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Haiti does not lack entrepreneurs. It lacks investors who think like entrepreneurs—and entrepreneurs who think like investors. For too long, the narrative has celebrated the lone founder who builds a business from nothing.

But in an economy where 77% live below the poverty line and firms rarely grow beyond micro-scale, heroism is not enough. What Haiti needs is a new archetype: entrepreneur-investors— Indiviuals who start as entrepreneurs and become investors. They are people who have operated a business, understand its pain points, and now use their success to fund, mentor, and multiply others’ ventures.

There is not a linear pathway to succeed in entrepreneurship ;however, there needs to be a thiving business ecosystem to create wealth in a nation. How likely Haitian entrepreneurs succeed in Haiti compared to Haitian in the diaspora or others elsewhere?. While many will answer this to accept the reality of being successful in Haiti is pure luck; however, there is a much fundamental issue of the Haitian business ecosystem.

Haitian entrepreneurs have long been celebrated for their grit, ingenuity, and sheer will to survive in one of the most challenging business environments in the world. Yet too often, that same energy that fuels the launch of a microenterprise keeps founders stuck in the role of operator—managing day-to-day cash flow, navigating insecurity, and putting out fires while being busy with tasks—rather than evolving into owners who build scalable systems, and eventually investors who fund the next generation of growth of new ventures.

The shift from entrepreneur to investor is not just a personal ambition; it must be a national imperative. For Haiti to accelerate business development, deepen its secondary market for corporate ventures, and unlock exits for startups, its most successful founders must become capital allocators, mentors, and ecosystem builders. While it has been so difficult to transition from entrepreneurs to operators to investors, there is a new generation of Haitian business leaders who want to lead the way to transform the business ecosystem to create investable pathways and scalable solutions to make it easier to become investors rather than being a fovever entrepreneurs.

Why Haitians Lean Toward Entrepreneurship Instead Investment & Venture Capital Strategy

Much of Haitian entrepreneurship is “necessity-driven,” born not from opportunity, but from the absence of formal employment, weak public services, and chronic instability. Haitian entrepreneurship is not structurally and constructively proven with tangible outomes and susccesful exits, yet it is more about young and educated people are tired of seeking employment and opportunities elsewhere to start with a new business venture with no formal training in school or through business accelerators or incubators because they have the best ideas and product launches with user traction and/or municipal government contracts to expand their operations to new territories and markets. In such a context, starting a small business—whether a roadside stall, a transport service, or a boutique—is often the only viable path to income. This creates a culture where entrepreneurship is synonymous with survival, not innovation or scale. The metrics to use to quantify the success rate and sales growth and operational excellence are not there to ensure the business they operate will likely succeed as numbers are shown statistically they are on the right path to attract more private capital investment.

Academic research on Haitian entrepreneurship highlights a phenomenon called “learned helplessness" which is a prolonged exposure to poverty, violence, and institutional failure that leads many to believe that systemic change is impossible, so they focus on immediate, controllable income-generating activities rather than long-term, high-risk ventures. The result is a proliferation of small, informal firms that rarely grow beyond the founder’s direct labor or a collaborative team to operate as a small enterprise without formal board governance.

This is not a luxury; it is a survival strategy for the nation. Remittances sustain families, but equity investments build companies. Aid builds schools, but venture capital builds industries. And while the diaspora sends billions home each year, only a fraction is deployed as risk capital that could transform the private sector. These are structural and systemic barriers that mus be broken.

The obstacles of insecurity, corruption, weak institutions, and a history of broken promises are also some of societal barriers. But so are the opportunities: a young population, duty-free access to the U.S. market, untapped renewable energy potential, and a global diaspora eager to invest if given the right tools.

Even when entrepreneurs achieve modest success, the ecosystem offers few pathways to transition into investors:

• Capital scarcity: Domestic credit to the private sector is among the lowest in the region (10.4% of GDP in 2019), and 78% of firms in Port-au-Prince report being credit-constrained.

• Weak financial infrastructure: Haiti lacks a robust credit bureau, movable collateral registry, and legal frameworks that protect creditors—making equity and debt financing risky and expensive.

• No secondary market: There is virtually no functioning market for buying and selling shares of private companies, which means founders cannot easily exit or recycle capital into new ventures.

• Cultural and informational gaps: Many successful Haitians abroad send remittances (which totaled 38.5% of GDP in 2019) but lack structured financing vehicles to invest in equity or growth-stage businesses back home.

-- The Case for a New Mindset: From Operator To Owner To Investor

To break this cycle, Haitian entrepreneurs must adopt a three-stage evolution:

1. Operator: Building a Viable Business

This is the foundation where operators focus on cash flow discipline by mastering unit economics, cost control, and working capital management, customer validation by proving demand before scaling, and Informal-to-formal transition by registering businesses, complying with tax obligations, and building credit history before any funding can be allocated for grants or equity. As they use scalable solutions, systems, and metrics to operate, they operate more efficiently and more effectively and can expand their operations to more locations and markets.

2. Owner: Systematizing for Scale

Owners shift from doing the work to design the system delegation and governance by hiring managers, establishing boards or advisory councils, and separating ownership from operations, strategic planning by setting 3–5 year visions with growth targets, not just monthly survival targets and task-led initiatives, and accessing growth capital by leveraging instruments like leasing, partial credit guarantees, and diaspora-linked funds. The business is fully operational and scalable , there will be a demand for talent to manage it and help it grow and scale with systems, strategies, and processes to control costs, increase mechanisms of control to losses, and hire better managers and leaders to compete with existing competitors and acquire other ventures and firms that have more better revenue and sales.

3. Investor: Funding the Ecosystem

Investors use their capital, networks, and experience to back others with angel investing by providing seed capital to early-stage ventures in sectors they understand, venture building by co-founding or incubating startups with proven models, and participating in secondary market by buying equity in growing firms, enabling earlier founders to exit and reinvest in the business ecosystem.

A strong business idea may open the door for entrepreneurship, but the right investor can determine how far and how fast a company grows. With private capital, the Haitian can't thrive..

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Types of Investors That Are Neccessary to Expand Access, Opportunities, & Scale in The Business Ecosystem

High Conviction Seed Specialists: often move early , accept greater uncertainty, and help founders and entrepreneurs shape the first institutional round.

Enterprise, SaaS, and Fintech Investors bring their specialized knowledge of recurring revenue models , customer acquisition strategies, regulatory environments and scalable B2B distribution.

Ai And DeepTech Funds assess ont only market potential but also technical defensibility , intellectual property, research depth and the ability to attract exceptional engineering talentto the join the first or second batch of talent.

Multi-Stage Venture Firms may provide continuity across future rounds , but founders and entrepreneurs should understand how attention and wonership expectations evolve as the company scales.

Operator-led Investors can deliver significant practical value through product guidance, executive recruitment, commercial introductions, and lessons drawn from building companies themselves.

Consumer, Brand & Culture Focused Funds are built for consumer first companies .

Emerging Seed Funds are the next generation of early-stage fund managers to manage a portolio and create access and opportunities to help become investors and portfolio managers..

Haiti’s private sector is dominated by microenterprises: 95% of formal firms are micro, and half are less than six years old. This suggests low barriers to entry, but high barriers to growth. There is where most investors are reluctant to enter as growth stalls and companies can't get an exit nor get acquired by a corporate venture. Businesses are built and created to satisfy a unmet demand or operationalize for more effectively to add more value and benefits to existing product categories. Once this happens, businesses become more attractive to competitors and create a more strategic approach to business ecosystem to rationalize on the best course of action to either invest alongside this new venture to benefit from their growth trajectory. As investment is allocated into the new startup because it becomes the darling for the ecosytem, the corporate ventures don't panick on more capital flowing the startup ecosystem to build more growth-led startups. The growth is where more venture capital activities become more interesting to attract diaspora direct investment and foreign direct investment either directly or indirectly.

In the case of investment, there are some key constraints to consider in the business ecosystem that must fully enable the business environment to be optimally ready for investment and private capital and they include :

• Political instability: 84.4% of firms in Port-au-Prince cite it as their biggest obstacle—far higher than in other fragile states. No business can operate nationwide with so much political maneuvering and mismanagement ot human capital. There needs to be a political party reform to show these leaders who can lead into the polls are those that have a total of voters registration and total members of party to represent in the major political part election. Let's say that a registered political party can admit to send political leaders to represent in the general elections for presidency needs to have at least 100K-500K registered party members on 11 millions population.

• Infrastructure deficits: 93% of firms rely on generators due to unreliable grid electricity; transport and digital infrastructure are severely underdeveloped. This is a major segway for building a friendly business environment to transport goods and create connectivity with market participants and accelerate local commerce and trade. Scalable businesses can't survive on a single market or territory, they must thrive by expanding their operations to several departments, cities, and localities in Haiti. With a franchise business model, it will help more Haitian businesses to seek for new locations for the next franchisee to open a new operation . This is where modern infrastrcuture will connect cities, regions and communities to become crucial for modernizing Haitian cities and towns. With modern bridges, high roads, tunnels, and toll roads, and faster lane roads, they all can speed up that infrastructure gaps to improve trade and commerce in Haiti. Haiti Metro & Infrastructure Authority is advocating for more independent infrastructure management to support local municipalities and state goverment in bidding on the better road network and infrastructure capabilities to equip Haiti with modern infrastrcuture to do businesses like Dominican Republic or Chile.

• Skills gap: Low literacy (61–64% for males, 57% for females) and limited managerial training constrain firm productivity. Catts Pressoir College led by Guy Etienne / Collège Catts Pressoir is being a leader in academic reform to make the teaching and training more practical to world education standard by getting their students to get involved in scientific research, practical learning, and intense training to get these kids ready for the new and moderneconomy;however, the education in Haiti is imported from high industrialized societies where Haiti's broken systems are not ready to provide a clear template for development and economic mobility as a way to contribute meaningfully to its growth and development.With FDR-BRH, this can create a pragmatic mechanism to incentize research & development in Haiti as projects are funded based on outcomes and community impact to create more opportunities for growth and upward social mobility.

• Gender disparities: Women-owned firms are smaller and grow more slowly, despite women comprising a high share of entrepreneurs. There needs to targeted programs to empower more women entrepreneurs and more capital growth available to them in forms of grants, municipal contracts, and state or national concrats to help them expand their operations and start new ventures. Haiti Executive Board's Haitian Young Ambassadors Program (#HYAP) is working to empower more young male and female entrepreneurs to help them benefit from our mentorship, funding, and advisory services so they learn new commercial skills and get them ready to negotiate commercial contracts and government contracts so they can support their business operations and scale with more funding options to grow their businesses.

Meanwhile, diaspora remittances exceed both foreign aid and #FDI, yet less than 5% of the population holds e-money accounts, and digital financial services remain underused. This represents a massive untapped pool of patient capital that could be channeled into equity investments if the right vehicles existed. This is where Bousol Wallet can be a great opportunity to grow the US-Gourde digital money infrastructure to help more individuals and businesses to start getting paid for services in Haiti and abroad. SocialPay Inc is working to build strategic commercial partnerships to help connect local vendors with global commerce as a way to enable them to receive credit, manage their producct inventory,and sell their goods and products to more markets with a pool of currrencies and receive loans on revenue based on total growth sales and of their total businesses value in the last 6 months to last 15 months with a 10 to 15 percent of capital allocation to fund the next growth phase.

A stronger market-based economy in Haiti needs an integrated market system for financial services and banking to create more opportunities the business ecosystem participants that can thrive on businesses transactions, deals, and commercial developments like real estate projects, M&A, and asset sales and liquidations. Commercial banks in Haiti remain the primary or only source of financing and capital allocation for various projects, buisness and personal loans, and financing for households and business deals. Yet, fragmentation and fragility of the economy along the national, local, and regional barriers limit them from being the only financial entities to solve so many socioeconomic and financial challenges. This is not doable and it is now time to have holistically a more integrated payment ecosystem, better financial products, and more banking options with more types with interoperability for funding major capital needs. mid-term capital options, and short term to make it currency circulation more fluid. This can be done to alleviate too much financial stress in many households and hold asmany businesses back to grow the economy.

--Enhance greater market integration to help banks grow while minimizing their risks on their deposists, expand their operations in more markets and accelerate their transactions in sustainable projects and businesses that are fully bankable. It is crucial to have more banking or investment licenses to sell financial products and expand the opportunities to more communities, businesses, and households.

-Implement national standards on reporting, accountability, and fiduciary responsibility to ensure financial institutions follow the banking guidelines and security priorities for all stakeholders. All financial institutiond and banks are able to work on regulatory frameworks to protect consumers, clients, and customers against fraudulent activities, money laundering, security schemes and pirates of fishing on investment and deposit accounts.

--Simplify the rules for banks and financial services to operate with licenses and help them increasing their efficiency, effectiveness, and customer excellence to preserve financial stability, credibility, and operability.

--- Building a Secondary Market for Corporate Ventures

A functioning secondary market -where shares of private companies can be bought and sold—is essential for liquidity by allowing founders and early investors to exit and recycle capital, valuation discovery by creating price signals that guide investment decisions, and ecosystem confidence by demonstrating that growth and exit are possible.

1. Legal and Regulatory Framework

• Enact laws enabling private equity funds, angel syndicates, and special purpose vehicles (SPVs). This is the most anticipating version of transitionning to a market-based economy to create more investment vehicles to grow a newtwork of investors for risk premiun and minimize the cost of capital in the business ecosystem in Haiti.

• Strengthen creditor rights and collateral registries to reduce investment risk. Businesses constantly face diferent risks to work on to avoid being let alone to solve these problems . This is why creditors need to have special provisions of rights to creditors to limit some risks as they have the automony to rightfully give access and opportunity to some individuals or businesses .

2. Diaspora Investment Vehicles

• Scale initiatives like the Pan-Caribbean Fund proposed by Delphin Investments, which USAID is supporting to channel diaspora capital into SMEs and Haitian Diaspora Fund, and Haiti Investment Fund led by Haiti Executive Board and operated by FOCO Digital Corp.

• Create tax incentives for diaspora equity investments in certified high-growth sectors (e.g., agribusiness, renewable energy, apparel). This is crucial as high-growth sectors will be oversubscribe quicker because the growth opportunties that they represent across various investment channels.

3. Intermediaries and Platforms

• Support the emergence of local venture capital firms (e.g., Caribbean Investor Capital, though still nascent) and angel networks.

• Develop online deal-flow platforms connecting Haitian startups with diaspora and institutional investors. This is the most promising that it can eve be to accelerate for deal flows into the Haitian startups with better rankings on data from Haitian accelerators and incubators or from their own firms through third party auditing.

Watch the Video about Question-Answer Business Ecosystem Challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yu13wAVHjI

4. Anchor Investors

• Encourage successful Haitian entrepreneurs to become limited partners (LPs) in regional funds or to launch their own family offices and Profin Group is the investment promotion in haiti can lead in supporting institutional capital to grow across financial ecosystem in Haiti.

• Partner with multilateral institutions (IFC, IDB) to provide first-loss capital or guarantees that de-risk private investments. The private capital is risk adverse and investors can weigh in their decisions with not having the confidence to pair the risky assets with guarantee and avoid they can lose all their money on risky investment, yet they can transfer some performing brands a growing brand portfolio.

5. Exit Pathways

• Promote trade sales to larger regional firms, management buyouts, and eventually IPOs on Caribbean exchanges as firms mature.

• Support M&A advisory services to facilitate transactions through our HEB Advisory Group and FOCO Advisors.

The question is no longer whether Haitian entrepreneurs can survive. It is whether they can evolve—into owners who build systems, and investors who build ecosystems. The future of Haiti’s economy depends on it.

• For entrepreneurs: They need to systematize their business by delegating to create more free time to focus on growth and commercial partnerships, seeking growth capital to expand their operations in new markets or territories in Haiti by pitching their business models, their revenue traction , and growth targets and metrics, and planning their exit strategy to have more venture capital to start another venture and invest in high growt and scalable existing startups .

• For successful founders: They must llocate 5–10% of your wealth to angel investments in Haitian startups where they have proven numbers in sales, revenue , and growth targets and municipal contracts to expand their operations in new cities and towns. They can also mentor the next generation of startup ventures on metrics, business ecosystem, board governance, equity ownership, and corporate ventures so they can build better products for growth and scale for the next exit opportunity .

• For policymakers: They must enact business laws enabling private equity and increase capital allocation into the Haitian businesses ecosytem starting with Haitian diaspora investors, strengthen creditor rights for businesses and their owners to be financially responsible on debt obligations and corporate debt to improve country's rating and ranking on these national debts for investment and opportunities, and create tax incentives for diaspora investment to invest in the future economy to drive it forward. If they invest $50K to $200K in the national economy, they haveduty free on certain products made in Haiti and up to $2M, they will have tax break for 5 years on propert tax .

• For the diaspora: Move beyond remittances to investment on local businesses to benefit from citizens to investor designation and can benefit from airport lounge service and business class up to $10K flights commercial value. This is program Haiti Executive Club will operate with its travel and tourism partners to Haitian business leaders and executives to create more opportunities for their members to invest in Haiti. Join investment syndicates like Akselerem, Tigoav Angels, Haiti Executive Angels while demanding more transparency and accountability from investees and the accountability for any funding generated for national development such $1.50 for FNE.

• For development partners: they can help fund intermediary vehicles to expand new development projects, guarantee first-loss capital to get recovery mechanisms so they can start off from a recoup up to 25 percent of their investment, and support secondary market infrastructure to help private shares to exchnages hands and create a public stock market in Haiti to make it more market-based economy for all participating stakeholders to benefit from public market exits.

Haiti’s next economic chapter will not be written by solo operators. It will be written by investor-entrepreneurs and public market participants who understand that the greatest return on capital is not just profit, but prosperity for a nation and a long-term growth to reward the market participants who bet on Haiti's economic future and its resilient economy

Dr. Guerda Nicolas l Nicolas Paul l Widline N. Daniel, MBA l Beatrice Louissaint l Beatrice Duret Gentil l Carl-Henry PETIT-FRERE l Guetet Theo Simeon l Marvena St. Agathe l

This Edition of World's Top 50 Haitian Cultural Icons for 2026 is brought by Haiti Executive Board with FOCO Digital Corp and our business partners: Groupe ProFin l ZAKA l #GrupoPerassan l Travel Informer

Executive Offers for our readers of the Business Community :

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