Four business ideas for Haiti

1) Potable Water Business in Verrettes

By March of 2011, we should be able to start selling filtered water to the community of Verrettes. Thanks to the donation of a water system by an NGO after the earthquake and the support of Crossworld’s Haiti relief fund, we have been able to build a small retail outlet to sell clean drinking water by the gallon.

The business will be overseen by a local committee and the profits will go to support the work of AIS in the area. The committee will take care of registering the business with the local authorities (i.e. getting a “patente”). Free drinking water will be given to the school that is located on the property, and a monthly rent will eventually be paid to the campus where the building is located.

We will also start selling the Digicel services mentioned below from this location.
If this business is successful, it may provide a model for future businesses.


2) Selling Digicel Services throughout Haiti

Digicel is the largest provider of cellular phone service in Haiti. Since it entered the country in 2006 it has taken the cell phone market by storm and now holds a greater market share than its largest competitor, Voila.

In Haiti the cell phone market is mostly a pre-pay system where you have to buy a card to put minutes of use on your phone or have it electronically credited for minutes using an electronic system called “Pap padap”. We have had a contract with Digicel to sell “Pap padap” under the name of Elysee Vaillant, one of the board members of AIS Haiti, for over a year now.

Digicel is now about to introduce a new service called “Tcho tcho mobile”. This service allows the electronic transfer of money to anyone who has a cell phone at a fraction of the cost of existing money transfer services. Traditionally in Haiti, money transfer services have been a very profitable niche for companies like CAM, Western Union and major banks who charge exorbitant fees. Digicel wants to take over this market in the same way it took over the cell phone market in Haiti. This money transfer service has the potential to revolutionize the money transfer business in Haiti by allowing safe and secure financial transactions anywhere in the country. For instance, farmers in the country could receive payment for their products directly from the person buying them in Port-au-Prince instead of having to go through a middle man. As an incentive to get people to sign up on this system, Digicel is offering a bonus of 40 gourdes ($1 US) for each person a distributor signs up.

We had a plan last year to start selling “Pap padap” last year in every place we had a soccer ministry, but could not implement it because of the challenge of how to safely transfer money. Digicel’s new system solves this problem and will allow us to offer a new service as well.

In general our plan is to train our volunteers in soccer ministry how they can make money by selling these Digicel services. Once they have proved themselves in this, we would like to offer them micro-loans to add on products and services to their business.

More specifically, we hope that by also training more experienced Digicel salespeople and by offering them insurance and other benefits, we will secure their loyalty and increase their sales production for the benefit of all involved.

Our initial markets will be outside of Port-au-Prince because we believe competition will be fierce in the capital. We already have ministries in seven out of the 10 departments, or states, of Haiti and plan to expand to all 10 in the next few years. In addition, under Haiti’s earthquake recovery plan the Haitian government desires more services to be offered outside of PAP to reduce the number of people who need to enter the city.

We will need to rent a small office in each of the places we hope to establish this business.


3) Standardized Guest houses in Haiti

At this time, there are no hotel or guest house chains in Haiti. There is no “Hilton” or “Holiday Inn” chain in Haiti. If you travel out into the country, there are few decent places to stay. Many “hotels” outside of Port-au-Prince also double as Brothels. This, coupled with the varying quality in accommodations, services, and security from place to place, make safe and comfortable travel in Haiti difficult.

Our idea is to build a guest house in each of the towns we have ministries in. The building would be a simple design with 6 to 8 rooms. Each guest house would have internet, modern bathrooms, hot water, air conditioning, and 24 hour electricity and security. We would market them not only to the international community that is working outside of Port-au-Prince, but also to the local Haitian population as well as the Haitian diaspora.

There is a Christian construction group called Lazarian World Homes that builds homes, hospitals and other structures using a mixture of a high tech foam and cement. They are interested in helping us with this project. They have the potential not only to help us technically, but with fund raising as well.

In addition to rooms for guests, the building would also have space for the office of AIS Haiti in the town and a cybercafé. The cybercafés would also sell the Digicel services that we mentioned in the previous business description.
These combination guesthouses and cybercafés would employ young men and women who are involved in our soccer ministries. It would give them hands-on training in the hospitality and technology industry, which has nowhere else to go but up in Haiti, particularly now with the high amount of foreign organizations in the country, but also in the future as tourism begins to make its rise in Haiti once again.


4) Developing a brand for Various Haitian Agricultural products

To date, there is no single brand under which a variety of Haitian products are marketed outside the US. There are various companies that sell Haitian coffee, dried mangoes, etc., but most of these companies are foreign owned, and they make the bulk of the profits by simply placing their label on the products. So far, to our knowledge, no one has made an effort to create a well-known brand specifically for Haitian products. Such a brand would increase local profits and encourage higher levels of agricultural production, which is the staple of the Haitian economy (employing 85% of Haiti’s workforce).

Since Bruce McMartin, a fellow Crossworld missionary, is already trying to develop a coffee business in the US, and we have several other contacts through STEP, etc. it would seem that trying to put all of our agricultural products under one brand name could be beneficial to all.

I am currently working with a young Haitian entrepreneur by the name of Gerald (Junior) Bataille who has this dream of creating a Haitian brand. He has his start in beekeeping and honey production, and he has created a model through which he can grow his company by giving away pollination services and a large portion of his profits (through grants and no-interest loans that recycle for various projects) to agricultural partners and communities. Because of the intrinsic link between agriculture and beekeeping, growth in one domain increases the potential for growth in the other, so he sees this giving as an investment. To further encourage production and to increase his profits, Junior’s company would also sell agricultural products produced by his partners (as well as similar products purchased nationwide) under his label at a Fair-Trade price.

If you have questions about, or would like to invest in any of these businesses, please feel free to contact me ar rich.mears@crossworld.org