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REGION:
Haiti
INDUSTRY:
Healthcare, Supporting Enterprises
Fonkoze is a family of organizations that brings financial inclusion and development services to Haitian women ranging from the ultra-poor to micro-entrepreneurs. Through a network of branch offices that cover most of Haiti, Fonkoze uses its “Staircase Out of Poverty” model to enable women to improve their livelihoods and wellbeing, one step at a time. Fonkoze provides business support through microfinance loans, business training and mentoring, and it also conducts adult education courses in basic literacy, business and life skills.
Fonkoze’s healthcare program reaches 250,000 households each year through its Boutik Sante social franchising initiative operating out of 44 branch offices across Haiti. Fonkoze’s team of registered nurses train microfinance clients to become Community Health Entrepreneurs whose small businesses can conduct basic health screenings, deliver health education sessions and procure health products from Fonkoze to resell in their communities. This extends access to health, personal hygiene, infant care, nutrition, household sanitation and livelihood products to rural areas.
“Seventy-five percent of Haitians lack access to health products and services, particularly those living in rural and hard-to-reach areas,” according to Fonkoze. In 2015, the organization’s Boutik Sante program launched a five-year plan to scale the network of Community Health Entrepreneurs and bolster the supply, storage and distribution of the health products they sold to rural residents in the last mile.
They were using paper and Excel to track health products as they came from suppliers, were received at a central warehouse, were distributed to branches and finally handed to Community Health Entrepreneurs for resale to local residents. Fonkoze wanted to digitize this hard-to-scale approach that was straining under the weight of handling about 100 health products.
“TaroWorks has given us tools we didn’t have before. We can quickly tap into our network of rural healthcare entrepreneurs and product distribution centers to gauge product demand, smooth out kinks in the supply chain and help measure the impact of our business training efforts.”
Florence Jean-Louis, Director of Human Development
TaroWorks provided Fonkoze with a centralized inventory management system that uses its mobile field service app and Salesforce’s CRM database to track product movements between the suppliers, Fonkoze warehouses and the point of sale locations - even if inventory activities are happening in warehouses with spotty internet connectivity. With the data coming in from the nurses and throughout the organization, Fonkoze management has visibility into inventory cycle counts, adjustments and value of stock on-hand to proactively prevent stock-outs so the community has access to goods when they need them. Fonkoze also uses TaroWorks to enroll, train and measure performance of Community Health Entrepreneurs as well as log sales of healthcare products by Fonkoze nurses to the women-run social franchise businesses.
Having a mobile and cloud-based inventory management system increases efficiency and transparency in managing inventory, as well as tracking the engagement of the Community Health Entrepreneurs during their training and through sale of products they’ve purchased from Fonkoze. It also supports real-time, data-driven business decisions through monitoring product sales and revenue by Fonkoze branch offices, tracking top products sold to franchisees and estimating product supplier lead time.
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