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Ti Kredi
Ti Kredi, or Little Credit, is Fonkoze's lending program for women who are not yet ready to manage a loan as large as $75, the first loan in Fonkoze’s core solidarity-group credit program. Ti Kredi begins with an initial loan of just $25 to ease clients as comfortably as possible into lending activities.
The smaller loan size comes with a shorter repayment period and close accompaniment from a Fonkoze credit agent – including capacity building and life skills training essential to bringing Ti Kredi clients out of near-extreme poverty. These training sessions include hard skills like micro-enterprise management and literacy, as well as topics such as sexual and reproductive health, children’s rights, and environmental protection.
Fonkoze’s holistic approach is designed to confront poverty at its roots and weed it out of its client’s lives. Poor health, human rights abuses and environmental degradation conspire against Fonkoze’s clients as they climb out of poverty. Recognizing this, Fonkoze has designed Ti Kredi to confront these realities while providing clients with the economic resources needed to generate a stable income.
Because of Ti Kredi’s emphasis on the very poor, it is an innovative and unique program in the field of microfinance. Most, if not all, of Ti Kredi’s clients would be deemed too poor to succeed in traditional microfinance programs, and hence they have remained on the outside looking in as others reap the benefits of access to credit.
However, because of Fonkoze’s uncompromising commitment to Haiti’s poorest, these clients are outsiders no more. They are entrepreneurs. And in greater and greater numbers, they are building a better future for themselves and their families as they embark on the arduous journey out of poverty.