Microloans Fight Rural Poverty: Haiti

The Hillside Agriculture Program (HAP), works with rural farmers in Haiti to create sustainable benefits for them. With funding support from USAID, the program aims to:

• Improve agriculture practices;
• Promote business development services, in hill side farming.

This paper elaborates on the methodology and impact of HAP, which uses a market-based approach, treating the hillside farm as a business unit, and aims to increase productivity by improving:

• Resource management;
• Agricultural production;
• Post-harvest technologies;
• Marketing systems.

Further, the paper describes:

• The problems faced by hillside farmers in selling coffee beans, as the regional coffee cooperatives could not purchase them due to lack of access to credit;
• This deadlock was removed by HAP extending a loan guarantee to a local non governmental lending organization, which covered all loans provided to coffee grower associations.

Commenting on the other activities of HAP, the paper notes that HAP:

• Trains farmers in appropriate farming techniques and technologies;
• Supplies them with the latest market information;
• Distributes cultivate fliers with pictures for the illiterate.

The paper concludes that even a marginal increase in the income level of rural farmers can bring about a significant change in their living standards.