FXB International unveiled a toolkit Monday that other organizations can use to follow the group’s multi-pronged approach to fighting extreme poverty.
Philanthropist Albina du Boisrouvray, who founded the organization, said she is releasing the step-by-step plan, called FXBVillage, in the hope that nonprofits, governments, philanthropists, and others who work to combat poverty will adopt it. The intensive three-year program has operated in China, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uganda.
She made the announcement at Harvard University, where she enlisted the expertise of the public-health and international aid experts when FXB International first developed the plan more than two decades ago
“This is a guide to our work of the past 26 years and a field-tested, transparent road map that works,” said Ms. du Boisrouvray.
To date, FXB International has operated 162 FXBVillages of 80 to 100 families per village. The organization says it has lifted 81,000 people out of extreme poverty at an average cost of $125 to $230 per person annually. About 86 percent of participants end up living above their country’s poverty line and are still doing so four years after the program has ended, according to the Human Sciences Research Council.
FXBVillage seeks to help the world’s poorest people by giving them access to education, health care, food, and housing for three years , with the goal that they will be self-sufficient by year four.
“I knew, to be successful, FXB couldn’t just focus on one thing,” said Ms. du Boisrouvray. “Rather than target single issues in silos, we set it up to tackle all the main issues that contribute to extreme poverty.”
Three-person teams provide villages with information and services related to nutritious food, hygiene, basic medical care, education for children, vocational training for adults, legal assistance, and psychological counseling. The teams also help families start small businesses or farms and provide basic training in how to barter, buy, sell, and save.
FXB covers all of the program’s cost in the first year. By the second year, it pays for 75 percent and the participant is responsible for the rest. In year three, FXB the cost is split half and haf, and by year four, the families are expected to be self-supporting.
Ms. du Boisrouvray is an unlikely actor on such a stage. She was born a countess in Paris during the early days of World War II. Her father was from a French aristocratic family. Her Bolivian mother was the daughter of Simón Iturri Patiño, a self-made Bolivian industrialist, who in his time was considered one of the world’s wealthiest men.
She grew up in New York, had an early career in France as a journalist, and founded a film production company in 1969 that she ran for nearly two decades.
In 1986, her only child, Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, a search and rescue pilot, was killed in a helicopter crash in Mali. He was 24 years old and a passionate champion of helping those in need, says his mother,
His death coincided with Ms. du Boisrouvray’s growing concern about the many vulnerable women and children who were being driven into poverty in those days as the AIDS pandemic was escalating in Africa and around the world.
So she started the organization with $100 million of her own fortune to honor her son’s memory and to address the growing AIDS crisis. Eventually those efforts grew into what is today the FXBVillage program.
“There are 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty today, so with the release of this,” she told the Harvard crowd, “we’re calling for others to join us and apply this model for a more sustainable world.”