Sustainable Projects: long term income sources?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sander Koyfman on September 19, 2009 at 3:51pm

http://www.icuc-iwmi.org/Symposium2008/ - International centre for Underutilized Crops has Haiti resources

Permalink Reply by Sander Koyfman on September 19, 2009 at 4:03pm

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007... - sun ovens - $250 a pop!

Permalink Reply by Donald Skow on September 21, 2009 at 1:34pm

Hi Sander,
Thanks for bringing this up.
Last month when in Haiti we discussed this with the community elders. Angela Fairfield was also involved. Long term income has to be a part of a project sustainability for orphaned children.
Some things already planned or implemented by the local Haitian community is the purchasing of Tap Taps (privatly owned public transportation), phones for rent, a sewing bussiness, wedding clothes and facility rental, voluntourism (very symbiotic) import bussiness from Dominican Republic, specialty brick making, creating of art images to be sold over the internet (my seven year old grandson has found this lucrative) and opening an internet cafe.

Another long term and important objective being planned is to see the children educated in skills i.e. nurseing, accounting, agriculture and bussiness. Skills that can both give back to the community and provide income.

I have been giving a lot of thought to Scott Rains comments he made during Saturdays confrence call; voluntourism for the disability community and how we can course correct some of our plans to accomplish and accomodate. Scott sounds like a very resourceful and talented individual.

I gathered, Eion Bailey has a long standing passion for "Bread Mountian" and bringing "the Myth" to reality. Mistakenly I thought he had been to Haiti. Yesterday a friend, pilot and traveler reminded me, "Haiti makes other poor nations seem rich". I am glad to see his passion and the creative work he has put into IM TV.

I also hope the bussiness community will add some creative imput.

Permalink Reply by Colin Duncan on April 2, 2010 at 3:54pm

Are we talking about building business capacity in the local community, or providing job training and income opportunities to the kids in the orphanage? If the former, would that project be directly connected with the orphanage? If the latter, we'd have to take care to avoid the perception of "sweatshop-under-guise-of-orphanage." That said, I recall a girl's orphanage in Madagascar that did a brisk trade in homemade clothes and paper products that the kids made, among other things. Not sure how they were financed, but it was a great operation, made sure to give the older girls job training, etc, so they would have options in life.