KENYA:
April, 2007
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled A Dam Connects Machakos, Kenya, To Archbold, Ohio, addressing issues highly relevant to the NDP cause.
Two key experpts stand out:
Residents of that small village and neighboring hamlets on the plains west of Todelo provided the money to construct the crude cement-and-stone dam, which is about 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Over the past four years, they have sold cattle and hosted an annual hamburger festival to raise more than $70,000. That money has helped build several hundred small-scale dams and water retention ponds in the Machakos area, delivering 5,000 families from drought and hunger…
They are farmers tilling a field largely neglected by the big international aid agencies: the economic development of small farming communities in Africa. While international aid for education and health projects and emergency food relief has grown over the past two decades, aid for agriculture and rural development has shrunk by more than half, contributing to increasing malnutrition and hunger…
Most impressive about this initiative is how a relatively small amount of money changed the lives of so many. A small group of neophytes, employing local fundraising efforts equivalent in complexity to those you might expect from high school kids trying to raise money for a prom, helped save lives and inspire hope. $70,000 raised over four years from events such as their annual “Burger Bash” helped make a lasting impact on a village in dire straits. It should act as reassurance that members of the Neutral Development Project are up to the challenge.
ETHIOPIA:
Projects by Partners in the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia:
- Installation of a flour mill in the North Wollo region. Wollo flour mill serves 1,500 families and the income is allocated by an elected committee for projects which benefit all of the villages.
- Two microfinance projects currently in place provide unemployed or underemployed women can start their own businesses
- After the first loan is repaid, women are entitled to larger loans.
- Protecting clean water sources like springs and artesian wells and digging shallow water wells.
- Renovations on a high school library and construction of a footbridge for access to medical services during rain season
- Establishment of a community peer education program to accurately inform inner city Addis Ababa residents about HIV.
DJIBUTI:
The Near East Foundation
In poor communities across the country, the Near East Foundation, in conjunction with local officials, is creating a credit based system of cooperative farms to combat the lack of resources, planning, and emergency funds available to the subsistence farming community. At around $5,000 per community, the goal is to create “a sound micro-finance culture within the country” and help move Djibouti’s farmers off of the vicious cycle of hand-to-mouth existence they’ve been living.
UGANDA & SUDAN:
Dunavant Cotton
…Then cotton growing revived in Uganda, and Dunavant Enterprises came to town about five years ago, paying cash on delivery. After three seasons of growing cotton for Dunavant, the world’s largest privately owned cotton broker and one of the biggest family-owned agribusinesses in the United States, Mr. Okelo, who owns less than three acres and has two wives and a passel of children, had saved $300, about double his annual earnings before Dunavant started buying his cotton.
Last summer, Mr. Okelo opened a small grocery store.
”Before Dunavant, no one came to help us,” says Mr. Okelo, 40, who has farmed a variety of crops in these parts for about 20 years.
…There is another reason for optimism about Africa: Some countries, including Sudan, Zimbabwe and Uganda, are growing much less cotton than they did in the past. So shifts in the cotton trade have raised hopes that Africans can ”go back to the future” and become a global cotton power, said Maggie Kigozi, chief of Uganda’s investment authority in Kampala.”
Source: New York Times, Out of Africa, Cotton and Cash, January 2007
