STARTING WITH ONE, AFFECTING MANY: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
One: a Rwandan artisan making baskets. Two: this Rwandan artisan joins other artisans and learns new techniques, product diversification and business skills. Three: this group is recognized by the government as a cooperative and can now receive loans. The business expands, products are sold, and revenue is brought into the community. Now kids can go to school and health insurance can be bought.
What if the one became the many? And what if the many were economies, cutting across countries, regions, continents, the globe? Economies stuck in cycles of poverty provide little opportunity for the growth of education systems, health structures or participation in the global market. Economic decay is a form of brokenness. We want to change that.
Through creative businesses ranging from small business development to large-scale coffee production, the influx of profits can boost and spur entire economic systems. This equals more jobs and more opportunities. Opportunities for people to discover what they love and to do it.
Choices. Starting with One, affecting many. Economic Development.
Bright light sifted down through eucalyptus leaves and fell to the earth in patterns.
Coffee buying season had just begun. A coffee farmer walked up to the scale, a brown burlap sack slung over his back. He poured his coffee cherries out onto a green mesh net suspended above the ground; like bright red stars they came tumbling out. He began to sort the good cherries from the bad, submerging them in water, causing the bad ones to float to the top. He proudly presented his crop to FH staff and after being weighed, the farmer was paid a fair wage for his coffee cherries, higher per kilo than what the government currently pays.
His cherries were then combined with the other buys of the day and put through the washing machine, which removes the cherry from the bean. The sheathed beans, strewn out on drying tables, will spend the next 20 days being thrown into the air and shifted onto a series of tables to dry. From there they will be shelled, roasted, and then brewed. Coffee. From Burundian cherries.
Though the washing station is currently run by FH, once the business becomes profitable, it will be placed into the hands of the farmers, who all live within a few kilometers of the washing station, their coffee fields rising sharply up the hillsides. The proximity to the coffee farms means less time travelling to the washing station, which means a fresher bean and better coffee.
Now, the farmers will benefit from the harvest, the washing and the selling of the coffee to roasters. The market has just opened up to them. And the profits from a product born from the land will come back to the community. For the first time.
what
+ Small and Medium Enterprise Development
+ Micro-Finance and Savings Groups
+ Small Business Trainings in Business Management and Marketing
+ Income Generating Skills Training and Activities
+ Natural Resource Management
+ Promotion of Business Sector in Rural Areas
+ The first Millennium Development Goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015.
+For this to happen, health, peace & reconciliation, education, water & sanitation, and other programs will be vastly insufficient. A much more pointed approach to developing the poor's economic capacity is needed.
+ To meet the first MDG target, Africa must achieve an annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 7 percent. Yet only 10 out of 37 African countries achieved a 5 percent or higher average GDP growth rate between 1997 and 2003. If this trend continues, World Bank projections indicate that 42.3 percent of the population-rather than the target of 23.7 percent-will remain in poverty by 2015.
+ Facts from: Ending Hunger in Africa: Prospects for the Small Farmer, ©2004 International Food Policy Research Institute, p. 2, United Nations Millennium Project
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