Spreading the News Perfect Opposites trailer

My toughest job this side of the equator is finally over. Melanie and I have worked hard to create a newsletter detailing our projects and goals. You can check it out by clicking on the tab on the left entitled “Newsletter.” It was a great experience and I struggle to even really call it work. I was so excited to share what we’ve been doing with those who have been supporting us, especially the community of Mary Washington, our families and current donors.

It was, surprisingly, more of a struggle than I thought it would be to get some hard copies printed. With scarce resources and our clients’ financial well-being in the back of our minds, Melanie and I carefully researched copy centers to find the least expensive ones. We had hoped to forge a partnership and perhaps get discount with one store…alas, this turns out to be a bit more difficult than we thought. Instead, we used the university’s copy center and decided to work to create a partnership for future publications.

Enjoy!

Almost There…

In fifty days, the La Ceiba team will board our flight to San Pedro Sula, ready to transform our theories into action. With just three weeks left before our semester ends, we have plenty to do before heading home.

We have shots and malaria pills to take, surveys to translate, grants to apply for, a poverty index to create and other logistical details to decide upon. Many of these tasks are tedious, and perhaps even a bit unexciting. It’s the less sexy part of development work. Before we are can to spend a week in Honduras to reaffirm our dedication to our clients, to extend loans and establish new relationships between La Ceiba, individuals and communities, we’ve got to plan. All this planning will enable us to focus on the task at hand while we’re in the field, especially since unforseen circumstances always arise.– we learned quite a lot about this from the stove project trip last January.

I’m excited to return to Siete de Abril. Without fail, the time spent there has been my favorite part of each of my three trips.  My Spanish is not the greatest, but I’ve had the opportunity to get to know some of the families in the last three years and have both seen and heard of their high and low points that are a part of life– the births and businesses, deaths and medical problems, the struggles for land and power. At heart, Siete is a community, with all the faults, failings, joys and struggles that all communities face, although they are amplified by poverty.

I’m so excited to be able to ask the women who will receive loans what their goals for their business are: Do they want to send their child to school? Provide their families with an extra meal? Get medicine for a sick spouse or parent?  We’ll get to see the impact that the improved stove project and eco-bags have had on the community. And, of course, be able to hand the women the loans they have waited for months to receive. We’ll spend much of our time surveying the villagers, getting a better sense of their needs and assessing the impact our program will have in the future. We’ll meet with organizations in the area and establish partnerships with them.

For now, though, I’ll be helping Christine finish creating our poverty index and working on whatever odd tasks the other Board Members need me to do. We still have a lot of work left to do, but just knowing that the best is yet to come– being there and being a part of something this amazing and unique– makes it more than worth it.

The semester is coming to an end and now it is time to prepare ourselves for going into the field.  This is going to be a very unique experience for me because I have never left the country.  Therefore, I will need to prepare myself for the culture shock of being in a different country so that I will be able to be helpful to our mission while we are down there and not just completely in shock of the different ways of life in Honduras compared to America.  I have had an appointment with the medical staff here on campus to go over all the proper precautions to take medically before going to Honduras and have gotten the proper shots and prescriptions for medication to take before going.  However, I still need to prepare myself mentally for this trip as well as preparing what needs to get done while we are down there. From my part as the accounting department head most of my work is administrative in nature so not much of my specific work will be done down in Honduras therefore I will mostly be helping others accomplish their tasks such as surveys and training whether that is actually helping or occupying our clients children so they can take the surveys and go to training sessions.  Overall I think I will easily be able to handed my tasks down there with respect to just the physical aspect however I will definitely need to prepare some more for the huge culture shock of going to another country for the first time.

Without a Paddle

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot trailer

Our next sets of blogs are supposed to address getting ready for the field.  The good news is in terms of logistics, I am confident that everything is figured out for the monitoring/evaluation.  The flip side is I am still working on the particulars of what we will actually monitor/evaluate.  My work this semester has largely revolved around determining what and how we should monitor La Ceiba.  While I have completed extensive research and have a list of about ten different possibilities, I had felt at a stalemate for a while.  The reason is—I did not want to make an executive decision about something as important as how we gauge our success and failures.  I wanted input and (hopefully) a consensus from our whole team.  Fortunately, we have been able to dedicate the past class and a half to this very topic. 

• The Steam Experiment release

Our discussion in class proved very lively, and I feel that important points and questions were brought up with the whole class.  In fact, our discussion ultimately led back to our theory on economic development.  And, perhaps, that is where the blur is.  No one knows the perfect chain of causation for economic development.  However, I do not find this disheartening because I advocate that there is no perfect chain of causation.  Is it crazy to think that every individual may have a unique path to their own economic development?  I don’t think so.  I see the importance in big picture ideas, for they are the best place to start.  But, I do not see the purpose into holding onto big picture ideas when we can get the real ideas.

Here is my proposal.  All the women cite they want to participate with La Ceiba to increase their income.  But, let us ask them why? Let us have them lay out a list of goals they want to achieve with increased income.  Do they want more money to buy food, medicine, clothes or something else entirely?  And then, after a completion of a loan round, let us ask them if they progressed in reaching these goals.  That ground level, that micro-level, is where I believe the real progress lies, especially in the short term.  If we focus on helping our clients achieve success in the short term, we can then notice failures and necessary adjustments earlier.  As a result, long term success will become more viable!   

Now, this is certainly easier said than done.  And, to some extent, it has never been done.  As undergraduates, blazing a new path may seem a bit ambitious.  But, why not?  We have the time, the resources and our program is small enough that we can gauge success on an individual customized level.   This is part one of my proposal.

Part two of my proposal is to also possess a standard poverty index measure.  This would be much like Grameen’s 10 indicators of poverty, or David Gordon’s list of absolute poverty. As to what should be included in this list, is widely unknown.  No such poverty index (that we can find) has been created for Honduras, needless to say for Siete de Abril.  However, Megan is working on researching what other local MFIs in Honduras use.  Pulp Fiction film From here, we hope to develop our own.

Part three of my proposal is arguably the easiest because it has been done before.  Our “institutional measures”, in particular our success as an MFI, will be gauged using UNDP Core Performance Indicators for Microfinance.

I believe the combination of all three parts of my proposal is our best option.  That is, I propose we measure the affect of La Ceiba via: 1) how our clients reach their individual goals, 2) a poverty index customized to Siete de Abril and 3) standard institutional measures.  Even more so, I believe with careful thought all of this can be measured effectively and effeciently, I’m excited as to what insight such a broad spanning look will give us!      

• The Perfect Assistant move

The Tropical Depression

After hearing about the tropical depression that hit Honduras and seeing pictures of the flooding in El Progreso, I was up late last night really worried about our clients. Thousands of people are displaced in El Progreso and I had no idea whether or not that was any of the women we work with. Thankfully I got an email from Yapa this morning assuring me that they all were fine, but I still felt that I needed to call a few of the women to make sure.

Catching Up

I just got off the phone with Karen and Natalia. They both said their houses only had minimum flooding and it was the homes on the other side of the river that were the worst hit. Natalia’s sister lost everything–her house, clothes, and belongings. As Natalia said, “God has the power to take away anything at anytime. Thankfully we were lucky.”

We spent a few minutes catching up on what was new in our lives. Karen told me that her daughter Jessica was sick again and she had to take her to the clinic. On a positive note, however, she told me that she still gets together with Abigayl, Keyla, Reyna, and Jazmine every day to make eco-friendly bags to sell. Natalia seemed to be busy helping to take care of her sister.

La Ceiba

I then asked each of them a couple things about La Ceiba. Karen assures me that her group of Abigayl, Carmen, Maria, and herself are still ready to work together. I also asked her to do me a favor and get the missing contact information from a couple of our clients.

The big microfinance news, however, was with Natalia. She has formed a new solidarity group consisting of four women that are moving to Villa Soleada and two remaining in Siete de Abril. Natalia has had prior experience working with microfinance institutions and understands the committment it takes to be in a group. Therefore, when a few women told her that they wanted to be in her group but not until the loans arrived she said that was unacceptable and began to form her own group. They are having their first meeting together tomorrow and she said they will be ready to work with Laurie in a couple of weeks in order to prepare for the loans. I was very excited to hear the initiative Natalia took to organize the group! Tomorrow I will speak with the members of her old group to see if they would still like to work together.

Back to the Real World

The reason I mention all of this is that I think sometimes it is important to take a step back from our work in the classroom and realize how real our clients are. It seems silly, but it is something that is easy to forget when we are physically so far removed. Personally, I was busy with other things this past week and didn’t have time to call the women. It took a tropical depression for me to realize how much our clients mean to me and how much I want to see them succeed if they are willing to work hard.

The Realization

The Super

The storm also made me realize how strong of a supporter I am of our default policy. We have been going back and forth lately between a strict zero tolerance policy versus a policy where clients who default on their loans have the option to appeal to us to try and get another shot at becoming a part of a solidarity group. Ultimately the decision lies in our hands, but the idea is that if their excuse is “acceptable” then we will let them try again (with a punishment of course).

As Natalia said today, they got lucky this time. However, in the event that a natural disaster were to hit again it could very well be our clients who are suffering. Our default policy may be more costly to us, however, I think it is a cost we should take on. In the end, it is the policy that I believe gives our clients a better shot at success and at actually improving their standard of living.

On Thursday we had a guest speaker in class, Mr. Steve Meeks. He’s a business man who has had a great deal of success in economic development since retiring from his tv network. He’s done a lot of work in Sierra Leone, and has been recognized by their government for the MFI he started there, and he spoke a great deal about animal multiplication programs he’d run in New Guinea. He has a very different take on microfinance and development work than most of the people we’ve spoken to and I think there are a lot of things we need to really reconsider after speaking with him. During class he emphasized the importance of distinguishing between a business model and a charity model and realizing which side your organization was on. After hearing our plans for La Ceiba he told us we were falling squarely on the charity side and would have difficulty running a charity like a business and being sustainable. I think he’s got a point, but I still disagree with some aspects of his analysis. He said that if you go into a community and bad things happen, you can’t blame yourself for those things because you’re still doing lots of other good, and the good outweighs the bad. I agree that sometimes bad things happen that are beyond your control, but I also consider it to be our responsibility to take those things into consideration and minimize their effects. I’d like to think  that we could find a happy medium. 

Something else he discussed that really made a lot of sense was the importance of “spinning your money”, meaning getting through loan cycles quickly and getting money into the hands of other entrepreneurs right away so that you’re getting a higher return on that money over the course of a year. He said that shorter loan terms help to increase the impact of the money and reduce the default issue. His organization has loans between 2 and 6 months… we were setting ours at 6 months… but maybe we need to reconsider that… and the interest rate needs to be set by the people in the program… The case he presented for that point was strong, and I think there was a great deal of validity to it. He also said that it’s really important to be hands on in a community because people need to have constant contact with the MFI in order to maintain a sense of ownership and obligation to the organization. Interestingly, his MFI has a lot of repeat loan recipients, but he aims for  a “6 and out” philosophy, meaning that after 6 loans they’re able to seek loans from traditional banks. Apparently, this is a complicated process, but they get the real loans at the end by guaranteeing the loans for the lendees at the formal bank. Mr. Meeks said that this was a really important aspect of that transition because it helped to deal with the lack of formal identification and it prevented the person from having to offer all their property as collateral then losing it. He cited an example where a country had dismantled its hacienda system to give people land, but those people lost it back to the same people who’d had it before anyway. 

 After class I spoke to Mr Meeks a bit more about some of our concerns with defaults, domestic violence and other issues. As to domestic violence, he admitted that it was a legitimate concern and expressed an awareness of violence that has resulted from mfis, but said that we needed to realize that it’s not our fault, it will be triggered one way or the other. He also said that only by being a sustainable presence that community leaders and the government can’t ignore can an mfi have a serious impact on familial issues. We need to be sustainable to have that kind of economic power. He also said that information can be presented through videos, literature or some kind of media outlet (a popular TV show in South Africa was a successful program of this sort). He also said that we have to remember that educating the women can only do so much. It’s not women who are choosing to be assaulted or beaten or disempowered in any way. It’s the men around them who are doing it, so it’s the men’s problem. They must be dealt with if the issue is going to be affected. He said that finding a way to give the husbands an incentive to embrace positive behaviors was the key. One program that he was proud of was a goat program. Children who had perfect attendance at school would receive a goat at the end of  the year. Because the goat was valuable to families in the community, parents pushed their kids to attend class even when it was harvest season or the child was a little sick. They would get the child vaccinated and the child would see the school nurse before illnesses became severe. By giving the family a reason to send the child to school, the program ensured that the child remained healthy and got an education. By hiring a local to raise the goats during the year, the program also gave someone a job that would support their family. This is the sort of incentive structure we need to create to deal with the issues we confront in Honduras… we’ll see much better results with positive reinforcement then we can get with punitive measures. You can only do so much to punish, but there are near limitless ways to reward. 

After talking with Mr. Meeks for awhile, I really think that we need to look at the way that we approach microfinance once more. I want to be holistic and responsible, and I want to remain client-driven… but I also think that we need to put sustainability first. You can’t have an impact if you don’t exist. 

There was a lot covered, and I may have missed some, but I’ll update if there’s anything else that comes to mind. I think he’s a very valuable resource and I’m so glad he shared his perspectives with us.