Assessing Innovations in Microfinance: Improving the Health of Haiti's Poorest

This project is devoted to assessing the health of children in an innovative microfinance program being piloted in Haiti. Our evaluation will be among the first to examine health changes of the extreme poor participating in a program of this kind. We are working with Fondasyon Kole Zepòl (Fonkoze), a microfinance organization that serves the rural poor of Haiti. We are designing and conducting a pilot study of health among clients of a program called Chemen Lavi Miyò (CLM), which prepares the poorest in three areas of Haiti to participate in microfinance. CLM provides 50 women with an income-generating asset, such as a few chickens, a goat or a small business, as well as provide social services such as social awareness education and access to free health care. After graduating from CLM, participants will be prepared to join a standard microfinance program.

Evaluation of the CLM program will be crucial as Fonkoze expands the program to reach 5,000 participants in the coming years. In addition to evaluating the fiscal impacts of such programs on clients, it is important to evaluate the program's health effects because clients’ basic health needs must be met in order for them to fully take advantage of microfinance services. Fonkoze plans to evaluate the health of CLM participants, but it has limited resources to carry out a thorough and well-designed study. The extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure in rural Haiti pose logistical as well as ethical constraints upon Fonkoze’s evaluation methods.

During the spring of 2007, team members Jon Snowden, Richard Lowe, Rita Hamad, and Jade Benjamin-Chung designed survey instruments for the study. In the summer of 2007, Jade Benjamin-Chung, a UC Berkeley Master of Public Health student, traveled to Haiti to collect baseline nutritional data and disease incidence data on children of CLM clients. CLM will be piloted for 18 months and will conclude during the winter of 2008. We need funding to support two more students to return to Haiti in the summers of 2008 and 2009 to collect follow-up data to determine whether children’s health improves as their mothers progress through the CLM program.

CLM is unique in that it specifically serves members of the community identified as the “poorest.” While microfinance has been praised widely for its ability to decrease poverty and improve the lives of the poor, it has also been criticized for helping the “poor” but failing to reach the “poorest.” The distribution of microfinance services in Haiti is a prime example of the disparity in access to services amongst subgroups of the poor. The majority of microfinance services are offered to people living in urban areas, leaving rural areas, where poverty is the most extreme, devoid of access to microfinance services. As CLM proceeds, Fonkoze may conduct a larger randomized control trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the program; the results of our pilot study would be an important aspect of designing this larger study.

Required resources:

1. Total project needs: $5,000
2. Other:

   We need funding to support two students to travel to Haiti during the summers of 2007 and 2008 to collect follow-up data.