An ajoupa is a minimal, prism-shaped structure that some of Haiti’s poorest families live in. It consists of two straw walls – pressed cane or dried corn stalks will do – that lean on each other. The back wall is a triangle made of the same straw. If there are palm trees nearby, the ajoupa-maker will lay some seed pods across the top. These are thick and fibrous, and can be as much as six or seven feet long and over a foot wide. As roofing material they can provide some protection against rain.

Rosana has been living in her ajoupa for several years. She and her husband, Joseph, live in Dejaden, a small village in Masikòt, a large and remote area of Sodo where we are now starting our work. Getting to the entrance to Masikòt is a hard 90-minute climb. A motorcycle can’t make the trip. Masikòt is divided by a number of deep, narrow ravines. From that entryway, you can hike another couple of hours, up one steep slope and down another. Dejaden is about halfway between the entrance to Masikòt and Kwaskou, the most remote of its villages.

The ajoupa is not the first house that Rosana and Joseph have lived in. Their first home was a thatch hut that burned down early in their life together. Their first child was an infant at the time, and he was caught in the fire. They lost him. Their second house was washed away in a hurricane’s heavy downpour.

So they live in the ajoupa now with three of their four children. The fourth – actually the oldest of their surviving kids – lives in the mountains outside of Port au Prince with a family that took him for Rosana and Joseph. His parents gave him away hoping that his new family would be able to do more for him that they themselves could. But they don’t hear from him, so they don’t know. The three other kids spend their nights down the hill on the slightly raised floor of their grandmother’s hut because rain soaks them through if they’re on the floor of the ajoupa. The ajoupa’s one bed has just enough room for Rosana and Joseph.

We met Rosana as part of the process of final verification. After participatory wealth ranking has given us a preliminary list of women in an area who might qualify for CLM, members of our team of case managers visit each woman and fill out various household surveys that all aim to give us precise information about the way the family lives. The case managers then make a recommendation. If they judge the household to qualify for CLM, one of the directors visits to interview the woman and make a final determination.

Verifying that Rosana and her family qualify for the program was easy, except for the fact that it came at the end of almost eight hours of marching through Masikòt, seeing one family after another. Everything she said and everything I saw as I looked around her yard marked her family’s need for the program. The children aren’t in school because Rosana and Joseph can’t afford to send them. They have a small patch of land, but couldn’t afford the beans to plant it with. They make about a dollar for a day’s work now an again when a wealthier neighbor needs help in the field. Then they have to wait until their neighbor – wealthier but not wealthy – can pay them. They keep a goat for a neighbor, and the goat just gave birth, but it had only one kid. If it had had two, they’d have received on as payment. Now they’ll have to wait for another pregnancy.

The day before I met Rosana, I was in Bouri, where I met Monique. It was also during a second trip we were making to an area. We had missed her the first time around. She’s the mother of six kids, the oldest a boy about thirteen. She was once a market woman and was starting to thrive. She told me that her business had grown strong enough that she had begun buying livestock out of the profits.

She and her husband were watching their household grow when disaster struck. He became sick. He lingered, constantly weakening, for five years. They spent what they had to save him, selling the animals and using up the capital that was in her business, but nothing helped. He died. That was five years ago. She wanted to sell their one small piece of land, the yard the house sits on, to pay for his funeral, but her neighbors convinced her not to. Instead, they chipped in for the funeral themselves. One of the neighbors even gave her use of a small plot of land right next to her house so that she has something to farm.

This brings me to her boy. Neither he nor her other children have been to school yet. The sad truth is that he’s an important wage earner in the household. Their main source of income is what he and his mother are paid when they can find work in other people’s fields. Between the two of them, they might be able to make about $1.80 for a day’s hard work.

The boy was scowling in the corner of the yard as I spoke with her. She explained that he had spent a couple of hours starting early in the morning planting sweet potatoes for her in their borrowed plot of land, and he was complaining that he was hungry. She had told him that he would have to wait. She had some corn lying on a sheet in the sun. A neighbor had brought it by as a gift, but she would have to dry it out before grinding it into meal. When I asked her how long that would take, she said that it would be ready tomorrow. In other words, neither she nor her kids had any prospect of a meal today.

The final verification process can be frustrating. We cannot afford to tell people in advance that we’ll be coming to see them. Such an announcement would require explanations that could only distort the information we need to collect. So we just show up, hoping that the people we need are at home. My whole eight-hour visit to Masikòt was all because nineteen of the women we needed to see were absent the first time we went. And even on the day that I returned, there was one woman we couldn’t find. So we’ll have to go again. And, as luck would have it, that one woman lives on the top of a ridge in the most distant corner of the most distant village in Masikòt.

And to miss a household is a big problem for us. CLM only goes to a village once. We simply eliminate extreme poverty in one fell swoop everywhere we go. If we miss a deserving family, they will never get another chance. Yesterday, a woman who thought we had missed her panicked when her neighbors, who had also qualified, told her what we would do for them. She was so upset that she stumbled and fell, bruising her side badly because she landed awkwardly on a rock. She’s got three kids – ten, six, and five – whom her husband, who used to beat her regularly, left in her hands when he deserted her. She feeds them by working for her neighbors in the field or doing their laundry. She can earn enough to buy a cup or so of rice that she divides into two meals. In other words, she really needs us badly.

But for all the misery you see and all the frustration you encounter, verification is ultimately very happy work. Because it’s work undertaken with a keen awareness of the package of services we can offer all the households we find that need them and of the program’s excellent record of success with those services. The hungry kids you see today will be healthy and in school tomorrow. The ajoupas will be replaced with decent homes with tin roofs. The families will have reasonable outhouses, filters to ensure clean drinking water, and the know-how and income-generating assets they’ll need to change their lives forever.

The mountaintop chapel in Piton, a very rural community within Fondwa, was badly damaged by January’s earthquake. About a third of the back wall remains, just a triangle of cinder blocks covering the lower left-hand corner. As you look behind the pulpit, you see a plantain grove and fruit trees through the space where the wall once was. The chapel’s important support posts are mostly intact, the poured concrete broken, and the iron cabling that strengthens it bent but still strong. The other walls, though cracked, still mostly stand, but sitting within the chapel you feel as though you are in a ruin, a ruin still doing the work it was built to do.

Fondwa, in mountainous southeastern Haiti, is about four hours away from the region where we do our work. The CLM team went there to attend a funeral. Franck Laurore, one of our new case managers, was killed on the job last Thursday.

Laurore was part of a team of four who had been assigned to collect data in an area called “Tifon.” Tifon is on the far side of the lake in Peligre that was formed when a hydroelectric dam was built in the 50s. The team had been working there for several days. Like the other teams that are in the field right now, they were following up community meetings, identifying the families who are poor enough to need our help.

Each day, three of them would take a canoe-ferry over and back across the lake while Laurore would walk. The extra hike would take him over an hour each way, but Laurore couldn’t swim, so he was afraid of the boats. Most of them are dugout canoes no reasonable person would believe in. All that extra walking makes a big difference in a day’s already hard fieldwork, but Laurore was simply afraid.

Thursday, he was exhausted. The team had been hiking all day up and down Tifon’s steep hills. They ran out off water and had nothing to eat. When they got back to the lake at the end of the day, his partners were surprised to see Laurore negotiating the price of the crossing with the oarsman. He was just too tired for the extra hike.

They got most of the way across the lake when a freak storm appeared. Its high winds swamped the boat. Two of the team members were able to swim to safety. A third man, who cannot swim, was saved because the wind blew them so close to the dam that a bystander was able to climb down and throw him something to grab hold of. Laurore panicked and went straight to the bottom. We recovered his body two days later, when it finally floated to the surface, just a few feet from the dam.

Laurore was 29, his aging parents’ sixth and youngest child. Our team met to plan the funeral with the older sister and brother-in-law whom he lived with while he went to high school. They had lots of understandable questions about their little brother’s death, but the most striking thing about the meeting was their very vocal determination that Laurore’s work continue. Even in his first months with the team he had apparently told them enough about what we do, enough about the desperate poverty of those we serve, to convince them of the work’s importance.

And the work is continuing. By Tuesday all the teams but Laurore’s were back in the field. Two of that team’s three surviving members are still too shaken to work, but the other was studying the remains of their soaked-through documents to determine what of their data can be salvaged and what must be collected all over again.

Our team’s members have been very badly shaken. But their determination is keeping them on the job nonetheless. César, another of the new case managers, explained this well. He talked to me about a woman he met on Tuesday, pregnant and living with three children on a straw mat on the floor of an open lean-to shack. She had found nothing to feed her kids that morning and wasn’t sure what she would give them the rest of the day. “When you see the way a woman like her is forced to live,” he said, “it’s easy to keep your mind on the job you need to do.”

Laurore’s death will change the way we do our work. It must. Although we know we will lose some of our program participants – their intense poverty can be deadly in any number of ways – we don’t expect to lose staff. They are healthy, strong young people. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be capable of doing this job. We must protect them. Lifejackets, which we should have had already, are now on the way. While we’re at it, we’ll be more insistent about the helmets that our staff is supposed to wear on motorcycles as well. One gets too accustomed to risk, too comfortable with it, and we simply have to be more aware of the safety issues that surround us. Laurore’s death robbed us of our most precious resource. We can let nothing like it happen again.

Laurore, on the left, with Brunel, who survived the accident, and Samuel, another CLM case manager. The photo was taken by Bethony Jean François.

Pascal has been a case manager for Chemen Lavi Miyò for almost four years. He is one of the original six who were hired to shepherd the 150 women in our pilot through the process. He had been one of Fonkoze’s best credit agents before that. The results of the pilot were striking, with 142 of the 150 families graduating on time. That means, that the women who led those families had accumulated the resources – financial, personal, and social – to support themselves. A remarkable success for women who entered the program with nothing.

Fonkoze spent a lot of time struggling to raise the money needed for the major program scale-up that brought me to CLM. But the work didn’t stop during that interval. We stitched together enough financing to serve 250 members, which was already a big increase. So Pascal and some of the other original case managers just kept working. While most of our team is selecting new members, Pascal and others are well into the eighteen-month cycle with this 250. By early 2011, he will have accompanied his second group of families through this program.

He spends most of his days just visiting the families, moving around enough on foot and on motorcycle to ensure that he sees each of the members he’s responsible for at least once each week. These visits are the heart of the CLM program, because for all the asset transfers and home repair and health interventions and other things we do, unless we accompany our members very closely as they learn to use their new resources to manage their lives, they will fail. Weekly visits allow Pascal to help them keep close track of their businesses’ development, but also to brainstorm with them about the considerable problems they face in their daily lives and to plan.

On the day I went around with him, his first visit was with Gertha. She is a mother of six who’s eleven months into the program. She originally received three goats and 1500 gourds – about $37.50 – worth of merchandise to start a business with. She now has seven goats and a cow to go with about 2100 gourds worth of inventory and cash in her business. She started selling rice and oil, and still does so, but when she sees a chance to buy some fruit, she grabs it because she knows she can turn it over quickly. She also buys a kind of palm leaf that she braids to make sleeping mats. She now supports her family fully with the income from her business, using her livestock only as long-term investment. She and Pascal spoke about an experiment he arranged for one of her older sons, a young man who’s 19.

CLM had provided her the material and the money she would need for minimal home repair. Most of the families who enter our program live in homes that do not protect them from the elements. The roofs leak. The thin walls are cracked. The mud floors ensure an environment that’s bad for everyone’s health. CLM wants its members to live in homes that are shelters, homes that give them a chance to protect both their health and whatever merchandise they have on hand.

When he was helping her plan her home repair, Pascal found Gertha a young carpenter who was willing to take on her son as an apprentice. He worked hard enough that the carpenter was impressed, and now he takes the young man to other jobs. He and his mother are both excited that he is learning a profession that should help him support himself down the road.

Another of member whom Pascal visited that day was Julienne. She also received three goats and 1500 gourds when she started the program. She now has five goats, a cow, a pig, and 3500 gourds in her business. But during his visit, Pascal uncovered a problem: She’s been making a lot of her sales on credit. Of the 3500 gourds in her business, over 1300 are in her customers’ hands. It’s a dangerous situation, because even if they pay her eventually, they are reducing the amount of merchandise she can buy and, so, the amount of money she can make. And she would be able to feed her family if the income drops too low. And that’s a best-case scenario. The customers who owe her money could always fail to pay her at all.

So she and Pascal talked about why she sells on credit and why she probably can’t eliminate the practice entirely. They agreed that she would need to reduce the percentage of her sales that she makes that way. It is the only way to ensure that she keeps moving forward.

Pascal, like all CLM case managers, has only 30 minutes to meet with each member because he must see 50 of them every week. There’s always a lot for him to accomplish in the half-hour. He needs to talk with members about their investments, but also about their health, their children’s education – about all the aspects of their lives that CLM aims to help them improve, which is everything. Using those 30 minutes well might be the key to Pascal’s success

Pascal makes notes about problems CLM members are encountering and the decisions they make to combat them in their notebooks. On subsequent visits, CLM staff will check to the notebooks so that we can be certain we’re following through.

Only the last five hours of the hike from the Boukan Kare market to Bouli, the gateway to Tit Montayn, are uphill. You spend the first hour or so crossing and re-crossing the Boukare Kare River. There is nothing like a bridge. You just roll up your pants and do your best to keep your feet as you struggle through the river’s swift, thigh-deep waters. The steep and rocky path that rises after the last crossing – the eighth by my count – is entirely unshaded, so you spend the whole trip under a tropical sun. And reaching the Boukan Kare market is already a challenge, even if there is something like a road that takes you there.

Tit Montayn is, in other words, hard to get to. Neither trucks nor motorcycles can make the trip. There is no road. It is one of Boukan Kare’s four “communal sections.” Boukan Kare itself is a “commune,” something like a county, and a communal section is the next smaller geographical division in Haiti.

Through its Chemen Lavi Miyò program, Fonkoze is committed to removing extreme poverty from Haiti’s Central Plateau, and Boukan Kare is one of the first two counties we entered. But to eliminate extreme poverty from Boukan Kare means eliminating it from all its communal sections, so whatever special challenges a region presents, we know we will have to overcome them. Bringing our program to Tit Montayn will present an array of challenges.

We spent a day last week making a first exploratory visit, hiking up Thursday in time to eat, bathe, and recover. And not much else. Friday morning we walked around a little, talking to community leaders about their section, learning as much as we could in a few hours before we had to head back down the hill.

Tit Montayn is a nickname. The area’s full name in French is Petite Montagne. It is a mountainous region, with steep hills on all sides. From Bouli, the paths stretch out for two to three hours in three directions, toward Ench and Mayisad in the north and east and to the Artibonit River to the west. It’s a lot of territory to cover. We learned that it is sprinkled with little farming communities. There are, perhaps, several hundred of the sort of extremely poor households we will need to work with.

Our case managers can generally serve about 50 households each, so we will surely need to have several of them in Tit Montayn, with a regional director to guide and support their work. There is, of course, no question of their hiking up the mountain every day, so we will have to establish a satellite office with a residence attached. We will have to get equipment up the mountain, but also get people and equipment through and around the hills once they are there. So we will need to acquire some horses and mules. We will need to find ways to ensure communication – cell phone coverage is spotty – and food and water and everything else that staff will need to work full-time in a region far from their homes.

And there’s more. Once we have selected households for the program, we will need to buy them the assets that the program requires. If there are a couple hundred of participating households, and they all choose, say, goat-rearing as one of their enterprises, we will have to get two-three goats into each family’s hands. That’s a lot of goats. Perhaps we’ll be able to buy most of them, or even all of them, in the small markets that we’ll find in the hills, but we cannot be sure of that. And getting large numbers of animals up the hill from Boukan Kare will be a nuisance. Something worth trying to avoid.

And that may not be the worst of it. Our program depends on a certain amount of cash. During the first months after households receive their new assets, we give them a small weekly cash stipend. It’s only 300 gourds, or a little more than $7, but it helps them protect their assets by relieving some of the pressure they normally feel to turn everything they have into cash and consume it right away. After all, their children are hungry. If we find just 200 households in Tit Montayn, that means getting $1400 up the mountain every week, without even considering other expenses.

And the need to transport cash will be multiplied by the fact that we do not implement the program in a vacuum. It works together with Ti Kredi, a credit program for families who are just slightly better off than the ones who qualify for CLM. We will need to be able to deliver loans and collect reimbursements in and around the Tit Montayn hills. And within six months, those Ti Kredi members should be ready to graduate to regular solidarity-group credit, which means larger loans and larger repayments.

All of this means moving around with large amounts of cash in one of the poorest places on earth. Until Brinks comes up with an armored mule, our agents and case managers will need to just throw the money in their backpacks and be as inconspicuous as a stranger in a very isolated region can be. Whatever plans we make for managing our cash will have to be made in close collaboration with the Fonkoze credit staff in the Boukan Kare office, which will be responsible for serving the families of Tit Montayn long after CLM and Ti Kredi have moved on.

So there are a lot of good reasons not to go to Tit Montayn. And there is plenty of need in other, much easier-to-reach places. It is not as though a decision to skip Tit Montayn would have us sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. But we are out to prove that it is possible to eliminate extreme poverty, so we cannot cherry-pick the poverty most convenient for us. Tit Montayn carries an importance for us beyond the families whose lives we hope we’ll permanently and dramatically improve.

Our question cannot be “whether?” but always only “how?”

CLM staff hiking to Tit Montayn

Mirlande is a young mother of five. She lives on a hillside outside of Saut d’Eau. Her home is made of woven strips of wood that are covered with a layer of mud, and a roof of leaves. The house has a dirt floor, and lacks even a very basic latrine. She shares the home with her kids and the man who is father to the four youngest children. The seven of them live on what the father brings in by farming and by buying pigs on credit and selling them quickly at a profit. They don’t have the means to get into the more lucrative business of raising the pigs. That would require the capital both to buy the pigs clear and invest some extra money in feed.

Before Fonkoze can begin to help Haiti’s poorest families lift themselves out of misery, we have to identify those families. Good selection is the cornerstone on which the CLM program is built. It’s a three-step process, and we’re in the middle of it right now.

The first step is Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR), which I’ve written about before. It’s a process we saw a lot of during our month in Bangladesh. (See: The Right People.) Fonkoze staff members go into the communities we’re planning to work in and hold meetings at which community members provide initial information as to the economic status of each household. Staff members leave these meetings with maps of the communities and lists dividing the households into between four and seven classes, ranging from the richest of the rich – whatever that might mean for a given community – to the poorest of the poor.

The information is useful. It introduces us to a community and teaches us something about how to approach it. We could hardly do without it. But it is neither sufficiently detailed nor 100% reliable. So Fonkoze adds to and verifies it through two more levels of field research on its way to selecting the families who will be invited to participate in CLM.

The first is a set of detailed field surveys completed by the men and women who will eventually serve as case managers for the families we select. Teams of two-three case managers go door-to-door, filling out multiple questionnaires for every family that the PWR meeting has placed in one of the bottom two economic categories. We collect information about the households’ income sources, assets, and their ways of life. These surveys give us extensive baseline data about the families we will eventually work with, and they allow the case managers to make their preliminary recommendations.

Fonkoze has distinct programs for very poor and extremely poor families. They are very different approaches, and it’s important that we get families into the one most appropriate for them. For very poor families we have Ti Kredi, or “Little Credit”. As its name suggests, it is a loan program that provides a more supportive framework than our regular credit programs do so that poorer women can get their businesses onto solid ground. The program lasts six months, includes a supportive repayment calendar and extra education and accompaniment, and prepares participants to move forward through regular solidarity-group credit.

But credit won’t work for the poorest of the poor, because they cannot sustain a business without significant additional support. Their immediate needs would inevitably consume any assets that they might try to invest. Even the very poor are hungry most of the time, but the extremely poor might go for days at a time with nothing substantial to feed their kids. It would be foolish to expect those who live as they do, on the edge of starvation, to set aside resources that could easily be converted into food.

Case managers use the data they collect in these surveys, but also their own good judgment, to confirm that the families they visit truly belong to one of the bottom two groups and to recommend them for either Ti Kredi or CLM. But they only make recommendations. Final selection is made by one of our five field managers. We revisit the homes that our case managers have recommended for CLM to talk with the women who would serve as our program’s link to them, to the women who would participate in the training we offer and take responsibility for the assets we give. We establish how many children the women are responsible for, what other people they have to share their responsibilities with, and how they feed and otherwise care for those who count on them. Our object is to answer a simple question: Could the woman we are talking with succeed in Ti Kredi? Only if we decide that she could not do we select her for CLM.

Most of the judgments are easy. We visit home after home after home with five or six or eight or nine children, all of whom are terribly, visibly hungry. These children might have absentee fathers, or they might have hardworking, but landless ones, who can’t get much more than a dollar for a day’s labor in the field. The families might live from sharecropping, typically receiving two-thirds of what they can scratch out of the fields they farm, enough perhaps to eat a meal a day for a couple of months each year. The women themselves have no small businesses because they have no ability to set aside assets for sale. Many of them labor in the fields next to the men, earning only about 75 cents a day. Some of them just sit at home and rely on their neighbors’ occasional charity, neighbors who are, themselves, far from well off. So when you’ve talked with these women for a few minutes, it’s easy to sign the form that authorizes their participation in CLM.

But then there are cases like Mirlande. She has a working, though volatile partnership with her husband. They do not own the land they live on right now. They rent the house and the land it’s on, which includes a small plot that they farm. This year it cost about $5, up from $3.75 the year before. But they also own two pieces of land, a smaller one her husband inherited from his father, where they are starting to build a house, and a larger one they bought this year when her husband sold a cow. Her three oldest children are in school. The first has his tuition paid by his father, who supports him in no other way, and the other two through a kind of buy-one-get-the-next-two-for-nothing arrangement. They regularly eat about once a day, feeding on the millet and corn that they harvest for as long as that lasts and then on what they can buy through the income of her husband’s pig trade.

I doubt neither Mirlande’s poverty nor her need. I know that she and her family are hungry most of the time. They lead a terribly hard life. But the structure of support that her husband provides, including a regular if inadequate source of income, and the capacity for future planning that their purchase of land demonstrates at least suggest that credit might work for her.

So I went against the case managers’ recommendation and put Mirlande on the list for Ti Kredi. It isn’t the kind of decision one can feel good about because it robs a very poor family of resources that could do its members an awful lot of good. But we need to reserve those limited resources for the families who need them most because, as it stands, there are many more of them in Haiti than we can possibly serve.

Azuba is a young mother of three from a village outside of Mithapukur, a town in northern Bangladesh, one of the poorer parts of the country. Mithapukur is home to a large BRAC office, where BRAC began offering its program for the ultra poor early on, back in 2002. The BRAC team reached Azuba’s village in 2004, and Azuba was selected to participate.

When women enter the program here, they are given a choice among productive assets. BRAC now offers something like nine or ten options, including several different combinations of livestock, a couple of agricultural possibilities, and non-farming commerce. Like many of the women we have met here in Bangladesh, Azuba chose to receive two cows. Cows can take longer than some of the other options to produce income, but they are thought to be reliably profitable. She was given about a week of classroom training, and got her cows shortly afterwards.

Within three months, disaster struck. The two cows very suddenly grew sick. Azuba contacted her caseworker, who notified the branch’s manager for the ultra poor program right away. He rushed to her with a veterinarian, but there was nothing they could do. The cows died.

BRAC’s selection process is designed to involve community members, and there’s a reason for this. BRAC knows that it can’t provide all the material and social support that the ultra poor will need to change their lives. They will need help from their neighbors as well. The BRAC team formalizes this help by organizing community anti-poverty committees shortly after transferring assets to program participants. These committees are made up of the community’s leaders, the very people who might once have supported the poor through offering domestic employment or occasional handouts. Getting them onto a committee takes their habit of charity and applies it towards eliminating the need they are already used to addressing.

So Azuba and the staff of BRAC’s local office made two applications for special support. They appealed both to BRAC’s central office and to the local committee, and both answered the call. A new cow that was pregnant or ready to become pregnant would cost about 8000 Bangladeshi takas. At the current exchange rate, that’s about $112. The BRAC program head authorized 7000 takas to go towards buying Azuba a new cow, and her local committee came up with another 1000. So her caseworker purchased a replacement cow, and Azuba was able to get started again.

Thanks to the second chance that she received, Azuba graduated from the program for the ultra poor. In a sense, she’s begun to flourish. She has a hygienic outhouse and a well that provides safe drinking water. She now has two cows, and one is pregnant. She’s already sold four others. She covers most of her family’s daily expenses with income from a rice business that she started with some of her profit. She and her children live in a house she built with 10,000 takas of her own money, and she farms land that she gained access to by depositing 15,000 takas with its owner.

Azuba is a success story, but also a lesson. Given a chance, poor women can be counted upon to lift their families out of poverty. But it isn’t easy, and those that would help them along that journey must be prepared for bumps in the road.

The BRAC program for the ultra poor begins, just as Fonkoze’s version does, with a careful selection of the women who will be invited to participate. The program is both resource and labor intensive, so you want to make sure that the people you’re serving really need it.

The selection procedure that’s used is called “participatory wealth ranking” (PWR). Just as its name suggests, PWR invites the residents of a community to collectively provide the initial information that will guide eventual selection. PWR involves three staff members: an organizer, a facilitator, and a recorder. And it unfolds in three steps: an initial visit, mapping, and wealth ranking.

The first member of the PWR team, the organizer, undertakes the initial visit. She goes to a village that the BRAC ultra poor team has identified as needing ultra poor services, and she does two things there. She walks around, meeting the community’s members, especially its leaders, and gaining a sense of the number and types of households the village contains. And she invites residents to a meeting to be held the next day. She doesn’t say much about the purpose of the meeting, but just asks them to come because BRAC needs to collect information about the community for a program it hopes to offer.

The next day, all three BRAC staff members come to the village. They will lead the village’s residents through a two-step process. The first step is to trace a map of the community on the ground. They ask for a volunteer from among the participants to help them with this, but work hard to make sure that as many participants as possible are contributing their opinions. This can involve a lot of discussion as to just where to put the roads, and it can take several attempts to get it right. One of the reasons for tracing the map on the ground, rather than directly onto paper, is to make erasure and correction as easy as possible.

After tracing the roads, the volunteer adds symbols to mark important landmarks – schools, Muslim mosques, Hindu temples, government offices – then places small numbered cards everywhere that there is a household.

As each small card is placed, the PWR team is collecting information. They ask the name of the principal member of the household, his or her father’s name, and his or her occupation. This information is gathered by the second member of the PWR team, the facilitator, and written down by the recorder both in a notebook and on larger cards, with each household getting its own card. The notebook will be the official record of the day’s activity, but the cards will be the tools that permit the team to move the group to the next step in the process.

That next step is the actual ranking process, where the team learns the relative economic status of every household in the community. The facilitator will begin by choosing three of the cards and asking participants whether the three households are equally well off. If they are, the facilitator will have to choose another couple of cards and ask the same question. If they are not, the facilitator will ask a volunteer from the community to put them into separate piles. The group will then go through the whole stack of cards, one after another, deciding which pile to put each of them into. In the course of this work, they are likely to come across households that do not exactly fit into any of the piles. For example, they might come across a family much wealthier than any of the initial three. In such cases, they will simply add a new category, or pile. By the activity’s end, they might have five or six or even seven separate piles, each of which represents a distinct level of wealth.

If, at the end of the activity, the facilitator feels that there are too many cards in any one of the piles, he will go through that pile again, asking participants to split the households it contains into two groups. What is most important, at least for the program for the ultra poor, is that all the poorest households in the village end up in one of the bottom two piles, because it is those two piles that BRAC field staff will concentrate on for initial and final verification.

While almost everyone is ranking the households, the team asks another volunteer to copy the map that they have drawn onto paper, so it can form part of the meeting’s permanent record. The map will be filed in the office, and can help BRAC staff, especially supervisory staff, to find members’ households.

The information that’s gained through PWR is not 100% reliable. Program staff will have to follow up with two sets of home visits to gather and verify the detailed information necessary for selecting program participants well. But the PWR is a valuable step in the process nonetheless.

First, it is a valuable starting point. The team collects information that can guide their further work. They don’t have to start from zero. They don’t have to go to every house as they would if they had to start the process with home visits directly.

Second, it helps protect the program from the jealousies it inevitably engenders. A certain few households in the community are being selected to receive substantial support. Having defined people’s level of wealth at a public meeting can make it easier to explain why some people receive support and others don’t.

Finally, it usefully raises the presence of extreme poverty as an issue before the community’s eyes. BRAC will not be able to provide all the support and protection that the ultra poor will need to lift themselves out of poverty. The women who are finally chosen will need their neighbors’ encouragement and support as well. Eventually, BRAC will help the community organize a poverty reduction committee, whose mission will be to provide the extra support and advice that program participants need. In including everyone in the selection process is one way of reminding them that there are terribly poor people in their midst.

May 27, 2010, Rangpur, Bangladesh

Nomichha used to work as a servant in her neighbors’ households. They wouldn’t really pay her, but they would give her some food, and between that and the few taka her husband could earn working other people’s land, they would do the best that they could for themselves and their child.

Then BRAC came into their lives.

BRAC is the world’s largest NGO, a comprehensive development agency that was formed in Bangladesh in the wake of independence in the early ‘70s. It now employs over 100,000 people in countries across south Asia and Africa in its broad array of anti-poverty programs. Fonkoze sent three Haitians and me to Bangladesh for a month to study one of those programs – it’s called “Targeting the Ultra Poor” (TUP) – because it is the model for CLM, Fonkoze’s approach to addressing extreme poverty. BRAC will be providing extensive technical assistance as Fonkoze scales-up its program to reach many more families. BRAC is especially known for its capacity to do things not only well, but on a large scale.

BRAC’s TUP team came to Nomichha’s village just over a month ago. They held an open meeting, inviting the local population to help them identify the ultra poor households among them. After verifying what they learned at that meeting, they sent a caseworker to each of the selected households to describe the program to the prospective participant. She would receive training in running an income-generating activity and then be given the assets she would need to get the business started. She would get a daily stipend to buy food for several months. That would enable her to give up working in other households so she could devote herself to her new business. She would also gain free access to essential healthcare services. Most importantly, she would receive weekly visits from her caseworker, who would provide extensive additional training for two years as she built up her new livelihood.

When she heard that BRAC was willing to give her two cows, she was a little afraid. At first she decided not to take them. She had heard rumors that BRAC would force her to convert to Christianity. But her neighbors and family spoke to her, and they convinced her that the rumors weren’t true. So she took the cows, and has been caring for them for a month.

BRAC offers the women served by TUP a wide range of assets to choose from: various sorts of livestock, small plots of land to farm, merchandise to create a small business. But Nomichha can’t really tell you why she chose cows. She’s still very shy. Her neighbors answer most questions for her.

She’ll have a lot to do to graduate in two years: build up her business and her confidence as well. But BRAC gives her a proven road to travel, and dedicated and experienced staff to lead her on her way.

The difference between Nomichha and Mazeda is dramatic. Mazeda is a graduate of the TUP program, having joined it in 2006. She tells a similar story of her life before TUP. She was a domestic servant, doing odd jobs for food in her wealthier neighbors’ homes. “I had a miserable life,” she says, “full of problems.”

BRAC gave her one cow and two goats, and she quickly got her dairy business up and running. She now has two cows and a calf, and is selling two cases of milk per day. She eventually sold the goats because she wanted to invest the money in a rice business instead. “I had learned how to process rice from a neighbor, but I never had the money I needed to start a business myself.” She buys raw rice from farmers and then processes it to be sold in the market. She built her own house with 12,000 takas (about $170) that she earned from her businesses, and leased farmland for 20,000 takas so she can grow some rice herself. She has 3000 takas in savings as well.

BRAC’s program is designed not just to provide extremely poor people with some income, but to fundamentally change their lives, and Mazeda is a great example. “I’m a different person in my village now. People respect me. They come to me for advice, even for small loans.”

We explained to Mazeda why we had come to Bangladesh, and asked her whether she had advice for the Haitian women we would be serving. She asked us to tell them three things, “You need to work hard, listen to the advice your caseworker gives you, and take good care of your assets. Mainly, though, it’s hard work.”

Meeting her, and other TUP graduates, is enormously helpful as we look to make our program in Haiti expand. We don’t have a lot of graduates in Haiti just yet. The pilot of our program served only 150 families. Seeing so many graduates, and hearing their stories, gives you a sense of the scale our program is capable of. It is possible to eliminate extreme poverty for more than a lucky few. One village after another, BRAC is eliminating it from Bangladesh entirely. Though we are not ready to bring the program to such a scale in Haiti, seeing it before one’s eyes gives good reason to hope.

More than 50% 0f Haitians live on less than $1 a day. And one of the most striking things about that fact is that most of the people who make up that roughly 50% are not what Haitians themselves would call “poor”.

It’s not that their lives are easy. Those lives are constantly at risk because of the fragility of the livelihoods that support them. In better times, many such Haitians might manage to eat a good meal once a day, maybe even twice. They might eat enough to stay reasonably healthy much of the time, and to ward off the worst hunger pangs. But it’s hard to have a back-up plan when you’re living on the edge. An illness, an accident, a little bad weather: It doesn’t take much to transform difficult lives into misery.

When I say they are not poor, then, I am, in a sense, playing a game with words. The Creole word “pòv” is generally reserved for those whose state is really wretched. There is another word, “malere” for those who are merely badly off. And most of those living on less that $1 a day are probably malere, not pòv. At least until the next disaster strikes. But the word game has a point. The hard reality is that there are also lots of Haitians, many too many, whose lives are worse than bad.

Fonkoze’s programs, especially its credit programs, are mainly for Haiti’s malere. The malere badly need access to the Fonkoze’s services to improve lives that badly need improvement. But from the moment they enter Fonkoze, they already have the wherewithal to make use of the help Fonkoze can provide. If they are entering directly into standard solidarity group credit, they already have a business that the money they borrow will add to. Even if they are entering into Fonkoze’s Tikredi, or “Little Credit” program, which was designed especially for families that aren’t ready for standard loans just yet, they start with an idea for a business and the determination to succeed.

But Fonkoze knew that it could not be satisfied with itself as long as its reach could extend only to Haiti’s malere. Those whose need for change is greatest are those whom its credit programs could never help. They are the poorest of the poor, the extreme poor, and their lives are difficult to understand or even to conceive.

They are landless, without crops to harvest or businesses to invest in or livestock to sell or consume. They have no income-generating assets at all. They eat what they can, when they can, but neither regularly nor well: a few abandoned mangoes might feed them on one day. They might get to glean a cup of corn in exchange for farm work in a neighbor’s garden on another. They go days at a time without ever having reason to light their fire. Their homes provide no shelter. With every rain that falls, they are sure to get wet. Their children are not in school, and may not be at home either. They may have been sent to live with other families in the hopes that they will at least be fed. What’s worse is that Haiti’s extreme poor live without hope, without imagining that they can change their lives. These households, mostly led by women, are locked in a cycle that starts bad and gets only worse.

Fonkoze’s leadership made a commitment years ago to find a way to serve these especially poor families, so they looked around the world at other institutions that have discovered approaches that work.

They founded what they were looking for in Bangladesh. An organization named BRAC had developed an approach that depends on teaching people to manage an income-generating activity and then giving them the assets they need to start their own. It’s a two-year process that depends on very close accompaniment. Program participants get visits once or twice a week from case managers who provide coaching and encouragement.

Fonkoze piloted the program in Haiti for 150 families with BRAC’s help. We call the program CLM, short for “Chemen Lavi Miyò,” or “the Pathway to a Better Life.” Results were excellent. 142 of the families were self-supporting within two years. The pilot demonstrated that, even in as difficult and dysfunctional an environment as Haiti, allowing families to suffer such misery is a choice. We can do something about it. They live that way because we are not sufficiently committed to change.

Fonkoze is now ready to dramatically expand the program. It has hired four new field managers to work beside the one already in place, and is preparing 20 new case managers. We will begin serving 1000 new families right away.

I will be one of those field managers. I left the Marigo branch on Saturday, and on Sunday flew to New York. Monday my three Haitian colleagues and I got visas from the Bangladeshi consulate, and are now on our way for a month’s training with BRAC in Bangladesh. I have seen CLM a number of times over the past couple of years, usually as a translator for Fonkoze’s visitors. I look forward to developing a team of case managers who can succeed at this most important work.

But the stakes are troublingly high. In Marigo, our team was working with women many of whom were just a hair’s breadth from misery. An error or an accident could have brought them to disaster at any time. The women in CLM, however, are already suffering the worst sort of misery. CLM is very simply a matter of life and death. I will owe it to them to keep their danger constantly in mind.