financing from Root Capital. Remiers is part of a new
generation of agricultural entrepreneurs in Haiti who,
with the right tools, can play a key role in transforming livelihoods for small-scale producers in the country.
Three hours north of Port-au-Prince in the town of
Mirebalais, Leander-Engström and Poitras met with
small-scale growers who supply CariFresh. Access to
the organic export markets allows these farmers to sell
mangoes for nearly three times the local market price.
Finally, the 3W team journeyed to Thiotte, a remote
mountains town near the Dominican border, located in
one of the few remaining tracts of Haitian rainforest.
There they met with Root Capital’s first Haitian client,
Coopérative des Planteurs de Café de l’Arrondissement de
Belle-Anse (COOPCAB).
The cooperative represents over 4,000 coffee-farming
families from the area surrounding Thiotte. In a coun-
try where only 1. 5 percent of forest cover remains, the
specialty-grade Arabica coffee that COOPCAB’s mem-
bers produce and export grows better under the shade
of forest canopy—linking economic opportunity to en-
vironmental conservation.
HELP HAITI
Over the past two de- cades, microfinance
has been a lifeline for millions of Haitian small-busi-ness owners. But after the
devastating earthquake in
January 2010, many of the
country’s 130,000 microcredit borrowers could no
longer make their monthly
payments. By the end of
that year, $62 million was
outstanding in microloans,
creating a major liquidity
crisis within the country’s
microfinance industry.
Enter Calvert Founda-
tion, a U.S.-based, non-
profit impact investing
firm. In June 2010, Cal-
vert teamed up with fund
manager Omtrix and sev-
eral partners, including the
Inter-American Develop-
ment Bank’s Multilateral
Investment Fund, the Clin-
ton-Bush Haiti Fund and
the Deutsche Bank Foun-
dation, to restart the flow
of money between credi-
tors and microfinance insti-
tutions. The result was the
Haitian Emergency Liquid-
ity Program (HELP).
HELP purchases delinquent loans from microfinance institutions (MFIs),
allowing them to maintain
their lending operations
and preserve their capital
base. The restored liquidity
enables MFIs to restructure
loans with lower interest
rates and/or extended repayment terms, lessening
the burden on the creditor.
The MFIs will repay HELP
in monthly installments
over three years, after
which they will repurchase
all or a portion of the original loans back from HELP.
Caroline Bressan, in-
vestment officer for Latin
America and the Carib-
bean at Calvert Founda-
tion, says keeping Haitian
MFIs afloat at this time is
crucial. “Once you damage
the culture of payment in a
country,” she says, “it hurts
overall access to credit and
the wellbeing of the micro-
finance system.”
Today, HELP collabo-
rates with three Haitian
MFIs: FINCA Haiti, Associ-
ation pour la Coopération
avec la Micro Entreprise
(Association for Cooperation in Microenterprise),
and Fond Haitien D’Aide À
La Femme (Haitian Fund
for Aid to Women). Together they service 6,500
creditors—mostly urban
women with small businesses selling produce or
cheap household goods.
The Calvert Founda-
tion’s contribution to HELP
comes from interest-bear-
ing investments by its net-
work of 8,000 retail
investors—individals in-
vesting, on average,
$10,000 from their per-
sonal accounts—rather
than from a corporation.
The investment offers a
creditor a new loan to re-
build his or her business,
and the profits from the
business are ultimately
used to repay the investor
with interest.
Arthur Marie Thomas,
whose produce business
in Jacmel was destroyed
by the earthquake, is hoping she comes out a winner, too. The 52-year-old
single mother of four received a $1,250 loan from
FINCA Haiti in January
2011 and has already managed to rebuild her store.
As she works to make it
as profitable as before the
earthquake struck, that mi-croloan is once again providing a lifeline.
