Sunday, December 09, 2007
Mentoring multiplied, jobs created
Madame Marie Michele Lefèvre
PWOFOD
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
”Before it was more a question of loan reimbursement, but now it is different. We see ourselves as exercising a ministry,” says a member of PWOFOD, a business affiliate in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A powerful example of someone daily living out her ministry of business is Madame Marie Michele Lefèvre.
Madame Lefèvre began a small popsicle business years ago, and, to her surprise, it grew exponentially. Today, she operates a business with 22 freezers, 40 employees, and 300 merchants, and is close to paying off her most recent loan from PWOFOD of 13,000 USD. Through her perseverance, Madame Lefèvre has affected her community by creating employment opportunities that sustain hundreds of families in Port-au-Prince.
Empowering others through employment, Madame Lefèvre developed the opportunity for individuals to rise from poverty by working. According to Beatrice Pierre, Million Mentors Coordinator of Partners Worldwide, “When a poor person comes and asks her for money, she gives that person some product and tells him or her to go out and sell. She makes salespeople out of them.” Of her 300 merchants, most arrive each morning and purchase the popsicles to sell, or, with her permission, commit to sell and pay for the inventory at the end of the day.
The profits belong completely to the merchants in her sales model. In this way, Madame Lefèvre invests in the growth of each merchant’s success. Through this arrangement, each merchant makes significantly more compared to the average earnings of Haitians working in the informal market sector.
According to Madame Lefèvre, mentoring and a better knowledge of finances are her current needs to further improve her business. In light of her experience in mentoring, Madame Lefèvre believes that the practice of mentoring should continue to grow locally and internationally through Haitian business affiliates and Partners Worldwide, respectively.
Pierre agrees that the local mentorship has positively affected Madame Lefèvre, saying, “Thanks to her mentor, Samuel Sanon, her enterprise grows and continues to grow both in term of dimension and administratively. After having made a lot of investment in machinery and equipment, she realized that she needed competent staff and the building has to be renovated. Now, her products are of far better quality than three years ago and are made in more hygienic conditions. She can compete now with any ice cream maker.”
Madame Lefèvre presently envisions a greater expansion of her business. Yet, her vision doesn’t end there. She wants mentoring to be available for the market women up the street. Mentoring has encouraged Madame Lefèvre to thrive; now she passes this along by encouraging hundreds of others to do the same.