This project will give poor and disadvantage women in rural Haiti the means to develop small scale sustainable businesses that will allow them to become independent while building healthy local communities. With this funding we will provide financial support, business training and motivational support to 290 women who will become local role models and will help erase gender based bias and stereotypes and other prejudices that lead to many forms of abuse of women and girls in Haitian society.
Most household of the poorest population are led by women as single parents, with the women sometimes struggling to provide for multiple children. Girls are not encouraged to pursue secondary education let alone technical careers. Although women occupy a majority of the population, they are underrepresented in all aspects of Haitian lives. Politics, white collar workforce, and businesses.
We focus lending to women owned businesses in the commerce, agriculture, and sewing sectors. We plan on starting with the 12 neediest villages in the department, and we forecast lending initially to a total of 290 businesses. We plan on initially loaning out 25,000 Haitian gourdes (HTG) (roughly 260 USD) per business. Pay back starts by the second month. After the sixth month they are eligible to increase their loan based on our assessment of the business.
Empowering Haitian women will also create role models for younger generations and help to erase gender based bias and stereotypes and other prejudices that lead to many forms of abuse of women in the Haitian society.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
