We are link­ing to this story not because it’s a com­men­tary on micro-credit, but because it was writ­ten by Lisa Simpson.

Yeard­ley Smith voices Lisa for the car­toon “The Simp­sons” she also has trav­eled over­sees to help with the work of the Grameen Foun­da­tion. In her com­men­tary for The Huff­in­g­ton Post, Smith recounts a recent trip to Haiti.

A month after that meet­ing, Alex and I trav­eled to Haiti to see the result of a suc­cess­ful part­ner­ship between Grameen Foun­da­tion and an MFI called Fonkoze. It was a phe­nom­e­nal trip. I had no idea what to expect. All I knew was that Haiti is the poor­est coun­try in the West­ern hemi­sphere. Indeed, it is like a for­got­ten coun­try. After decades of polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion, even its own gov­ern­ment seems to have given up on its peo­ple. In Port-au-Prince, I was struck by the mis­er­able liv­ing con­di­tions all over the city. I was stunned by the vast num­ber of peo­ple who clearly had no job to go to and sat or stood aim­lessly by the side of the road wait­ing for some­thing to change.

Fonkoze pri­mar­ily reaches out to the rural poor who are espe­cially iso­lated and dis­en­fran­chised, so we spent most of our trip vis­it­ing these bor­row­ers in the Cen­tral Plateau. Ninety-nine per­cent of Fonkoze’s bor­row­ers are women and in order to best serve them, they have devel­oped four tiers of assistance.

The first and newest tier doesn’t even involve a mon­e­tary loan. It involves giv­ing the bor­rower an asset such as a goat or chick­ens and teach­ing them how to raise them.

Ade­line lived in a mud hut with her three chil­dren, the father of whom came and went, pro­vid­ing no mea­sur­able sup­port. As a woman who lives in an espe­cially iso­lated rural area and makes less than a dol­lar a day, Ade­line was given a goat to begin her jour­ney out of poverty. She was also enrolled in an 18-month pro­gram that includes basic edu­ca­tion, bi-monthly vis­its from a Fonkoze staff mem­ber, health care, and home improvement.

While this inti­mate, hands-on approach is incred­i­bly labor inten­sive for both Ade­line and Fonkoze, I’m con­vinced it’s the rea­son the pro­gram is so suc­cess­ful. Ninety-nine per­cent of its par­tic­i­pants grad­u­ate to the next tier and receive their first micro-loan. I’m telling you, it’s one of the most fan­tas­tic phe­nom­e­nons I’ve ever had the priv­i­lege to witness.

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