#zafen

Katleen Félix, M.Sc.

President, Haitian Hometown Associations Resource group - www.haitiresourcegroup.org

Consultant – Finance, microfinance and remittance product design.  

Ms. Katleen Félix has more than a dozen years of experience in corporate finance and more than 20 years experience in community leadership. For 7 years she was the Director of Projects and the Liaison Officer at Fonkoze, the largest microfinance institution in Haiti. She is a founding member of the program and website named Zafèn (www.zafen.org), offering the Haitian Diaspora the opportunity to finance online SMEs and social projects in Haiti.

 We are proud to have katleen Felix among the KWS Montreal Speakers

By Katleen Felix

How can we improve the performance of our investments in Haiti? That’s the question that was confounding the Diaspora when the concept behind Zafèn was born. For decades, family and friends have supported relatives, businesses and social projects “back home” in the beautiful Caribbean towns we left for many different reasons, yet still love and always will.

Remittances between $100 and $300 per month are a constant, and the Diaspora wanted to do more. The pivotal moment came April 18,2009. More than one hundred Haitians living on the island and Diaspora now residing in Boston, New York and Miami were participating in a video conference with the Inter-American Development Bank and other partners that addressed financial literacy and investment in Haiti. Great ideas were flying across the airwaves.

Pierre Labaze, a Haitian New Yorker, was one of the strongest advocates for creating a Kiva-like financing platform exclusively for what we now call small growing businesses or small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Haiti. A year later, it was launched, and this month, we are so proud to celebrate Zafèn’s third anniversary!

It has truly taken a village to make it happen. After that pivotal meeting, Barbara Magnoni of EA Consultants who co-authored a report on Person-to-Person lending, and I began looking for grants. The Haitian Hometown Associations Resource Group backed the idea. Anne Hastings, CEO of Fonkoze Financial Services, introduced the International Vincentian Family to the mix. The stars aligned, and together, we established an online funding source to stimulate collaboration between Haiti-based business owners, the Haitian Diaspora and caring people everywhere interested in developing the Haitian economy.

For the past three years, Zafèn has been presenting businesses and social projects to the public that have been screened for their potential viability and likelihood of contributing to Haitian economic empowerment. Due diligence is conducted by business analysts who work for Fonkoze, an alternative bank for the poor with offices across Haiti. The analysts submit the proposals to a committee for evaluation. Approved projects are posted at zafen.org to attract funding.

Congratulations to Zafèn for three glorious years of empowering Haitians!

To get involved, visit Zafèn to review great opportunities. Make a loan or donation, and join the conversation on  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Meet Grazuéla Jean, one of Zafen's team of Business Analysts. Grazuéla is from Jérémie which is the capital city of the department of Grand’Anse.

We asked Grazuéla to tell us a bit about her job:

It is good to work in Zafèn since it allows me to meet some great people all over the department. I like all parts of my job but the most interesting part is when I meet clients and they tell me what they do and their needs.

Some of them maybe face some issues to run their business but they try as hard as they can to do their best to overcome those issues and continue running it. In order words, they know what they do with great skill despite their limited means. They are fighters and I learn a lot from them, too. 

With little they have, they create positive impacts in their community and they are the ones that work in the national production field. Then, when they find a loan from Zafèn they have the opportunity to increase their activities and get more people involved in business activity for the benefit of their community which is a sign of economic development. I admire their effort.

With Zafèn service they are able to help so many.

Meet Josue Myrtil, another one of our hardworking Business Analysts.

Josue was born in Cap-Haitien and grew up in Port-au-Prince. He's currently working for Zafen in the southern region of Haiti, "Les Cayes".

In his own words, "The best part of my job is when I have meetings with different organizations or associations in the area of Les Cayes that are happy to hear me talking about Zafen and how Zafen can help them and their community.

My favorite Haitian proverb is "chita pa bay" which translates roughly to you gain nothing by sitting around."  

We have just 2 days left to seek funding for the amazing women of AMURT-HAITI. These women need a loan for materials for the products they make and sell, including peanut butter and jams.  

The 35 women in this group all lost practically everything in the earthquake and are eager to restart fresh. Their new business will also have a trickledown effect on the local vendors and past Zafèn clients via acquisition of the raw materials.

Click here to learn more about this project and to loan money.

Brian Iniguez with a Fonkoze client.

Where are you from?

I am Canadian-Ecuadorian. I have lived in Cuenca, Ecuador and Toronto, Canada, but I have spent the majority of my life in Canada.  

Where do you go to school?

I am in the International MBA program at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto.  My focus is on International Business and Finance. 

How did you find out about Fonkoze?

The International MBA program that I am enrolled in requires that every student complete an internship in their respective regions of specialization. My region is Latin America and the Caribbean.

This being said I had to find an organization within my region and I have always been interested in international development so I began to inquire about companies involved in economic development within the Latin American and Caribbean region. 

Then luckily one day an alumnus from my program working with MEDA came to do a presentation on the organization and some of their partners, with one of them being Fonkoze. He also informed me that another student from our program just a few years ago had done an internship with Fonkoze as well.  After doing some more research and speaking with the previous intern I was convinced that Fonkoze was an organization that I would love to work for so I went through the whole application process and now I’m here and loving every minute of it!

What have you done during your internship?

During my three month stay here I have been working with the Business Development, Special Loans, and Zafen divisions of the organization.  The purpose of the work has been to try and come up with a strategic plan to integrate the financial services within Fonkoze even further and to uncover other opportunities in order to grow the suite of financial products Fonkoze currently offers. 

As it turns out, Business Development was facing some of the biggest and most pressing challenges relative to the other two divisions, so I have spent most of my time working within this division.  Within Business Development I have worked with the new director in conducting analysis and evaluation on how to restructure this division in order to ensure a sustainable profit.  I have specifically worked on new supervision, monitoring and incentive structures to implement within the division and I made a presentation to Fonkoze’s Board of Directors regarding the proposed restructuring.

Within the Special Loans division I have had the opportunity of helping to organize and participate in a focus group with the “Madam Saras,” which are Haitian women traders who buy merchandise to bring back to Haiti for resale from places such as Miami, New York, Panama, and even as far as Taiwan and China!  This is truly incredible given many of them only know how to speak Haitian Creole and they are going off to far away foreign countries and negotiating deals on merchandise being purchased.  The purpose of the focus group was to explore ways in which the Special Loans division can further enhance the financial services product it currently provides to the Madam Saras. The main constraint right now is that the demand from the Madam Saras is so high that the available supply of financing at the moment cannot meet the demand without posing significant business risk to Fonkoze.  I have been working with the Director of Special Programs on options to expand this portfolio without incurring further business risk.

Within Zafen, the purpose of the work is to identify clients who have graduated from the zero-interest funding program to the Business Development division that charges clients an interest rate that is competitive within the Haitian market in order to help them enter the formal Haitian economy and turn into bankable clients.

What’s your proudest moment at Fonkoze?

My proudest moment at Fonkoze was being asked to make a presentation to the Fonkoze Board of Directors on the Business Development division, more specifically on the proposed plan to restructure the division and the change in strategy.  I was very excited and honoured to present to the Board of Directors given most members on the board are very well distinguished and well known individuals within the microfinance industry.  It was also gratifying to know that upper-management had the confidence in my abilities to allow me to present to the Board of Directors.

The presentation went very well and the proposal to make this strategic change was approved. At the end of the presentation, Father Joseph, one of the principal founders of Fonkoze, asked me what my commitment was to Fonkoze.  I did not quite understand what he meant so I repeated the question back to him to ensure I had heard him correctly and he stated that yes, I had heard correctly. I told him that I would be here until August 18th, which marked my three month commitment of my internship. He then asked me if I would reconsider and stay longer. I told him and the rest of the Board that as much as I would like to stay longer and work on implementing this structural change, I had to head back to finish my MBA program. 

As if asking them to spend a sweltering summer working in Haiti weren't enough, we asked our interns another favor. Tell us about it! Here's our first response, from intern Jacqueline Ackerman of Fonkoze's Zafen project. Thanks, Jacqueline! Look out for more Q&As on our blog in the coming weeks.

Here, Jacqueline (second from left) works with Zafen's senior business analyst (far right), a fellow intern, and a bakery manager (far left) to talk about how his business in Croix-des-Bouquets is doing and see how Zafen can help.

Where are you from? 

I'm from Haiti and the US. I was born in the US but my family moved to Haiti when I was a baby, and I grew up here. I moved back to the States, specifically Indiana, when I graduated high school. I have been working and studying in Indiana ever since, although I hope once grad school is done to move back to Haiti or at least out of the States.

Where do you go to school?

I am a grad student at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. I'm studying comparative and international affairs, policy analysis, and nonprofit management.

How did you find out about Fonkoze?

When I lived here, my school educated its students about different initiatives throughout the country, and I remember them bringing in people to tell us about Fonkoze and its work in Haiti. Fonkoze has been on my radar ever since!

What have you done during your internship?

I'm the Zafen program intern, and do basic program support work like editing profiles for projects to be funded. Zafen provides a platform for lenders to give zero-interest loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are trying to grow jobs or have some other type of positive community impact. The SME sector is defined differently depending on the country, so a lot of my work here involves creating a catalog and a database of Haitian SMEs in order to better define the sector here. It involves a lot of travel all around the country, which means I have been able to see many places that I never went in all my years growing up here.

What’s been your favorite experience in Haiti?

I would have to say that my favorite experiences in Haiti have been all of the traveling and site visits I have been able to do during my time here.  When I lived here, I traveled a little but but I feel like I never went to many places besides as a tourist.  I have loved being able to meet people who are sincerely motivated to help their country recover and help their communities by providing jobs and other services.  Through meeting regular, everyday citizens that are working hard to help each other, I have really been encouraged and my impression of Haiti's recovery has become much more positive than it was previously.

What’s your most valued moment at Fonkoze?