Approaches like our CLM program in Haiti are generally referred to as “graduation programs”. The idea is that program participants start at the very lowest end of the economic ladder and they graduate by moving up a step or two. They are still very poor, but their lives have changed.

At Fonkoze, we have thought of graduation as a mark of a graduate’s independence. Graduation programs are sometimes presented as an alternative to long-term support. Rather than regular cash transfers that could extend over years, a graduation program makes a greater up-front investment in a family, hoping that one big push will be enough to help them make their future on their own. At Fonkoze, and at BRAC, the Bangladeshi development organization that invented the approach, participants can graduate to other programs. Both BRAC and Fonkoze offer microcredit to graduates who wish to use it. But more fundamental than the step from one service to another is the change from a misery that is often without hope to a resilient and optimistic approach to a still-difficult life. The evaluation we use to determine whether someone can graduate from our program includes ten different criteria, and participation in microcredit is not one of them. Many of our more successful graduates are moving forward without microloans.

But our experience with persons with disabilities has forced us to change our thinking. We are in the midst of an experience with 30 persons with disabilities. It’s an attempt to adapt the CLM program to serve them. It was originally planned as a twelve-month program, but when the work was set to be finished, our team decided to extend the work for another six months. A detailed evaluation of the pilot is available here: http://www.microfinancegateway.org/library/final-evaluation-chemen-lavi-miyó-persons-disabilities-clmd.

There are cases that are easy to adapt to. Carmelle Jean, a partially paralyzed woman from Ti Fon, is unable to manage her livestock. Her mobility is too limited, as is the use she has of her hands. According to our original CLM principles, she would not graduate because one of the minimum issues is that a graduate be healthy enough to do the work she’ll need to do. But Carmelle has shown herself to be capable of mobilizing and managing help from her neighbors and their children. Her livestock is well managed, even if she cannot do the work with her own hands. Working with Carmelle taught us to consider the ability to do the work differently than we previously had, but it was an easy lesson to learn.

There are more difficult cases too, however. Josué is from Loncy. He’s the widowed father of four teenage and 20-something sons. He’s much more profoundly paralyzed than Carmelle. He can do nothing on his own. The boys feed him, they wash him, they dress him: they take care of all his needs. He lacks Carmelle’s skills as a manager as well. She knows exactly wants she wants done and when, and knows how to see to it. She really does manage her household, not just her livestock. Josué is completely dependent on what his sons decide.

He would not be able to graduate from our program according to our original standard. He does not manage his enterprises with his own hands, nor does he even do so a step removed, as Carmelle does.

But the change in Josué’s life has nevertheless been profound. When we first met him, he was spending all of every day inside a windowless, one-room shack. He wouldn’t talk to staff members who tried to interview him. He told them they were wasting their time. He didn’t bother to get dressed or clean up. He didn’t try to take any part in the life going on around him.

All that has changed. He now gets up early every day, gets cleaned up, and has his sons put him out in a shady spot in the front of their home, by the side of a main road. He spends the day chatting and joking with neighbors. He enjoys himself. He has his sons carry him in his wheelchair to occasional community celebrations, where he drinks and gossips with other older men. He eats a hot meal every day now, and he has a pig and goats that his sons take care of for him.

If graduation means achieving a measure of independence, Josué has not succeeded. But if it means graduating from one way of life to another that is distinctly better, than Josué has been a remarkable success.

I first met Modlet in 2014. Modlet was then in his mid-teens, one of his mother’s seven children. Their father died when he was very young.

His mother and sister had been selected to join the CLM program, and our team had invited them to an initial six-day enterprise training workshop at a school in Mòn Blan, not far from their home. The mother, Charitab, brought him along to the workshop because she didn’t think she could leave him at home. He was sickly, falling down all the time. His balance was bad. He had a hard time feeling his feet. He’d lose a sandal without noticing, and he frequently trip over things.

The area around Mòn Blan is extremely rocky, with steep and narrow footpaths cutting crooked ways around bare ravines. The footing there is tricky for anyone. For him, it had become dangerous.

Gauthier was at the workshop as well, and when we saw the boy we didn’t think we should wait. I put him on the back of my motorcycle and took him to the hospital. It was a hard ride because his terrible sense of balance made him a bad passenger. But we arrived at the Partners in Health University Hospital in Mirebalais.

It was the first of several diagnostic visits. He eventually saw Dr. Louine Martineau together with a visiting American neurologist. And they discovered a serious vitamin B12 deficiency. They started treating it with daily doses, he improved quickly, and the effect lasted for a while. But when the symptoms returned, they switched him to monthly injections. After six months of injections, he was doing much better, and they switched him back to pills, which he continues to take daily.

All this involved a lot of travel between Mòn Blan and the hospital. It’s more than a half an hour by motorcycle, and lines at the hospital can be long, so a visit usually meant at least a half-day’s work for someone on the staff. I was almost always the one. His mother and sister have a case manager, but case managers’ schedules are much less flexible that mine was as a manager, so I could help them out by doing it in the case manager’s place.

As Modlet and I spent more and more time together, a friendship took hold. We talked a lot, and one thing we talked about was school. Modlet was a terrible student. At seventeen, he was still in the third grade. He had had to repeat classes a couple of times because his grades were so bad. Math was especially hard for him. I was a little surprised to discover that he couldn’t do even simple addition.

So we added a math tutorial to our visits. I had him collect and clean twenty little stones, and we started using them to practice addition and subtraction. Sometimes it seemed as though we were making progress, and sometimes it just didn’t. When he got his report card in June 2015, he had failed third grade again.

By then he was eighteen, and I wondered whether it was time to help him and his mother plan a different future for him. Just because he couldn’t succeed at school didn’t have to mean that he couldn’t make anything of his life. I spoke to Charitab, and she agreed. She actually felt more strongly than I did that it was time for him to give up on school. We talked about whether she could give him a piece of one of her fields to farm so that he could start earning money. He had been growing fast and was now a slender but very strong young man. It seemed like a good solution. Someone would have to sell his crops for him, because he had trouble dealing with money, but he had siblings who could do that.

When we talked to him, he listened politely. But when we asked him what he wanted, he asked whether he could try once more to succeed in school. He didn’t want to return to the same school, but there was another one farther up the hill and he wanted to give it a try. He felt really strongly. His mother and I spoke about it, and we both thought it was a waste, but we also thought that he’d never be happy unless we let him try, so she agreed. He registered for third grade in the new school. His older sister took care of getting him his uniform and the books he would need. He was ready to go on schedule in September 2015.

He just got his report card, and it was a fantastic success. He couldn’t have been more right, and his mother and I couldn’t have been more wrong. He came in fifth in a class of 19.

It’s a little hard to figure. He’s now 19, and when you talk to him he can still seem confused. But he works hard and is rightly proud of his success. We don’t know if the same B12 that helps with the nerve problems that were interfering with his mobility also has improved his brain function or if something else has made it possible for school to begin to click

Jeanne Brise lives with her partner, Chilet, and four of their six children in Bwa Kabrit, a quiet area that’s hidden among trees just off the main road leading into downtown Lascahobas. She’s been a CLM member for a little more than a month.

She went through the selection process in January. When we select families for a new cohort, we try to visit all the families in a community or a group of communities who might qualify for the program. But then we run up against the reality that underlies the way our operation functions. We receive funds for a certain number of families, so if the area we are preparing to work in yields more families than that number, some families will have to wait. We could just stop selecting when we got to the number we can serve, but that would bring another problem with it. Accurate selection is extremely difficult in a community where we are already working. Jeanne was one of the unlucky ones. We weren’t able to start working with her until June.

At the time we selected her, our choice might have looked surprising. Her selection form lists the couple as owning two goats and a pig, much more wealth than an entering family would normally have. But those assets were only part of the picture.

They were living in a miserable house of straw and leaves on land that they didn’t own, or even rent. They are not from Bwa Kabrit. They’re from Koray Gran, a community in Savanette, the commune south of Lascahobas. They left home because they could see no future there. They couldn’t earn anything like a living. Chilet had found some day labor working in fields near Bwa Kabrit, so he brought the rest of the family over. A landowner permitted them to set up a small shack on his land. But since they had no access to any land of their own, they could not farm. Their children weren’t in school, and they couldn’t feed them every day.

They would work in the neighbors’ fields when they could find someone who needed them, and Jeanne would do laundry for wealthier families. Their hard work brought some progress. They used Jeanne’s laundry earnings to buy the livestock.

But our selection team did not think it would be enough to establish a life. Here is what Wesnel Charles, the manager who verified their selection, wrote in his notes:

“None of their four children go to school because they don’t have the means to send them . . .. The children are really filthy. You see their poverty vividly. The mother’s the same way. She says that they have to struggle with hunger all the time. If it wasn’t for her laundry money, they’d just die. Supposing they were able to sell their two goats for 3000 gourds [now about $50], they could use the money to rent a piece of land to live on. Then they could sell the pig to buy some of the lumber they would need to build a house. But their shack has nothing in it but the sticks they sleep on and the few dirty rags they wear.”

He’s arguing that even the assets they had were not enough to help them move forward. And he turned out to be right. By the time they joined the program, they had nothing, even though they were still in the same shack. Nothing of Wesnel’s construction plan came to fruition.

First the pig died. When it was clear that it had contracted Teschen Disease, an incurable viral infection fatal in about 85% of cases, they sold it to a butcher for 1750 gourds, much less than it had been worth just a week earlier, when it still appeared healthy. But the low price isn’t the worst of it. When butchers buy a sick or dead animal, they don’t pay cash. They don’t need to. They know that the seller is over a barrel. So the butcher owes Jeanne and Chilet the money. She said she would pay in July, but July is almost over, and they haven’t been able to collect yet.

The two goats turned out to be only one goat. We’re not sure how the misunderstanding occurred, but Jeanne now insists that she only had one. When Chilet’s brother was facing a sudden expense, he asked to borrow it. That’s to say that he sold to get the money he needed, promising to replace it in August.

Suddenly the couple’s assets were at zero. And the landowner who had given them permission to set up their shack on his land decided he wanted his land back.

So by the time the couple joined the program, they seemed well qualified: no assets except some money owed to them, children who are hungry and not in school, and a miserable little shack that they would not even be able to stay in much longer. Whether Wesnel’s decision was correct at the time he made it is a separate question, but events seem to have born out his reasoning.

The couple now has a lot of work to do. They found a small plot of land to rent, and their case manager, Sandra, help them convince the land’s owner to let them owe him the money. She made sure he knew that she would be taking responsibility for helping them save up the money that they owe him. Now they’ve begun to prepare their move. They are going to have to be very careful with money. They owe the rent, they will have some construction materials to buy beyond what the CLM program offers, and they want to send their two older kids to school this year.

We want the women who graduate from the CLM program to have access to savings and credit after they complete the program. It is one way to help them continue to progress. This can be straightforward. Our sister organization, Fonkoze Financial Services (SFF), provides such services to thousands of Haitian from all over the country, including the Lower Central Plateau, where we are based.

But we also work in areas that SFF does not reach. Their need to break even limits what they’ve been able to do. So we started looking for ways to facilitate long-term access to a supportive financial structure, and we can across Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA). I’ve written about them here: http://www.apprenticeshipineducation.com/vsla/.

VSLAs are a way to organize a group of people to save money and use their savings to make loans. A group agrees to meet one a week, and at every meeting every member must buy at least one share. They can buy as many as five. The group determines share prices at an initial meeting, and these prices can vary greatly. Our own team works with groups whose shares are as small as 25 gourds and as big as 500. Members of the group can borrow money from the pot, usually as much as three times their own savings, and they repay the loan with interest. The group also decides both the rules about repayment and the interest rate.

We’ve set up a number of VSLAs as part of an experiment. We wanted to understand how they work and judge whether they could help our members. Two of the groups involve CLM staff members – Full disclosure: I’m in one of them – and the rest are primarily for CLM members.

On Monday, the first group that we established reached maturity, the end of its one-year term. VSLA members generally agree to save together for a year. At the end of the year, they divide up the pot, including the interest that they have earned through their loans.

The pay out is a long and tedious process, because the VSLA approach is as low-tech as it could possibly be. Each member has a bankbook, with a star for every share they have purchased. The secretary had to count all the stars in every book and then recount them to make sure there were no mistakes. Then he had to count and recount the money in the pot. He did all this under the watchful eyes of the president of the VSLA.

The group should then have been able to simply divide the amount of money in the pot by the number of shares to find the share price, but things were slightly complicated. One member had defaulted on her loan. The unpaid balance was more than the total of her shares, so her shares were taken out of the total.

The group had originally set the share price at 25 gourds, or about 40 cents. They kept the price low to help them respect their commitment to buy at least one share every week. Over the course of a year of hard saving, they had accumulated over 81,000 gourds, or about $1,300. Several individuals had saved up $100 or more. When they did the division, they discovered a share price of just over 30 gourds, a 20% return on their investment. The secretary and the president then carefully calculated and recalculated each member’s share, and counted out the money for one member at a time. Members sat quietly and attentively through the tedium. They were clearly pleased.

Aniolie Occilien, a CLM graduate, explained what they like about the VSLA. “It forces you to save your money. You get it all at the end, and then you can do what you want with it.” She wants to invest her savings in a cow.

Dieula Chery felt the VSLA worked well for her, too. Another CLM graduate, she took out VSLA loans twice, and invested the money in her small business. She buys produce in the rural markets around Mirebalais, and she travels by truck with her merchandise to Port au prince. “It really helps. I was able to buy a third cow. I’ll use the money I saved up to by a mule. I’ve never had an animal to carry my stuff. It will help me get it out to the main road, where the truck passes.”

Next week, the group will start over again. This time, it will probably be larger. A number of their neighbors have been waiting to join, and it doesn’t appear as though many want to drop out.

We are excited about what we are seeing and have begun to establish more VSLAs. The newer ones are mainly for women who are still in the CLM program. That way, a woman can take out a loan or two while her case manager is still readily available.