The Tremendous Power of Women Helping Women with Jodi Fischer

When you think about the poor, the helpless, and the one who needs your help the most, what is your compassion that can best help you with? No matter how big or how small the gesture is, one act of kindness can transcend into multitudes. It is true that an individual alone cannot solve the needs of the world. But we can do something together. Jodi Fischer, Development Director of Adelante, and her team always look for ways to reach out to people below the poverty line. The foundation’s primary goal is to provide small loans and education to women in Honduras , which is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. They empower these women to achieve self-sufficiency, and that journey is what our talk will revolve around today. --- Listen to the podcast here: The Tremendous Power of Women Helping Women with Jodi Fischer Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk about helping people help themselves and giving people opportunities. My guest today is Jodi Fischer. She is the development director and a US liaison for a foundation called Adelante and Adelante is a foundation that helps women in Honduras, which is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, get small loans to start their own business. --- Jodi, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Jodi, first, I want to get the audience oriented by talking a little bit about Honduras. A lot of people know it’s one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere but probably not aware of what specifically is going on in Honduras and what’s actually preventing a lot of people there from having the opportunities to succeed that we enjoy here in the US or whatever country you’re listening from. There’s various statistics that support it’s the second to poorest country, second only to Haiti, in Latin America and that currently means nearly 70 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. There’s a lot of factors that play into that but there are some issues with the government, there is definitely things that happen that make it difficult for people to break those cycles of poverty. Essentially, and 70 percent below the poverty line, for some context, we think about the poverty line, we think about the line where you’re barely getting enough to eat every day and you’re under stress about what shelter you’re going to have. Is that an accurate way to think of it? Because I know that dollar conversions can be different for different currencies in different places. True, yes. It usually translates to living under $1.90 per day. Okay. There are different levels of poverty. I know that with Adelante Foundation, for example, we do not attempt to serve the poorest of the poor because giving them a debt burden would not be appropriate. However, a lot of the communities that we serve, people often don’t have anything but a dirt floor. They don’t necessarily have running water, they don’t necessarily have the ability to send their children to school so there’s different levels within the poverty index and we do measure those things and we do track the progress of the participants of our program over time. Tell me about the profile of a typical participant in your program. I know you provide some loans, you give them some economic opportunity to start something up. Well, 90 percent of the people that we work with are women. We will occasionally work with brothers, husbands, fathers usually recommended by women that have already participated or are currently participating in the program. They are typically considered unbankable, meaning that they cannot get a loan from a traditional financial institution and they have to be over the age of 18.Share on X So there are sometimes younger women who would like to receive support but we do want to make sure that we’re doing everything in our power also to encourage women to do education as long as they are willing and able to. And what makes someone “unbankable”? I’m guessing that’s a term that a lot of my audience is maybe not familiar with. They lack credit history. There’s a lot of people that we work with that are in peri-urban or rural areas so they may have never even attempted to get a loan. They lack any kind of ability to put down collateral and they haven’t established any kind of credit history. When they participate in our programs, they have the opportunity to establish their credit history so our goal is ultimately to give them the opportunity to not only start and grow businesses but also be able to develop a credit history so that if they want to move beyond our level of support that they will be able to do so. And so is everybody living in the US technically bankable? Is there a default bankability to anyone that’s born in the US because of, say, your parents having a credit history or something like that? Or is that a problem that many people here are not aware of and that, to become bankable, you have to somehow establish credit, which most people do when they get like their teenager job or something like that? That’s a great question. I mean, financial inclusion issues are definitely a problem here in the US as well. There are domestic microfinance organizations that exist here in the US. I know here in Colorado, we have the Rocky Mountain MicroFinance Institute, for example, so a lot of people will elect to participate in a program like that because even if they might be able to get a loan through a traditional financial institution, sometimes, it makes more sense to work with an organization that is keenly aware of the challenges that entrepreneurs who either want to start or grow a business may have so that they’re able to give them not only the microloan but also the support services, the education, vocational training, etc., that might best accompany those microloans so that we’re setting those entrepreneurs up for success. I see, because if someone were to get a loan from a standard bank, there wouldn’t really be any support services, they just, “Here’s your loan, make this payment by this day,” and if someone were to get a loan from a venture capital group, of course, there’s a little bit more leeway because they’re expecting most of their loans to fail but there are still these expectations. I know part of your program is providing some form of education to a group of people that may not really understand how business works. How does that work? Good question. I do also want to address that a lot of the women and families that we work with in Honduras, I would say, are naturally quite entrepreneurial, meaning they’ve had to struggle and they’ve seen their parents or other family members participate in some kind of enterprise in the informal sector so they understand the ethos behind a small business. Adelante has existed for over 20 years. In the past, we had education offered through assemblies, so in-person, small group gatherings. Because we have five different branch offices located throughout the country, we would have wellbeing officers or branch officers that were able to go into communities and offer these in-person, small group assemblies. That has shifted since COVID. Because we were prohibited from being able to gather clients, we did do a lot of shifting to ensure that we were getting more education material, aggregating the different types of modules that were frequently offered and starting to get them available online. We did a poll with our borrowers and we found out that over 80 percent have access to some form of technology that allows them to tune in remotely. So, we are still in the process of adding more content and looking for funding to support that endeavor but we will continue to work directly with borrowers as well to the additional things that we do is because we have wellbeing officers, it’s a term that we use instead of loan officers, wellbeing officers that work directly with our clients, our borrowers on a monthly basis so they are either visiting them physically in person and so there’s a lot of one-on-one mentoring that also happens. However, we also do a lot of suggesting that clients connect with other clients who are at different stages of their business development. So if we know that Maria down the street has a pulperia and there’s Teresa who lives less than half of a mile away and she’s just a little farther along in her business activities, we will sometimes make those connections so that women can support one another when we aren’t available to provide that mentoring and or training directly. Oh, wow. And are any of those relationships also --- is the mentor-mentee relationships some of those like business partnership relationships where it’s like, okay, well, someone has a business and this person’s business might be a natural supplier or something, business you already work with, they work together toward their goals? That happens, but I will have to say with the mentor-mentee, it depends. If they’re a peer versus someone with Adelante, we make sure that our wellbeing officers are versed in the different industries of the women that are pursuing enterprises. Are there certain types of enterprises that you tend to focus on in your organization or that you try to encourage more than others? Or are you broadly looking for any Honduran woman who has a good idea and has that aptitude that you’re looking for? We have a lot of women that are involved in a lot of different types of activities. The majority of them are in the informal sector so cottage industries. There’s a lot of, for example, retail, pulperias, I think I mentioned that earlier. They’re like little tiendas. They’re like little --- imagine like a little mini 7-Eleven,...