APF-- Haiti

Asosyason Peyizan Fondwa
This amazing little association in rural Haiti is one I visited in 2002. I just ran across an article on it and thought I'd pass it along. It really is amazing to hear of their progress since I've been there! They've begun their own University... [You have to start 2/3rds of the way down to get to the APF part.]

"Fr. Joseph’s dream is to create a peasant-based economic development model while constructing the mechanisms to replicate it nationally. Fondwa, his ancestral village 40 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince high in the mountains just off the road to Jacmel, is the laboratory. The dream has three primary building blocks. The first is Asosyason Peyizan Fondwa (APF), a peasant association that celebrated its 15th anniversary last May. The second is Fonkoze a decade-old grassroots microcredit lending organization. The third is the University of Fondwa that, despite the unsettled nature of the country, opened in January 2004 to coincide with the bicentennial of the republic...

New projects that are eventually to become freestanding businesses include a carpentry shop to build school furniture for the primary and secondary schools (725 students) and also for the university. A bakery was started...

When we visited in June 2003, Cuban agronomist Efrain, a white haired, reflective and serene man of noble mien, said his stock at this particular nursery had been reduced in half by a large planting the weekend before that placed over 2,000 trees. Many had gone on 60-degree slopes where parallel and level meter-wide-by-meter-deep trenches had been cut by mattock and shovel and in some places were hundreds of feet long...

The second leg of the dream is also in place, and it is the most spectacularly successful project to date. A dozen years ago, Fr. Philippe started Fonkoze as a microlending institution to serve as an “alternative bank for the organized poor,” particularly working for and with the ti machann, the street market women of Haiti....

The third and perhaps most ambitious part of the plan is to create a new “university of the mountains” to serve the three-quarters of Haiti that lives from the soil in 565 rural communities. The goal is to have three faculties: agronomy, veterinary science, and business management."

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