Annia lives in Maren, an area of Verèt, a large commune that sits along the Artibonit River in Central Haiti. She shares a small house with her two daughters, ages eleven and four. The girls’ father does not help them. “I am their mother and their father now.”

Before Annia joined the CLM program, she struggled to support her girls. She would sometimes do laundry for a neighbor or various other chores she could find to do, like shucking peanuts or beating dried beans out of their pods. “I might not always get paid with money, but at least they would give me food I could bring home.”

She also managed a small commerce. A friend of hers taught her how, at least during the right times of the year, she could by millet or corn with credit from farmers, take it to be milled, and sell the milled product for a small profit. The rest of the year, she would buy small piles of used clothing on credit, and sell individual pieces, either sitting in a spot in the market or strolling around with them in her hands and on her head.

When she joined the program, she initially decided to invest in a pig and small commerce with the funds Fonkoze would make available. But she began to feel as though the opportunities to engage in trading were disappearing because of the way gang control of the communes just west of Verèt eliminated access to the larger markets there, and so she bought goats with the money she would have used for her commerce. She ended up buying three. The purchase left her enough to buy a chicken as well.

She soon added a fourth goat. She bought it herself when she it was her turn to receive the funds from a savings club she joined using the cash stipend she was receiving for the program’s first months. It was only a very small goat. It cost just 4,000 gourds. But she’s been taking good care of it, and it is growing. One of the other ones miscarried, but another one is in the last stages of pregnancy, so she should have an additional goat or two soon.

Her pig grew quickly, but it died before she could realize all the profit from it. She was able to sell the meat, however, and she bought two very small piglets with the money from the sale. Those two pigs are now doing well.

She participates actively in her savings and loan association. At the end of the first cycle, she had accumulated more than 20,000 gourds, and she really needed the money at the time. She used most of it to pay her children’s school fees and to eliminate some old debts. She did not hesitate to continue in the association for its second cycle. She buys shares every week. She does not know yet what she will do with her savings at the end of the next cycle, but she has time to plan.

She has no doubt about her longer-term plan. “I still live on family land. I want to use the animals I am raising to buy land of my own that I can leave to my girls”

When asked about what she’s accomplished in the program so far, she is just as clear. “I used to wake up some days without any hope. I had nothing to feed my girls and no idea where I might get something. The girls would tell me that they were hungry, and there’d be nothing I could say to them. I don’t have that problem any more.”

Annia’s next-door neighbor is her sister, Fabienne. She lives in a small house with her husband, Jean Wisly, and their two daughters. She is also a CLM member, but she joined as part of a newer program, one for families not quite as poor. Rather than the whole package of accompaniments that Annia is receiving, Fabienne received only funds to invest in earning income, the chance to participate in a savings and loan association, and monthly visits from a member of the CLM staff.

It would be easy to imagine that the difference in the treatment the sisters have received could become a source of jealousy, but Fabienne says she hasn’t felt that at all. “I don’t need to feel jealous. Not everyone is at the same level.”

And her situation was different from the one her sister was facing. Her husband is a devoted father. Sometimes he goes to work in the Dominican Republic, but at home he farms as a sharecropper. “He’s not afraid to do what he has too. He’ll even sell a day of labor when that’s all he can find.” She would bring in money as well, trading in the nearby markets in Dezam and central Verèt. She had no steady commerce, but would go to the market with whatever money she had, look for something she could buy, and try to set it at a profit.

When Fonkoze offered her funds to invest to make her business grow, she chose to go in a different direction. It might have seemed natural for Fabienne just to invest in the kind of trading she was already doing, but larger trading activities in her region used to start with merchants who would buy at the important regional market in Ponsonde or even in nearby cities like Senmak or Gonayiv. But passage to all those areas has become dangerous because of a gang which has occupied Ponsonde. Commerce is difficult, so Fabienne decided to invest in livestock instead. She bought three goats with funds from Fonkoze, and used the change to purchase poultry. She eventually bought an additional goat with money that she and Jean Wisly were able to save out of what they brought in.Two of the four goats are now pregnant, so she may have more goats soon.

Like Annia, she likes saving money in her savings and loan association, and she is happy to say why. “When I save in my VSLA, the box isn’t in my hands and neither is the key. I can’t get my hands on the money, and so I can save.” She used the money she received at the end of the first cycle to do several things, including buying a pig, and she shares Annia vision for the future. “We’re living on our family’s land. My husband and I want to buy land of our own. I’ll sell all the animals I own if I have to.”

Fania is a single mother of three who lives just down a dirt path from Annia and Fabienne. Like Annia, she is a member of the program for families in the deepest poverty.

Just two of her three children live with her. Her middle child lives with the child’s grandmother. “He was the only child the man had, and when we broke up his family asked for him, so I let them take him.” She now lives alone with her two other children in a house that belonged to her late mother.

She used to support her kids with a business selling housewares. She would borrow money from her aunt, and buy her merchandise in Senmak or Ponsonde. But she gave that business up when the trip came to seem too dangerous. It got to the point that there were days when she could not feed her kids at all.

She asked the CLM team to help her buy some goats with the money it could make available to her. She bought two, and now she has six.

But she also has been able to start a new business. She lives right behind a school, and when it is in session, she sits out front making and selling fried snacks, “fritay.” Schoolchildren eat them before and after school and during recess. When the school is not in session — like now, when summer vacation has begun — she sells fried egg sandwiches. The sandwiches, called “pen a ze,” are a popular street food.

Much of the money to start the commerce came into her hands when she received pay-out at the end of her savings and loan association’s first cycle, even though much of that money went towards overdue school bills and food for the household as well. But she is excited about the second cycle. Her group is a couple of months into their one-year cycle. This time she wants to buy a cow.

Darline Tanisma is married to Michelène Etienne’s brother. The two women entered the CLM program together. They live with their husbands and children in neighboring houses in the same corner of Gwomòn, and they each have two kids, a boy and a girl. 

Before they joined the CLM program, the two families made their living the same way. The husbands are farmers, working land as sharecroppers and, sometimes, as day-laborers. The two women had small businesses selling used clothing.

Each had only about 1000 gourds of capital, which each received from her husband. They would go to the market in downtown Gwomòn early in the morning to check out the retail merchants, picking through their stock in search of items that they believed would sell well. They’d then walk around town, selling each piece. On good days, Michelène says, they’d earn up to 350 gourds of profit. Normally, they’d make about 200, now less than $3. They’d do this five days a week, taking Sundays and Thursdays off. The latter was their laundry day.

Neither family held productive assets other than the capital in their business. The surveys that were completed during the selection process by the case managers who recommended them for the program show that they owned no livestock whatsoever. Not even a chicken. 

As small as their income was, they would not normally have qualified for CLM. It’s not as though things were easy. There were days when they weren’t sure what they’d feed their families, and they had a lot of trouble keeping their children in school. But CLM is for the poorest of poor Haitians, and the two women’s steady trickle of income would have been enough to keep them out of the program.

But the CLM team saw women like Michelène and Darline as part of a population it wasn’t serving: too wealthy for CLM yet poor enough to need help. In the program’s early days, Fonkoze could have offered the women an alternative. It was called “Ti Kredi” or Little Credit, and it operated together with CLM. It consisted of a series of very small loans with short repayment periods. They were offered without the barriers the institution set for entry into its standard credit program. There was no registration fee and the required savings deposit was reduced to a token just big enough to open an account. It also came with more intense accompaniment than Fonkoze provides to standard borrowers: more frequent meetings with specially-trained loan officers who’d have fewer borrowers to manage. 

But that program no longer exists. After Fonkoze Financial Services (SFF) – the Foundation’s sister organization – took over management of all Fonkoze credit programs, it eliminated Ti Kredi. SFF is a commercial entity, and it judged Ti Kredi to be too expensive. The elimination of the program left the CLM team feeling that there was a gap between the families it was charged to serve and those capable of building stronger livelihoods through the resources available to them. 

So, CLM’s management team developed an approach that it’s calling CLML, or CLM Lite. It’s a nine-month accompaniment – compared to the standard CLM program’s 18 months. It shares some of the program’s key features: careful selection of members, a small cash stipend for a short period, a transfer of assets to build up the members’ economic activities, training, and support geared towards better health, including a water filter and access to free care. But CLML is stripped of other CLM features: the stipend lasts twelve weeks rather than 24, and there is no support for home repair except for help building a latrine.

In early conversations with the team, Michelène and Darline said that they did not need the weekly stipend. They explained that they could manage with the income from their businesses. They asked whether they could receive the money as a lump sum, and program staff agreed. They both used the money to repair their homes.

Michelène and Darline used the 3000 gourds worth of investment capital that the program gave them in the same way. They shifted their business model. Rather than picking through retail merchants’ wares every morning, they buy 4000 gourds’ worth of clothes in an unsorted pile every three days. They get the clothes much more cheaply than they used to, so they make much more off of what they sell. They may sometimes get stuck with something that no one wants, but so far that hasn’t happened often enough to affect their sense that they have taken a big step forward.

Both women diversified their investments, buying livestock. They both reached graduation with multiple goats, and Darline also bought a pig and a sheep. They also made regular weekly contributions to their savings and loan associations, with Michelène accumulating 6500 gourds in savings by graduation.

The added income has changed the way the families live. “I don’t have trouble paying for school anymore,” Michelène says, “and we send our kids to school the right way: breakfast before school, a snack or snack money in their hands, and a big lunch when they get home. They eat three meals a day.”

They have similar plans for the future. They both want to continue selling used clothes. “I like used clothes,” Darline explains, “they sell well, and you can grab something for your family now and then when you come across something they need.” But they would like to move to wholesale, buying the clothes in the large boxes that they are sent in and selling them in small piles to retail merchants, merchants like they are right now. 

The two women will continue to work on improving their lives, and the CLM team will continue to work on CLML. With very limited experience with the program, the team will need to clarify its criteria for selecting women for the program. It will also have to learn from each of the members it serve. Should it, for example, think of further reducing the stipend because these two women said they didn’t need it?