World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 16) OPPOSITE: With foot-powered pumps and drip irrigation systems, poor farmers can now produce three or four high-value crops per year. property. Once he figured out how to sell these crops in the market—he worked out a system of retail, wholesale and hawkers—he began turning a profit of $500, and then $1,000 a year. He built a new two-story house for his family. His two sons finished high school. The family business has expanded to cattle, goats and tilapia. What companies like KickStart and IDE are banking on is the idea that the single most effective way to promote a region’s development is to increase personal income. Building an entrepreneurial middle class, these companies say, can be an effective way to do that. Clean water, housing, education—people will naturally spend money on these as their income increases. And once a community is richer, it will work to get better roads, better schools and so on. In small numbers, they say, they have seen this happen. Projects that are market-driven, like these, are rarely as simple as they sound. In some ways, good design for the extremely poor is as much about designing a workable and sustainable economic system as it is a clever product. And building a workable economic system from the ground up is an enormous project, fraught with complications. It does not happen overnight, or without substantial resources. It is vulnerable to corruption and exploitation. Still, the basic message of work like Polak’s and Fisher’s—that poor people should be characterized not by their need for charity, but rather by their struggle to make a living—makes sense. For some years now, many nonprofits working in international development have integrated microenterprise concepts—helping people set up and run their own small businesses—into their projects. Welldesigned products are an important part of the success of such enterprises, and the infrastructure of a nonprofit can be an effective way to distribute them. (While nonprofits rarely ask people to pay for such products, they often require another form of commitment. Heifer International, for example, requires training and the promise to pass along some of the results of their work to others in need.) Regina Kamau, a Kenyan woman who monitors project impact for KickStart, describes a news spot she saw on Nigerian television, about efforts by the government to transfer slum-dwellers out of their slums and into new subsidized housing. A man living in the slums was asked if he was looking forward to the move. He wasn’t, he said. In his new place, he would have electric bills, water bills, all the things that he couldn’t afford currently in the slums. What the government should do, he said, was show him how to make money. “My problem is not housing,” he told the reporter. “My problem is money. If I had money, I wouldn’t be living here.” Empowering Entrepreneurship Heifer’s partners from the Philippines to Peru are cashing in on the earning potential of their small farms by developing small businesses. Heifer provides the “start-up capital” of a farm animal—a no-interest living loan— small cash loans to purchase equipment or supplies, and the training that helps farmers become entrepreneurs. After this, the rest is up to the participants, who use their ingenuity to start milk-processing plants, weaving centers, honey-marketing collectives and many other kinds of enterprises that generate income and employment opportunities. Because even a small loan can help people start and expand tiny businesses with big benefits. For more information about Heifer’s microenterprise initiative, visit www.heifer.org/microenterprise. 16 March/April 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org/microenterprise http://www.heifer.org
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