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Haiti update: MasterCard grant backstops recovery partnership
A $4.5 million grant from The MasterCard Foundation will form the base of a partnership with MEDA and its longtime ally, Fonkoze, to spur economic recovery in Haiti.
The new effort will restore Fonkoze’s destroyed headquarters and enable its poorest clients to build new livelihoods, benefitting 70,000 clients.
Fonkoze is Haiti’s largest microfinance organization with a mission to build the country’s economic foundation for democracy. Its more than 40 branches serve some 225,000 borrowers and savers, most of whom are impoverished women in rural areas. These clients depend on Fonkoze for financial services ranging from small business loans to savings accounts, and for complementary educational and health services.
Following the earthquake, Fonkoze lost five employees. A third of its employees were left homeless and more than half of its branches were damaged or destroyed, including the institution’s headquarters. Nearly 8,000 clients lost their homes, businesses or both. The support from The MasterCard Foundation will strengthen Fonkoze’s core operations. It will also expand two existing programs that will help 5,000 women create new livelihoods in two areas that have been greatly stressed by economic and social pressures due to the exodus of refugees from Port-au-Prince.
“The MasterCard Foundation’s timely contribution will help Fonkoze emerge from this tragedy as a stronger organization,” says Anne Hastings, CEO of Fonkoze. “We now have the flexibility to provide clients with needed services, which will empower them to sustain their livelihoods well into the future.”
The program will provide enterprise training, a livelihood asset (such as a goat or a chicken), a small short-term stipend and one-on-one mentoring to 1,000 extremely poor women. Another 4,000 women will qualify for the small loans and associated counseling needed to create or rebuild small businesses. Commercial and agricultural endeavors such as these are the backbone of Haiti’s supply chain, delivering food and goods between rural areas and cities. Restoring the businesses of women traders is, therefore, critical to the country’s long-term recovery.
“Fonkoze has a proven track record of serving Haiti’s rural poor,” says Reeta Roy, president and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation. “We are investing in an institution that is vital to rebuilding Haiti from the ground up.”
To supplement this work, Fonkoze is testing a “catastrophic microinsurance” product, which will provide clients indemnity for basic needs, loan repayment and new, interest-bearing loans to restart their businesses. This product reflects Fonkoze’s belief that clients must be educated and prepared to protect themselves against future disasters and economic shocks.
MEDA, which has worked with Fonkoze both as an investor and as part of its governance, will manage the funding from The MasterCard Foundation and provide ongoing progress reports and select advisory services. Fonkoze will concurrently track the quan☞titative and qualitative suc-
Experts weigh in on nixing the niceties
Is “terminal niceness” a raging problem in your company?
Winds are blowing in the business press about the pitfalls of being too nice.
The new chief executive of Xerox, Ursula Burns, was recently quoted in The New York Times as saying she hopes to eradicate the affliction of being too nice.
What she really seems to mean is lack of candor, which is only arguably a feature of “being nice.” She prefers employees who are bold and frank, which does not necessarily mean they’re “not nice.”
Others in the field have since been, well, emboldened to take on the problem of passive-aggressive behavior and the Trappist vows of silence that can sometimes be incorrectly interpreted as niceness.
“While no one likes to work with a tyrant,” says The Globe & Mail, “management experts ☞agree that being too nice
Haiti update
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cess of its clients by measuring their ability to acquire new skills and assets, and improvements to their health, sanitation and food security.
The MasterCard Foundation is an independent, private foundation based in Toronto, with assets totaling $3 billion. It was established through the generosity of MasterCard Worldwide at the time of the company’s initial public offering in 2006. Believing that every person has the potential to transform their lives, and to improve the lives of their families and their communities, the Foundation has worked to increase access to microfinance and youth education for people in developing countries so they can realize their potential and lift themselves out of poverty. It is the major contributor to MEDA’s YouthInvest program in Morocco and Egypt. ◆
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can cripple a company.”
This is especially true if conflict avoidance is perceived as being nice. People smile in the staff meeting because they don’t want to be seen as a whiner, but they may churn inside and then bellyache incessantly around the coffee pot.
Says one management specialist, “What companies need now are people who are willing to speak up about things that aren’t working well, haven’t worked well, and processes that are crazy, that don’t serve the customer in the end.”
Another says, “Telling a person that what they’re doing is affecting their performance
Want a thriving business? Take a look at the Amish
According to oft-quoted statistics, two-thirds of small businesses in North America die before the age of seven. That means only one third succeed.
That figure might raise eyebrows among the Amish, who enjoy a business success rate closer to 95 percent.
“Englisch” business owners who want to boost their batting average might check Erik Wesner’s new book, Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive (Jossey-Bass).
They may be surprised to see how the resounding business success of the Amish flies in the face of much conventional practice. For example, you won’t find a lot of MBAs among the Amish, who typically don’t go beyond the eighth grade. Nor will you find the abundance of electronic business toys that so many
or others’ perception of them is an act of friendship. Do the act of friendship. Let them know.”
Apparently there’s even room, now and then, for a dash of impatience. While impatience can produce “rash and poor decisions,” says a leading business professor, “impatient people can often get those people who are very slow or feel less urgency to move a little faster. If it comes down to doing nothing – many people are comfortable with the status quo – versus trying to make some changes and taking some risks, I can see impatience having some positive benefit.” ◆ executives can’t do without.
Wesner interviewed 60 Amish CEOs in regions like Pennsylvania and Ohio to find out how they choose and manage employees, acquire skills and know-how, get and keep customers, and lead their organizations to lasting success.
Like many family business owners, these executives shared goals such as family preservation and passing on something of value to the next generation. Spiritual values and personal integrity ranked high. Of strategic importance, says Wesner, is a shared sense that “business is a vehicle for something more important” and “it takes strong relationships – forged with employees, customers, other companies, and other members of the community – to achieve success.”
The book’s foreword is written by Donald B. Kraybill, an acknowledged authority on the Amish and co-author of an earlier book titled Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits. He notes that the Amish, “without worldly accoutrements or credentials have applied an uncanny savvy, a dose of common sense, an ethic of hard work, and a bushel of enduring values to the world of business, in turn sprouting profitable enterprises.” (Elizabethtown Sunday News)
