Source: Fonkoze.
Original press release not available online.
On Monday, May 19, 2008, the Fourth Annual Women Together Award honored the unrelenting work of Anne Hastings to alleviate extreme poverty for the women of Haiti through microfinance and her deep commitment to Millennium Development Goal 1: “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.” Past recipients have included Kerry Kennedy and Hillary Clinton; Nobel Peace Prize winners Muhammad Yunus, and Wangari Maathai; and actress Angelina Jolie. Other recipients of the Women Together Award this year included primatologist Jane Goodall, human activist Ella Fontanals Cisneros, Wall Street banker Violy McCausland, architect Teresa Sapey, oceanographer Sylvia A. Earle, fashion model Petra Nemcova, photographer Mario Testino, visual artist Shirin Neshat and entrepreneur Margarita Sanchez.
Anne Hastings has been the Executive Director of Fonkoze – Haiti’s Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor – since May 1996. Under her leadership, the institution has grown from two volunteer employees to over 750 full-time employees and is now the largest microfinance institution in Haiti. Fonkoze has 36 branches throughout rural Haiti, over 165,000 clients, more than 50,000 of whom have microcredit loans. In July 2004, Fonkoze spun off its financial services component to form a commercial financial institution. Anne also serves on the board of directors of that institution.
The foundation for which she remains Director is devoted to monitoring the impact of microfinance on the lives of clients, eliminating illiteracy among its clients, incubating new branches to reach ever poorer and more rural clients with microfinance services and continually testing and developing innovative new products for the clients of both the commercial entity and the foundation.
Before coming to Haiti, Anne had fifteen years of experience in providing strategic management services to executives and in managing young organizations for high performance and steady growth. Anne holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. She completed research fellowships at the Brookings Institute and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
Anne is the recipient of other awards including the 2005 Pioneer in Microfinance Award of the Grameen Foundation. In 2006, she was honored in the First Annual Chiapas Project Recognition Dinner in Dallas, Texas. In 2007, she received an honorary Doctorate in Business Leadership from Duquesne University.
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