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.