With 27 percent arable land and no permanent crops, the West Bank and Gaza suffer from periodic food insecurity. Using proceeds derived from the monetization of commodity donated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ACDI/VOCA funds drought relief and agricultural training activities for Palestinian farmers and pastoralists.
The ACDI/VOCA program in the West Bank and Gaza works with agricultural communities to mitigate the devastating effects of recent drought and reduce the risk of future drought loss. Under the project, the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) distributed emergency coupon subsidies and feed. From November 2001 to January 2002, the ministry distributed a total of 13,453 out of 13,582 subsidy coupons, supporting 912,000 sheep and goats in 12 districts. ACDI/VOCA reimbursed feed/fodder suppliers for 13,303 coupons totaling approximately $1.2 million. The feed subsidy program also served to strengthen cooperation between the extension service and MOA district offices, and provided economic stimulus to the livestock sector.
ACDI/VOCA is also working with at-risk agricultural communities to improve local community preparedness and response capability to drought events through the build-up of water catchment and collection structures, improved community awareness and water conservation education. To build capacity among rural inhabitants to better manage scarce water resources, PARC held training workshops for women, as well as students on water awareness and conservation, benefiting 1,098 participants. PHG held 60 workshops and conducted 49 home visits for 500 women, visited 27 schools to conduct awareness campaigns for 450 male and 455 female youth and held 20 workshops benefiting 130 men. These training workshops complement the building of water catchment structures in many of the localities where rainwater harvesting is carried out and an important source of water for irrigation.
In Gaza, ACDI/VOCA worked with World Vision to complete the construction of 36 agricultural ponds, and also led in projects to rehabilitate wells and conduct training workshops covering the following topics:
- strategies for reducing water consumption,
- maintenance of irrigation networks,
- water efficient irrigation systems and
- crop diversification
Alex Gebrehiwot
agebrehiwot@acdivoca.org
Feb 2001 – Dec 2001
When it was launched in September 2004, the India Growth-Oriented Microenterprise Development Program (GMED) was USAID’s first enterprise development project in India. A 4-year, $6.3 million program funded under the Accelerated Microenterprise Advancement Project (AMAP), GMED was an innovative program that developed sustainable and scalable approaches to job creation in agriculture by fostering the growth of micro and small enterprises (MSEs).
GMED’s components included agribusiness and urban services. The agribusiness component focused on fruits and vegetables, organically certified food products, maize value chain improvement, and the integration of HIV/AIDS-affected communities into commercial supply chains. The urban services component worked to improve municipal solid waste management through outsourcing to MSEs. GMED was solely a technical service program and had no grant or subsidy component, making it unique for a donor project.
Strengthening the Value Chain through Partnerships and Technology
GMED adopted a value chain approach to enterprise development following the principle that the growth of micro and small enterprises must be driven by sustainable growth strategies for all of the firms in a value chain. ACDI/VOCA developed partnerships with larger firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which then provide embedded business development services to associated MSEs as an integral part of their commercial transactions. Thus, GMED was a service facilitator, rather than a service provider. The ultimate goal of the project was to enhance MSE growth opportunities by expanding the scope of the embedded services being provided by corporate and NGO partners, helping to make them more effective.
Addressing Opportunities and Challenges
- GMED, with two partner NGOs, organized and obtained organic certification for several thousand small, marginal, mostly women farmers. It also helped to effectively market and export these organically certified products.
- GMED helped several major Indian corporations and larger NGOs integrate smallholder farmers into commercial supply chains by increasing their capacity to meet market demand. Growing demand represented significant potential for smallholder fruit and vegetable farmers, who account for the great majority of fruit and vegetable production in India—provided that these farmers can gain the ability to produce to market specifications. GMED helped two of its principle corporate partners establish three model smallholder vegetable farmer production bases to illustrate the measures required to accomplish this.
- In addition, ACDI/VOCA pioneered the Village Extension Agent model to expand the availability of private agricultural extension services at reduced cost while providing employable skills to local youth. 18 under-employed farm youth from within a vegetable production cluster were recruited, trained in the rudiments of crop, soil, water and pest management and stationed in their home village. The village agents, who spoke the local dialect and were acquainted with the village farmers, were trained provide solutions to less complex farming problems and could call on professional agents whose work they supplemented.
ACDI/VOCA and GMED demonstrated commercially viable solutions to MSE growth constraints through development of these models, inspiring other industry participants to adopt them. This bodes well for the sustainability and scalability of GMED efforts, benefiting SMEs and the industries involved through enhanced competitiveness and greater growth opportunities in India.
Alex Pavlovic
apavlovic@acdivoca.org
Sept 2004 – Sept 2008
The Women’s Refugee Commission is engaged in a three-year research and advocacy project aimed at improving the effectiveness of economic programming targeting refugee, internally displaced and returning women and youth. The project includes ten field assessments covering camps, urban settings and early return contexts. Under the program, six innovative pilot projects have been funded to allow operational organizations to try out new approaches and capture new learning.
The American Refugee Committee (ARC) implements the pilot project in Southern Sudan. This project utilized an extensive value chain approach and analysis of market systems in areas of return to facilitate refugees’ preparations to engage in enterprises that would provide the greatest employment and income generation opportunities. These types of in-depth market analyses have traditionally been neglected by relief and development agencies. They provide an important learning opportunity to determine the impact of applying more sophisticated market techniques to refugee livelihood programs.
Based on market analysis, the project identified apiculture (beekeeping) and lulu nut processing as suitable high-return sub-sectors for refugees. Women process lulu nuts (also known as shea nuts) which are used in high-value goods such as oil, shea butter, soaps and body lotions. The goal of the value chain approach in both subsectors is to:
- Generate research through these pilot activities to identify innovative, commercially viable solutions for current obstacles to high-quality shea nut oil and honey production;
- Improve the information flow among value chain actors and between levels of the shea nut (lulu) and apiculture value chains, expanding and strengthening market linkages; and
- Encourage suppliers and processing firms to invest in new production areas and techniques.
Through facilitation of activities in the targeted subsectors, the project targets sustainable improvements in honey and shea nut oil production, leading to increased wealth for women and their families.
On-going evaluation has led to adaptations in order to reach the overall goal of facilitating sustainable livelihood interventions for refugees. For example, it was determined that the program can have higher impact on transferring marketable skill sets when participants have a “go-and-see visit” to their place of origin. The project capitalizes on these visits to include a vocational training component, since conducting trainings in areas of return not only transfers skill sets but also contributes to social cohesiveness.
Terrence Isert (terryi@archq.org) or Connie Kamara (conniek@archq.org)
American Refugee Committee International
430 Oak Grove Street, Suite 204
Minneapolis, MN 55410
August 2006 – October 2009
For more information on the whole program, see the Promoting Appropriate Livelihoods for Displaced Women and Youth activity profile, or contact Dale Buscher at daleb@womenscommission.org.
Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. It is particularly important in post-conflict areas, with many children acting as heads-of-households and without the skills to provide for their families through employment or entrepreneurship. However, youth are often guided into enterprises that have low market potential, that are not meeting immediate community needs, that are socially or environmentally unsustainable, or that are replications of other businesses already run extensively throughout the community. By assessing opportunities for youth prior to their training, and incorporating an understanding of the need to assess the environmental implications of any business or industry development, and relating real growth opportunities to resource availability, these programs can truly achieve success and sustainability.
With this in mind, EcoVentures International (EVI) has been working with the PAS (Preparing Ourselves for Work) program in Timor-Leste to identify viable employment and enterprise opportunities to inform a training program for over 2,500 rural youth, ages 18-30. In the first phase of the project, EVI conducted a detailed market analysis of growing sectors of the Timorese economy and identified suitable entry points for youth. The goal is to introduce livelihood opportunities that are environmentally sustainable and build transferable skills for long-term employment and adaptability. Examples of such sectors include: bamboo, aquaculture, geotextiles, solar energy, and coconut processing, among others.
Each PAS participant will complete a year-long training program designed to build capacity in several core areas including: life skills, technical work skills, financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills. Through experiential, hands-on learning in a selected track, youth will then determine how to best utilize the financial capital they have accumulated. The research and tools EVI produced will inform the directions that program staff guide youth along each of these tracks, as well as the specific types of service opportunities they engage in during the training.
David Sturza
david@ecoventures.org
Tanzania’s urban areas do not have formalized systems for the disposal of used plastic bottles and bags. Piles of plastic waste accumulate in waterways and along streets in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, creating breeding environments for malaria-carrying mosquitos, allowing unsafe chemical seepage into water sources and soils, and developing generally unsanitary conditions in dense urban areas. To address environmental impacts of plastic use and production in Dar es Salaam and provide youth with simple after-school income-generating activities and training in personal and environment health management, EcoVentures International (EVI) and the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a coalition of cross-sectoral local organizations originally organized by EVI, worked together on a basic value chain assessment of the plastics recycling industry.
There are several plastics companies in Dar es Salaam manufacturing plastic shoes, buckets, and fences. Until 2005, these plastics companies imported the virgin plastic inputs for the manufacturing process. The EVI/EEDI assessment highlighted micro and small enterprise opportunities for unemployed youth in processing used plastics for recycling and reuse in the local plastics industry. An EEDI partner, Environment Based Poverty Alleviation, established a start-up enterprise for plastics collection and recycling, beginning by working with a few older jobless youths sourcing plastics from dump sites.
In order to reach the large volumes of plastics demanded, the enterprise tapped into the youth population to provide them with an easy way to contribute to the clean-up of their community, instilling a sense of social responsibility, and to generate income in a way that would not interfere with school activities. Youth are trained in basic protective health and sanitation skills and provided with protective equipment to use when doing their individual collection.
As the enterprise develops it has been able to take advantage of relationships with key market actors and grow its operations, first by contracting trucks to transport the plastic to a sorting facility. Financing from plastics manufacturers who used the lower-cost recycled plastic product facilitated investment into recycling equipment and expanded their capacity for production of recycled plastic pellets that had even more value to the plastics manufacturers in the region. The recycling enterprise has retooled its business model to make plastics processing and pelletization its primary function, and it continues to contract a network of youth plastics collectors to feed the demand for plastic waste while providing an important service of removing harmful waste plastics from communities, enabling youth to create a safer community while contributing to their own and their families’ well-being.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Some of the most successful youth empowerment initiatives are those that are started by visionary youth who understand the issues and challenges that they and their peers face and have a visionary perspective on how to improve their situation. Such is the case in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, where the youth-initiated and youth-run Kibera Community Youth Program (KCYP) has been offering jobless, vulnerable youth positive activities, such as sport and drama, to provide an alternative to more destructive activities prevalent in the community, such as drugs, gangs, and prostitution. They also have health education programs to inform youth about HIV/AIDS and associated risk factors and protective measures.
In order to support their activities, the leaders of KCYP realized that they needed a sustainable form of income. They wanted to be able to provide a service that could generate income while continuing to serve their mission of advancing the well-being of the youth of Kibera. A need cited in the community was a lack of access to information, which in Kibera comes primarily through radio and cell phones. However most individuals in Kibera lack access to electricity to charge their phones and/or do not have free income for the continual purchase of batteries to power their radios. A potential solution was identified in portable mini-solar panels that could be manufactured at low-cost by the youth of KCYP.
EcoVentures International, a long-time partner of KCYP, worked with the organization to provide technical assistance with business plan development and with building sustainable market linkages for the mini-solar panel business. Youth are trained in the assembly of panels and proceeds from the sale of the panels are shared between the individuals and the organization, providing these vulnerable youth with an income generating opportunity while helping to sustain the organization’s community activities that provide additional opportunities and benefits to many more youth and street children in the Kibera community, engaging them in a positive, peer-structured environment.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Building the capacity of youth to be workforce-ready and equipped with entrepreneurial skills is a common method of addressing economic development needs in economies in which youth are the largest sector of the population and/or the sector of population that has the lowest employment rates. However, so often youth are guided into enterprises that have low market potential, are not meeting immediate community needs, that are socially or environmentally unsustainable, or that are replications of other businesses that are already run extensively throughout the community. By assessing opportunities for youth prior to their training, and incorporating an understanding of the need to assess the environmental implications of any business or industry development, and related real growth opportunities in regards to resource availability, these programs can truly achieve success and sustainability.
EcoVentures International (EVI) is working with Haiti’s IDEJEN Program (L'initiative pour le développement des jeunes en dehors du milieu scolaire), analyzing various sectors in Haiti’s economy for opportunities for sustainable youth business development or employment. The country-wide IDEJEN program, funded by USAID through the EQUIP III program and run by the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) is aiming to provide employment and business development opportunities for some 10,000 out-of-
school youth over the next two years. To support this effort, EVI is providing research and capacity-building for local implementing partners on market-relevant and sustainable businesses opportunities that can be started quickly and with high growth and employment potential.
By analyzing different formal and informal value chain sectors, EVI is identifying high-potential sectors towards which youth trained in these programs might be directed. An additional piece to this is the development of tools that youth and staff at the IDEJEN centers can use to understand value-chain methodologies and to continually analyze market opportunities, enabling them to think through how to apply skills in which the youth are trained and ensuring that the training that youth receive will continue to be relevant to the youth and to the industries in which they eventually participate.
There are a number of projects currently underway in Haiti for the indirect development of environmental enterprise, and future work will connect players in some of the stronger-opportunity sectors to leverage their work and provide industry training and apprenticeships to youth to help feed the growth. Current sectors being investigated include mini-solar, bamboo construction, biomass fuel briquetting, and sustainable aquaculture.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
Deforestation resulting from increased population pressure on ever-decreasing forest resources is a well-known, critical issue in many parts of the world. Women and children are typically responsible for fuel collection and production, time-consuming activities that take additional time away from opportunities for schooling and income generation, which are both important to reducing youth vulnerability.
Through the Future Fuels program, EcoVentures International (EVI) is exploring enterprise opportunities for women and caregivers in alternative, environmentally-sound fuel production and sales that would reduce the amount of time necessary for fuel collection and production, increase household incomes, and create a healthier indoor environment with cleaner-burning fuels.
The program spurred from working with local partners during the establishment of the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a network of organizations focused on utilizing environmental business development to address community issues in Lushoto, Tanzania. A distinct opportunity was located in the sawdust waste generated by the area’s numerous logging mills. Typically, the sawdust is burned in large piles in the open air, but EEDI partners identified it as a raw material for fuel briquette enterprise development.
Fuel briquette enterprise development presented a potentially viable business alternative to charcoal production, a critical factor in local biodiversity and forest cover loss, both of which are natural resource bases critical for stability of the local economy. There are a number of existing technologies of varying scales to convert biomass waste into solid fuels, and EVI worked with its partners to identify an approach that uses low-cost production machinery that would be accessible to low-income women entrepreneurs. By working with women, the primary sellers of charcoal, the program could tap into existing market structures to incentivize natural resource management practices that complement rather than compete with household needs.
In 2007, EVI initiated an action-research program, working with partner organizations in the EEDI and groups of women currently involved in village savings groups, to test the effectiveness of the technology as well as the viability of briquette production as an enterprise by testing markets in different municipalities of Tanzania and Uganda. A next step of the program is to work on market linkage development between producers in rural areas and high-demand municipal end-markets. By developing these market linkages prior to engaging vulnerable women entrepreneurs, risk for the women will be mitigated, ensuring economic advancement and a better quality of life for children and youth in their care.
The program is also active in Tanzania
Megan Hill
megan@eco-ventures.org
Deforestation resulting from increased population pressure on ever-decreasing forest resources is a well-known, critical issue in many parts of the world. Women and children are typically responsible for fuel collection and production, time-consuming activities that take additional time away from opportunities for schooling and income generation, which are both important to reducing youth vulnerability.
Through the Future Fuels program, EcoVentures International (EVI) is exploring enterprise opportunities for women and caregivers in alternative, environmentally-sound fuel production and sales that would reduce the amount of time necessary for fuel collection and production, increase household incomes, and create a healthier indoor environment with cleaner-burning fuels.
The program spurred from working with local partners during the establishment of the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a network of organizations focused on utilizing environmental business development to address community issues in Lushoto, Tanzania. A distinct opportunity was located in the sawdust waste generated by the area’s numerous logging mills. Typically, the sawdust is burned in large piles in the open air, but EEDI partners identified it as a raw material for fuel briquette enterprise development.
Fuel briquette enterprise development presented a potentially viable business alternative to charcoal production, a critical factor in local biodiversity and forest cover loss, both of which are natural resource bases critical for stability of the local economy. There are a number of existing technologies of varying scales to convert biomass waste into solid fuels, and EVI worked with its partners to identify an approach that uses low-cost production machinery that would be accessible to low-income women entrepreneurs. By working with women, the primary sellers of charcoal, the program could tap into existing market structures to incentivize natural resource management practices that complement rather than compete with household needs.
In 2007, EVI initiated an action-research program, working with partner organizations in the EEDI and groups of women currently involved in village savings groups, to test the effectiveness of the technology as well as the viability of briquette production as an enterprise by testing markets in different municipalities of Tanzania and Uganda. A next step of the program is to work on market linkage development between producers in rural areas and high-demand municipal end-markets. By developing these market linkages prior to engaging vulnerable women entrepreneurs, risk for the women will be mitigated, ensuring economic advancement and a better quality of life for children and youth in their care.
The project is also active in Uganda
Megan Hill
megan@eco-ventures.org
For many years, Mexico has been challenged by the loss of a valuable segment of the workforce as youth from poor rural areas migrate to the United States in search of economic opportunity. Recently, the Mexican government decided to take a new approach to combating this emigration by adopting an idea initiated by Fundacion E, a Mexican organization that works to generate an entrepreneurial culture in emerging economies. Fundacion E believes that, in poor rural communities where livelihoods depend on income from small farms, training youth leaders to begin approaching farming from an entrepreneurial perspective might help youth to recognize the opportunities in agribusiness, and thereby encourage youth to stay in their home communities.
EcoVentures International (EVI) is working with Fundacion E in this initiative, training lead trainers and youth in very low-income areas in South Mexico in EVI’s AgriPlanner Curriculum. Through this training they learn to understand the business aspects of farming, which encourages approaching their farms from an entrepreneurial perspective. This helps change youth attitudes toward farming, increase farmer incomes, and keep youth on the farms.
The trainings simulate the planning, planting, selling, and contracting processes in agribusiness. Participants learn to understand, among other principles, changing markets, whether and when to invest in their farm, and how to value their own time. They learn to view their farms as businesses and assess the disadvantages and benefits of different contracting and selling options. In times when food security is becoming more of an issue, such training is particularly pertinent for individual and national security.
Margie Brand
margie@eco-ventures.org
