Today we congratulate Figaro Pierre

 

Today we congratulate our student Figaro Pierre, who graduated in bookkeeping & accountancy. Due to the schools closing becaue of the political situation in Haiti in 2019 first and then because of the pandemic in 2020, it was no easy ride to finally reach this milestone. 

    

Figaro, we are very proud of you and so glad that you finally made it to your diploma. Haiti can use good and professional bookkeepers and accountants very well! Good luck in the future

   

A happy face in difficult times

 Wilnick Joseph started his studies communication and journalism a year ago. He wants to become a journalist, a very important profession in a poor country like Haiti. 

We try to provide our students during their studies with tools they will need to perform their profession. For Wilnick this means obviously that he needs a computer. So when school asked the students to come with their own computer, we were happy to be able to find a nice laptop for Wilnick, thanks to Keijzer Computers in Port au Prince. 

Here we see Wilnick with his laptop: ready for the next steps in life!

Schools open up again

Schools

After being closed since April as of the beginning of August the schools of our students are opening up again. Because life for people in Haiti only gets tougher these days, we decided to continue paying them during this period half of the usual amount of the money we use to pay in normal times for food and drinks. Since they went back home they did not need the whole amount, but by providing half of it, we tried to help their families that, because of lock downs, were not able to earn money as usual.

While the schools started already later than normal, due to the riots in Haiti last year, the students effectively only went to school between December and April. Three of our students were due to graduate in July and August, which was delayed as well. They are now planned to graduate between November and February. How things are organized for the 2 students who were in their first year is not clear as yet. 

We hope everybody will be able to pick up their schooling and we wish all students a productive and healthy extended academic year 2019/2020. 

 

Start ups

 

We already mentioned the opening up of our first start up: the cybercafe. As usual in Haiti things are not as easy as they should be, so there were several challanges to conquer:

• Because of the lockdown of the schools business was not building up as fast as expected - students are an important part of the clientele 
  
• They ran out of toner, and then it appeared that transportation of refill kits for the laserprinter from the USA was impossible because of services suspended due to Covid19
• For this reason we were obliged to buy an inkjet printer in Haiti. 
• With clientele picking up, more ink was needed for the inkjet, and now it appeared that a refill service for that was not anymore available in town, so this had te be ordered from elsewhere in Haiti, but delivery times were much longer than usual because of Covid19. For this reason the cybercafe had to temporarily close again. From the beginning of September we expect them to be in business once more.

In the mean time we are calling for plans from our other former students to set up a small business. We will lend them the money to startup. We received already 4 plans, most of them to set up a little shop. We are observing that the plans are intelligently trying to find an unique selling point or some other way to start with a promising formula. With every one we will work out a small business plan and a path to pay off their debt. In the mean time we learn about the challenges to set up a smal enterprise in Haiti from the experiences of the cybercafe, which we can and will use for the next projects.

 

Latest News

 

On August 23 Haiti was hit by the tropical storm, called Laura. Fortunately this time the south of the country was not in the route, so damage was not big this time. Hopefully things stay quiet for the rest of this hurricane season.

 

Call for donations

As you see our Stichting Studiehulp Kay-Kok is still very much alive and kicking. So we would be very glad if our sponsors that did not contribute so far, would be willing and able to do so once more. At the upper left side of this post you can find how to make your contribution to our project. On behalf of the students and the start ups we want to thank you for that.

 

Now open: Cybercafé Websterline, multi services

It is official! After 1 1/2 years of developing plans, collecting equipment, sending it to Haiti, waiting for the riots to stop, finding and renting a suitable place, nearly opening up, but being challenged again by the virus pandemic, an immense quantity of patience and perseverance we can finally announce it:

Cybercafé Websterline, multi services 

 is in business now 

We are very proud that today we are able to bring this very good news from Haiti. 
As already announced in our Policyplans 2019 and 2020 our goal is to help our students to become economically independent. Good schooling is not enough for that in poor Haiti. So we decided to figure out how to help them to start their own small businesses. They have to come up with their own, realistic plans. We check the plans and help them to develop them further and to find possible investors. 
Cybercafé Websterline is the pilotproject for this new branch of our project. We are more than proud that we can announce the opening up of this first start up and we want to share with you what it looks like 

 

 

Cybercafé Websterline offers its clients a variety of services: there are several fully equipped laptops available, there is a high qualiy color laserprinter, you can laminate up to A3 format documents and: thanks to the small generator there is always current available.

In the future the services ill be extended with several more options.

But the best Cybercafé Websterline has to offer is its competent and very friendly staff: 
our former student Websterline and her brother Edisson. They are ready to help the clients with a smile to everything they need

The first clients know already where to go best.
We wish Cybercafé Websterline many more clients and a flowering business

Policy Plan 2020

Policy Plan 2020
Stichting Studiehulp Kay-Kok

Board: Mw. J. du Bois-Minholts, president

Mw. L.M. Kuijer, secretary

Mw. R. van der Kroef, treasurer

Website: http://ileavache.blogspot.com/

Email address: reinhildevdk@gmail.com

Bank : NL06TRIO 0391025457

Address: Jensemaheerd 147, 9736CK Groningen, The Netherlands

Postal address : Postbus 1485, 9701 BL Groningen, The Netherlands

Telephone: + 31 654786602

RSIN: 8555.41.143

The project in numbers

Tested in 2015	98
Qualified in group A	20
Group A (adjusted¹) by 2019	18
Admitted  2015/2016	6
Admitted 2016/2017	3
Admitted 2017/2018	4
Admitted 2018/2019	3
Admitted 2019/2020	2
Total admitted by December 2019	18
Still awaiting admittance group A	0
Graduates 2016	3
Graduates 2017	4
Graduates 2018	3
Graduated 2019	3
Total graduated by July 2018	13
Expected graduates 2020	3
Total graduates by 2020	16
2019 last 2 admitted of group A	2
Total to be graduated by 2021	18
Group B 2015 (not all qualified)	44
Group B adjusted by final 2018	29¹

  

 ¹ Due to migration, death, illness, not yet finished secondary school, study does not fit in our goals

Who, what, where, how?

1. Our goal is to fund as of 2015 during 5 years, the vocational schooling of maximum 10 students per year. We decided to open up our program for the academic year 2019/20 again for training courses that take maximum 2 years. This obliges us to use the academic year 2020/21 to let the last students in our program graduate. Funding is mainly found in our personal social network. Though we would be grateful to find also institutionalized sponsors (like schools and enterprises) that are willing to financially adopt one or more students, it appears that this is very difficult. We tried this several times, but failed so far. Of course we will grab any opportunity to broaden our financial basis, and we will keep on looking for this kind of sponsors, but on the other hand we have to be realistic about on what we spend our limited time and energy. So in the first place we focus on keeping those sponsors we have.
2. A second mission, that is directly connected to the first will get more attention in the years to come. We want to help our graduates to become self employed, which we consider with our actual knowledge of Haitian society, the only way for them to create a perspective on a more or less regular income and independency. The initiative of a general business plan has to come from themselves. We can help them subsequently to turn this into a real business plan, that will be used to find sponsors, loans and (micro-) credits for their project. The plan should be realistic (taking into account Haitian possibilities and limitations), it should be based on some kind of a marketing research to convince sponsors of its future creditworthiness, it should use skills they acquired during their training and it should lead to some sort of regular income. We will advise them in the development process and try to find sponsors and/or (micro-) credits. The first startup that is just to be launched in 2020 will function as our pilot in order to learn how to start a small business in Haiti. Some of our sponsors already committed themselves to this new branch of our project. 
3.  In order to make this aforementioned transition in the coming year we must adjust the goals of our foundation. The intention is to realize that in 2020. The change will include a formulation like: “The Foundation not only aims to offer young people from Ile a Vache vocational training,  but also to do everything (in the material sense and immaterially) that will be helpful to help them establish their own small business to enable them to earn a reasonable income with their acquired skills and become independent in due time.” The intention is to make this transition again work during 5 years.

Objectives 2020

A. Objective in 2020 is to continue with the 5 students from Kay-Kok, Ile a Vache to their vocational training courses in the city of Les Cayes. By the summer or autumn of 2020 3 of them will graduate. We will continue with the last 2 students for another academic year. This is especially targeted on the last 2 students from group A to enable them to finish their (2 year-) studies in 2021. Since we have some bigger sponsors that already committed themselves for a few more years, we are confident we will be able to accomplish our mission.

B. This means that in the academic year of 2020/2021 we will not start up a new group of students in order to close our educational program by 2021. Though in our original tests we had more groups formed, we believe that the achievement to help all suited people from the best tested group A will be the right moment to end the educational branch of our project.

1.     In the first place we come to this decision because it is according to the goals of the Foundation from the start the intention to run this program during 5 years.

2.     In the second place the rest of the list of candidates is not actualized anymore, so to continue there should be an entirely new round of testing.

3.     In the third place we encountered the problem that our graduates, in spite of their good diploma’s still don’t find suitable jobs. Since the last has been the underlying intention from the start of our program, we think, that instead of financing more young people to get a diploma with no perspective on work, we better start now to help the ones we invested already in to become independent.

C. As to the housing: we try to encourage the remaining 2 students to find their own places to stay, while the rented house is far too expensive to keep for 1 student (the other one already has found her own place). For those finding a place themselves we cover a fixed amount of expenses.

D. We are setting up an inventory of our (13) graduates about their actual employment situation.  So far the outcome is not very promising: nobody had found a fixed job.

E.  Set up the first startup (the cybercafé) of our graduates, to enable them to become self employed and financially independent. To learn how to do this in Haiti, what challenges you meet as a small entrepreneur, and how to solve problems that come up. To encourage other former students to follow the example.

F.  To prepare to set up more startups next year.

G. To explore the possibilities to set up our own small micro credit facility for our ex-students in order to enable them to start their own small businesses.

H. To explore the possibilities to transfer the small micro credit affair to become part of our first startup: the cybercafé, with which we hope the cybercafé to become in due time a kind of community service point (as already foreseen in the original business plan).  

Finance

For the academic year 2019/20, we had available + € 9200,-- from donations, of which by December 2019 we spent around € 5200,--. Based on our experiences so far the cost per person per year should be set on € 1600,-- (+ $ 1700, --), which leaves € 4000,-- for the second half of the academic year of which about 50% has already been paid for. The expenditures for the academic year 2019/2020 are thus covered.

We want to collect an amount of € 6.000,-- through the focused approach of individual supporters/sponsors (small businesses, Dutch schools and individuals) for the academic year of 2020/2021. This amount should be sufficient to cover the tuition, living, housing etcetera for the 2 remaining students ( €3200,--) in the academic year 2020/2021, to setup 1 or 2 startups  and to keep a reasonable buffer (together 2.800,--). 

Remuneration policy continued

The Board nor any other person in any way involved in the Stichting Studiehulp Kay-Kok receives remuneration or compensation for their work from the funds of the foundation. Our onsite collaborator or her representative receives for her work nor a reward or compensation of the Foundation (see also under "our local collaborator” in the Annual Report). She only gets $ 15,-- per month to cover the costs of data credit in order to keep up our regular and intensive communication.