FXB USA, Inc.

What is the purpose of building a health clinic if sick people don't have any access to safe drinking water at home? What is the point of operating a school if children have to learn on empty stomachs? Why should people cultivate a field if they cannot preserve and store the harvest or bring it to market? The extreme poor do not only lack sustainable income or enough food to eat, their poverty prevents them from accessing the critical resources they need to survive. Hunger, disease, illiteracy and stigma are interlinked and form a vicious cycle of poverty that is very difficult to break.

Recognizing that micro-credit would not work for the extreme poor, FXB Founder Albina du Boisrouvray developed the FXBVillage methodology, an integrated approach to poverty eradication in 1991. In creating the FXB methodology, Albina du Boisrouvray built on the thinking of the late Jonathan Mann whose pioneering work on AIDS linked human rights and health issues, arguing that sustainable impact in human rights cannot be achieved unless the social and cultural factors that heighten disease risk and prevent people from having basic, essential rights are addressed simultaneously.
FXBVillage methodology, a proven, three-year program, provides families living in extreme poverty with the tools and support they need to become self-sufficient and give their children a future. It brings the extreme poor to self-sufficiency in just three years by simultaneously tackling the five drivers of poverty: lack of nutrition, health, education, housing, and income. This means that in addition to participants receiving immediate access to the full range of critical resources simultaneously, FXB provides training for families to set up and maintain businesses, allowing them to build a sustainable source of income for the long-term.

The FXBVillage programs are rooted in the communities they serve. We work closely with community leaders, stakeholders and relevant associations throughout the process to tailor the program to address the diverse social, cultural, economic, geographic, and political dimensions of each country where the program is active.
FXB is not a charity. It represents an investment in families living at a level of poverty few can comprehend. It's about releasing human potential and bringing back dignity in people's life. Then and only then the vicious cycle of extreme financial distress can be broken with long-term and sustainable results. The strength and effectiveness of the FXBVillage methodology is our comprehensive approach and the personalized support. The synergy of the multiple interdependent components that are the basis of the program and their simultaneous accessibility form a global approach to the fight against poverty. This approach enables families to reach economic and social autonomy, which they can sustain over the long term, while ensuring the well-being of both adults and children.

The FXBVillage Model fights extreme poverty and allows 80 extremely poor families (about 600 direct beneficiaries as well as 1,200 members of the community) to reach socio-economic autonomy within three years. Children and families in the program receive services and referrals to assure health, food security, education, shelter and sanitation, HIV prevention, child protection, and livelihood opportunities.

The FXBVillage approach was designed to simultaneously address five drivers of extreme poverty:
1. Economic-In the first year of the project, FXB provides capital grants and training to help families to start an income-generating activity (IGA) such as a shop, restaurant, or livestock project. Households also pursue group activities as informal co-operatives.
2. Housing-FXB ensures that all participants live in safe and decent houses: safe water, basic sanitation services, and construction of latrines, ventilated kitchens, external showers, hand-washing stations and animal sheds.
3. Nutrition-FXB ensures that all participants have the ability to feed themselves, sufficiently and properly.
4. Healthcare-FXB ensures that all participants have access to basic and adequate medical care, psychosocial counselling and improved hygiene.
5. Education-FXB ensures that all school-age children are reintegrated to school and that teenagers have access to vocational trainings. FXB also globally trains its participants and the community on a number of subjects like: family planning, children and women rights, and disease prevention.

During the first year, FXB provides food support and pay for medical and educational costs. Besides the decrease of the financial burden for families, this allows FXB to work closely with participants on recovering their physical and psychosocial health status. Fewer financial worries help participants to recover more rapidly - physically and mentally and allow them to devote themselves to the development of their economic activities.

During the second year, participants are asked to create a small business plan and will receive in-kind grants to start Income Generating Activities (IGA.) Such microenterprises require that participants are healthy both physically and psychosocially. Then, they will start to generate income. Even if it is small, they will be able to pay for 25% of medical and educational costs as well as for the food.

The third year is a turning point. By this time, participants have generated enough income to be able to cope with their needs and with the needs of their children as well as to take advantage of all the trainings. FXB's contribution decreases again and the focus is put on the improvement and diversification of the IGAs.

FXB focuses both on addressing the collective needs of participants and the specific needs of individual households. FXB's internal capacity includes local country staff that are key to the success of the FXBVillage model. Each FXBVillage model typically has three staff members: The social worker, the nurse counselor and the program manager. Regular home visits from household-to-household enable the FXB team to assess household-specific needs and implement tailored, timely responses to their individual problems. This is a creative process whereby the FXB staff develops strategies capable of substantially improving participants' living conditions.

In order to increase the capacity of participants to live as a community, thus sharing challenges and devising solutions, groups of ten to twelve families of participants are formed according to geographical criteria. The members usually met on weekly basis to offer psychosocial support or help to one another (i.e. for housing issues such as houses rehabilitation or latrines construction), as well as engage in collective income generating activities. The beneficiary groups are the fundamental network of FXBVillage program: they strengthen the solidarity, represent a safety net for families and the entire community and ensure the sustainability of the project.

For FXB, joining forces with other organizations is also a successful way to implement the FXBVillage program and ensure its sustainability. Consequently, FXB works with various types of local partners that work for and with impoverished people. Multi-stakeholder partnerships that encourage public, private and non-profit actors' participation in the identification, formulation and implementation of activities, ensure sustainability, accountability and ownership of the program.

FXB's founder Albina du Boisrouvray decided that the FXBVillage methodology must be shared with the world for maximum impact on an open-source basis, as a key tool for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. FXB worked very closely with Harvard University to transfer the methodology into a step-by-step guide that is now freely available to NGOs, venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, governments and anyone else interested in the hopes that they would start their own FXBVillage and work to eradicate poverty using our three-year program. www.fxb.org/toolkit

FXB believes that we must all operate as a global team working together toward one shared vision: a world without poverty. This is not just FXB's vision; it should be everyone's vision because ending poverty leads to global peace and security.