Franck Daphnis
Director, Field Program Management
CHF International

Growing up amidst what he called "the urban challenge" of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Franck Daphnis said he forever remembers wanting to "design cities." While pursuing architecture and urban planning at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Cornell University, he refined his academic interests, focusing on economics and housing. Through his work with CHF, developing housing microfinance as a discrete area of practice, these interests have culminated something more than improving cities—building a better world for families worldwide.

For the past two summers, Franck Daphnis has taught at the world-renowned microfinance training program in Boulder, Colorado. For Daphnis, the best part of teaching the microfinance of housing has been knowing that we are "sharing knowledge with someone, whether from South Africa or Albania, who will take that knowledge and convince their institutions to design programs that can allow tens of thousands of people to shelter themselves. The end results are people bettering their lives, and its great to be a part of that." He adds, "Not a week passes that CHF does not receive an email from a previously unknown person asking how the microfinance of housing can help that person’s institute, municipality, city, or country."

Daphnis worked in local government planning in Milwaukee and in upstate New York before joining CHF in January of 1995, as a project coordinator in Haiti. He transferred to CHF Headquarters as a program officer and later became Director for Program Operations. He currently oversees programs in Latin America, parts of the Middle East, and in Africa.

Daphnis, co-author of CHF’s, "So, you want to do Housing Microfinance?" is
also the editor of a comprehensive anthology on the microfinance of housing, financed by USAID and the Fannie Mae Foundation, to be published in the summer of 2003 by Kumarian Press.