Our Approach
We believe that one of the keys to building a sustainable and prosperous Haiti lies in the promise of Social Entrepreneurships, focused on finding local appropriate solutions nourishing self-sufficiency and personal initiative.
The Programs
SELF-HELP GROUP SOLIDARITY NETWORKS
DESPRI supports bottom-up participative planning and organization of self-sufficient microcredit and empowerment women’s solidarity networks using the Self-Help Groups (SHG) methodology developed by KNH. Over the course of 6 years a total of 3,000 women members of 150 SHGs in the upper Artibonite have formed 12 associations and are managing more than 280,000 USD in self-generated loans.
Sustainable Agriculture & Environmental Regeneration
An initiative to help communities and organizations with the conservation and regeneration of fragile ecologies. Creating grassroots ecological agroforestry strategies and sustainable methods of land management. Promoting practices of watershed protection, soil conservation, and integrated water management.
Women Entrepreneurs
We build the capacities of women entrepreneurs, through the Entrepreneurship Incubation Centers (EIC) which are key to DESPRI’s hub and spoke model. The EIC is the incubation and capacity building hub, and the SHG structures are the spokes reaching into the most vulnerable and isolated rural communities. The hub identify potential women entrepreneurs and change agents, and invest in their capacities to establish and sustain businesses through rational utilization of local resources. The EIC provides training, accompaniment, consultation, microcredit access, and network opportunities. These hubs communicate regularly with the spokes through a bottom up representational structure which allows constant exchange of knowledge and support capable of impacting transformation in the most isolated rural areas.
Productive value Chains ESPRI-Sel
We believe that the development of productive value chains is key to providing sustainable solutions to Haiti’s challenges and needs. DESPRI has developed an expertise and specialization in the salt value chain, in particular the introduction of modernized methods of salt production and distribution. ESPRI-Sel (Entreprenariat Social Production Rural Intègre – Sel) is a social entrepreneurship model of salt production offering optimized harvesting yields, allowing Haiti to meet its need for iodized salt and thus eliminate the prevalent Iodine Deficiency Disorder (IDD) plaguing the country.
““The essence of cooperation, born of moving together, aims at widening or expanding the mental being of a person… Society is like a batch of pilgrims, gathering a strange power of mind in travelling together and, with its help, solving all the problems of their individual and social lives.”
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