Grant Spotlight: Building Resilience Post-Earthquake

HDI’s grants support local leaders and resource their solutions.

ASA, a community organization in the southern island of Grosse Caille affected by the 2021 earthquake, runs a school for local families without the means to pay for an education for their children. With a grant from HDI’s Earthquake Fund, it has started a program to provide goats to the school community so the income families earn from their goats can enable them to pay school fees and supplement household income.

This is a smart intervention because:

• It helps families diversify and increase their incomes

• It builds resilience and self-sufficiency

• A philanthropic group in Canada has supported this school for years. It adds resources to the efforts of others to multiply impact

• It is not a project. It directs resources to a local institution to improve its sustainability and build its long-term capacity to support its community.

Plus, the children love being able to contribute to their family by caring for the goats, a rural Haitian tradition.

Children with goats in schoolyard in southern Haiti

This is a small grant and a small impact.  But over the last two years, HDI has supported 56 such grants in the earthquake zone and 16 more across the country. Over the past 13 years, HDI has put a total of $4.37 million in grant funding into the hands of organizations building communities across Haiti.