Haiti Economic Development Fund: Clinton Bush Fund Announces Haiti Business Accelerator Program

Monday, December 5, 2011

Clinton Bush Fund Announces Haiti Business Accelerator Program

The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund's grant to TechnoServe is being used to implement the Haitian Business Accelerator, which intends to transform small and growing businesses into investment-ready, bankable companies positioned to promote jobs and develop Haiti's formal economy.

The formal business sector in Haiti is small. Many small and growing companies need the business expertise and, in some cases, the seed capital, to enter into it. TechnoServe's Haitian Business Accelerator seeks to use business plan competitions to find these promising entrepreneurs, and work alongside these investment-worthy companies to provide them with practical business training.

Program Updates
Applications to participate in the upcoming Mon Entreprise, Mon Avenir business plan competition are due December 15, 2011. Interested entrepreneurs should visit www.memahaiti.org for more information.

Why We Invested in the Haitian Business Accelerator
Clinton Bush Haiti Fund's grant to TechnoServe's Haitian Business Accelerator reflects our commitment to restarting, expanding and creating small and growing businesses, while empowering individuals and organizations to transition from the informal to the formal sector.

Transforming Lives and Livelihoods
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund grant to support the Haitian Business Accelerator aims to:

•Identify and support Haitian entrepreneurs through capacity-building and practical business training;
•Facilitate access to finance for developing enterprises;
•Strengthen entrepreneurship networks by collaborating with existing institutions, ultimately strengthening the business development services sector of Haiti;
•Develop a project that will, after three years, pass the business development services it provides on to Haitian institutions.

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Haiti Economic Business Development Fund Strategy

Poverty has tightened its grip on Haiti in the last 20 years. As the country’s population booms, many of its rural poor struggle to survive on exhausted croplands. Eighty percent of Haiti’s economy, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest, is driven by female microentrepreneurs, often peddling goods in local markets. Elections in 2006 signaled an end to decades of economic and political turmoil. But for female entrepreneurs, the key obstacles to building family prosperity remain:
• Lack of production training and technology, resulting in low quality and small quantities of goods for sale
• Limited access to credit, hobbling business growth
• Inadequate business know-how • Little or no connection with potential customers nationwide and abroad

Fund Profile Sector priority: Economic Empowerment Minimum Contribution: $1
Lives to be impacted: 3,585

The Fund works to lower those barriers bringing together experienced partners such as:
• The Inter-American Development Bank of Washington, D.C., which is helping fund and design the Fund
• Femmes en Démocratie (Women in Democracy), a Haitian organization with a national track record of training and supporting female entrepreneurs. This investment will measurably improve the lives of 3,585 people.

Strategy

This Fund adopts the “One Village, One Product” regional development strategy pioneered in Japan in 1979 and replicated elsewhere in Asia and in Africa. This proven approach focuses on a single product or a small number of products well-suited for local production, and concentrates on establishing these regional specialties as exports to national or global markets. In Jacmel, this Fund has singled out three products to be made locally: handcrafted basketry, embroidered fabric goods and castor oil. The handicrafts can be sold to tourist markets in other Caribbean markets or to U.S. retailers, while castor oil is used in making perfumes and cosmetics. The Fund will work with associations of female entrepreneurs in three towns, totaling about 1,200 members.

The groups and their members will:
• Gain skills in financial management and marketing
• Develop ties with microfinance institutions for growth capital
• Improve product design, quality and access to raw materials
• Identify and sell to buyers across Haiti and beyond Lessons learned through detailed monitoring of this Fund can help spread its successes to other regions of Haiti.

Haiti Demographics
Population 8.5 million
Average annual population growth rate 1.3% (vs. 0.2% in the U.K. and 0.8% in the U.S.) Gross national income per capita: $450 (vs. $37,740 in the U.K. and $43,560 in the U.S.) U.N. Human Development Index rank

Impact

Towns targeted by this Fund are home to thriving cottage industries, making handicrafts for sale in Haiti's popular travel destinations. But political upheaval drove off the tourist trade, leaving these rural entrepreneurs struggling to find new markets. Their production suffered in quality, quantity and profitability.

Entrepreneurs survived by diversifying their products, by forming cooperatives to buy raw materials more cheaply or to fill the occasional large order and through sheer determination. Despite their long tradition of industry and their drive to earn a decent living, these rural women are still among those hardest hit by Haiti’s pervasive poverty.

This Fund provides skills and resources that will help entrepreneurs and their associations trade nationally and internationally. These efforts are designed to increase family income and standards of living for thousands of people, and to jump-start their communities’ recovery from poverty.

Haiti Economic Development Fund

Monday, December 5, 2011

Clinton Bush Fund Announces Haiti Business Accelerator Program

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Haiti Economic Business Development Fund Strategy