that Haiti’s market women need more than credit as they struggle to lift their families out of poverty. They need education as well. Additional funding from Plan has made Basic Literacy and Business Skills classes available to Fonkoze borrowers at the Marigot branch. Marie France learned to read and write as a child, but when she heard that Fonkoze would offer Business Skills as well, she was excited to sign up. “Anything I can do to make my business better is important for me.”
She hasn’t been disappointed. In just four months, she’s learned to keep track of her business’s income and expenses in little notebooks she can bring to the market with her each day. “Before the class, I never really knew whether I was making money or losing it. I was a little bit lost. Now a have a notebook for expenses and another for sales. I have a separate notebook where I write down any sales I make on credit. That way, I have a clear record of everything my clients owe me. Thanks to the class, I feel like I am in control.”
Her children like the class, too. “They like seeing that their mother goes to school. When I take out my book to study at home, they read along with me. They ask lots of questions. It’s good, because they’re learning things that could help them later on.”
Thanks to support from Plan, over seven hundred women in the Marigot area have been able to participate in educational programs this year. Next year, they’ll be more than a thousand. But for Marie France, such numbers are not what matters. What matters is the improvement that these classes enable her to make in her business and, so, in her family’s life.