Agnes Kwamboka and her family used to be included in this number. Agnes and her husband worked as day-laborers during the planting and harvesting seasons in an effort to make ends meet. At home, they barely grew enough maize on their half acre of land to feed their family.

As if life wasn’t already hard, Agnes’s sister passed away suddenly and left her two young sons in Agnes’ care. “You have to take care of family, and that is what I did.” Now raising four young boys, she struggled to keep the children fed and also keep up hope. Agnes first heard about Village Enterprise after visiting a relative in nearby Kakamega who had started a successful business after participating on our program, and prayed for a similar opportunity.

In 2014, Agnes enrolled in our program and started receiving training and mentoring from Business Mentor Imelda Midzukani. Agnes loves having someone to encourage her. “I respond really well to Imelda’s training and enjoy learning all these new business concepts. She is always positive. She laughs a lot and is a great mentor and teacher.”

Agnes and her two partners decided to start a rabbit business. Why rabbits? “Limited competition, good demand and short reproduction cycles.” The three entrepreneurs sourced local materials and built a rabbit hut at Agnes’s home. They started their business with a male and female rabbit, which quickly produced six offspring that will be ready for sale in December.

“December is the best time to sell the rabbits. . . it’s the ‘festive season’ when people will pay a premium.”

In addition to her rabbit business, Agnes has used the Village Enterprise SMART (Smarter Market Analysis Risk Tool) process to identify new crops to farm on her home plot. She has reduced her maize plantings (a low-risk/very-low-profit crop) and is now harvesting kale. “I’m excited about our future. With the new skills and knowledge I’ve acquired through training, I’m able to reinvest and expand my business.”

Before Village Enterprise, Agnes faced a life of hardship without the tools and knowledge to improve her life. With her new-found income, Agnes is able to better feed her family, pay school fees, and afford medical care.

The post A Hare-Raising Success Story appeared first on Village Enterprise.

For more than two centuries, The Old Farmer’s Almanac seemed to hold the answer to every crop grower’s questions, like when is the best time to plant onions (“as soon as the ground can be worked in the spring”) or harvest potatoes (“after 10 weeks, usually in early July”).

Agnes Mwaki prefers to use an app. After the 49-year-old banana farmer in Meru County, Kenya, recently switched to growing onions — a more profitable crop — she needed help determining when to transplant the seedlings and when to harvest. Through a government program that provides her with a smartphone, Mwaki now uses WhatsApp to send a photo of her onions each week to an agronomist. “When I spot a problem, I just take a photo and send it to the agricultural officer, and she describes the drug [I’m] supposed to use and I buy it,” says Mwaki.

In recent years a growing group of mobile apps has moved in with access to real-time advice and market intelligence, and the latest of that technology is originating where this kind of data is increasingly vital: Africa. By 2050, the continent must boost its current food production by 260 percent to feed the estimated 2.4 billion people who will be living there, warns the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Yet many farmers there are unaware of the actual market price of certain crops like rice, which could lead them to sell their harvests for peanuts and fall financially short ahead of the next growing season. Even worse: They’re unlikely to know that they could have doubled their profit if they had just ditched their rice patties and started growing maize instead.

Enter a suite of mobile apps that is addressing everything from how best to feed farm animals to displaying the going rate of seeds or fertilizer and projecting the most profitable crops during a particular season. M-Farm lets farmers text message a phone number to receive up-to-the-hour prices on tomatoes in Nairobi, for example, while iCow offers tips on how to maximize profit and productivity from raising cattle (“Napier grass is best,” reads one tip). While these kinds of apps aren’t entirely new, there are more of them now, and many are becoming increasingly sophisticated as well as being developed and used within Africa. (Both M-Farm and iCow emerged from Kenya.)

One new tool being introduced in Kenya and Uganda allows users to analyze a particular crop — such as cassava tubers — and compare its profitability level to others. “We started noticing that a lot of our farmers were essentially planting crops at the worst times of the year, when everyone was harvesting or planting the same exact crops, because that’s what their neighbors did,” says Konstantin Zvereff, a developer who worked on the Smarter Market Analysis Risk Tool, or SMART. “When you have these low incomes, you can’t afford to take risks.”

Given that many farmers live on less than $1.25 a day, this kind of app could help a family afford to pay school fees or send their kids to a doctor. But the app alone isn’t always enough. That’s why Village Enterprise, the San Francisco-based nonprofit behind the app, is also using a four-month training program where farmers learn how to make use of their competitive advantages in deciding what and how to plant before they get help creating a business plan. Already in Uganda, Village Enterprise succeeded at persuading farmers that growing maize would be far more profitable than raising honey because of low demands for the latter.

As cellphones became commonplace here, farmers started calling friends or relatives at distant markets to determine the demand for certain crops in those particular areas. Yet now the race is on to develop apps that can do the same — across many agricultural products, at hundreds of retail locations and with input from thousands of buyers and sellers.

To be sure, some industry experts argue that the apps are wrongly focusing on things like scaling production rather than on what farmers are really thinking about day to day: reducing costs. And like many new ideas, ag apps that threaten to change a farmer’s way of life too drastically, and too quickly, can face resistance. In the U.S., farmers often resist change because of arcane agricultural subsidies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and underwrite the production costs of unprofitable crops. In East Africa, an older generation also remains hesitant. Software developer Tony Olendo’s grandfather, for one, was shown M-Farm and how it could have helped him select the most profitable crops. But he didn’t budge. “He’s been farming for close to 40 years now,” says Olendo. “This took his kids all the way through school, so it’s very difficult for him to imagine that he should now stop.”

To convince people like his grandfather to change, Olendo says developers must go “outside the laboratory environment that they’re used to” and hold a farmer’s hand while walking through the entire process — from how to till the land to where to buy fertilizer.

Banks may ultimately embrace this technology without reservation, because farming at any reasonable scale typically requires some manner of loan or credit. “One of the biggest challenges farmers face is lack of a credit history,” says Robin Miller, associate partner at Dalberg, a global strategic advisory firm. “Banks are too fearful to provide those loans without knowing the risk associated with how that person will use it.”

But data from thousands of people using ag apps provides records of how farmers make their decisions — and their returns. And conceivably, Miller adds, a bank that buys access to that data would have a better picture of a farmer’s profile and for deciding whether or not to offer a loan — and, perhaps, help a farm scale to the next level.

The post Africa’s Farming Revolution Starts Here appeared first on Village Enterprise.

But Hellen, who lives in Soroti, one of the most impoverished regions of Uganda, had children to feed and educate. When Hellen got a small $300 business grant and training from Village Enterprise, she stitched a clear path out of poverty for her family and dozens more.

First, Hellen trained to become a tailor, used her start-up grant to rent a sewing machine, buy fabric, and grow her tailoring business. But community-minded Hellen didn’t stop there. She bought sewing machines, hired a part-time employee, and amazingly, created a vocational school to train 40 other at-risk women to sew.

Finally, when Hellen saw students came to school hungry, she started a restaurant that employs more people! Hellen went on to build a church and plans to create a hair salon and another school. “I am so proud of myself—to think I came from so little and now have so much. And even still, it is going to grow!”

We are proud of you, too, Hellen! On this Mother’s Day we salute you and all the Hellens of the world staring down extreme poverty for themselves and their entire community.

If you believe that women like Hellen deserve access to markets, credit, opportunities, and more, share this post and support our efforts today.

The post A Thread of Hope: The Sewing Machine That Helped Feed Hundreds appeared first on Village Enterprise.

When times got tough and she couldn’t find work to pay rent, Elamina Mada would discover her house door locked by the landlord, leaving her and her family without any shelter. To make matters worse, Elamina was very prone to getting typhoid fever. When the illness would take hold, she would endure days of pain and sickness without taking any medicine. She avoided the doctor and sacrificed her health, worried that the extra costs would leave her family without food.

“Imagine not being able to go to the doctor when you are really sick. That was me when I got typhoid fever. I had no money to pay for medicine. It was an agonizing decision, but I had to put family first.”

She and other program participants began our one-year microenterprise development program in 2012. Elamina’s courage and spirit made her an exceptional business leader in her small, three-person business group. With a grant totaling $150 and the help from her Village Enterprise mentor Eunice Chebet, her business group started buying and selling cereal grains at a small table at the local
market.

Over time they used their profits to expand into selling fruits and vegetables and have added a covered kiosk for the new products. She has established a good reputation with farmers; they now come directly to “Mama Elamina” to tell her when their grains are ready for harvest. “I have learned about smart business practices, basic record keeping, and savings. All this training helps me run a successful business.”

Before entering Village Enterprise’s program, Elamina struggled to provide basic needs for her family. Now, her business has diversified and expanded. She can pay for medication when she gets sick, all of her children’s school fees, three meals a day, and new furniture. Elamina serves as an inspiration for the women in her village and for her first grandchild, Adimu, whom she can now afford to send to school.

“I am so grateful to Village Enterprise for opening my mind and for allowing me to provide a better life for my children and grandchildren.”

Downloadable version

The post Putting Family First – Mother Elamina appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Jane Arara joined the Village Enterprise program almost two years ago. Her first business venture was buying and selling kerosene.

She and her fellow group members went through a three month Financial and Business literacy training, then received a startup capital grant of $100 from Village Enterprise. After three months of successfully running the kerosene business, the group received an additional grant of $50 to boost their business.

Jane’s average day is a busy one. She wakes up at 5:00 a.m. to make mandazis (donuts) which are a favored delicacy among the residents of this village.

At about 6.00 a.m. people begin to stream in to get a hold of the mandazis before Jane runs out of stock. Once the light of the day breaks, it gets a little less busy for Jane as she begins to prepare what her customers will take for lunch.

As part of being in the Village Enterprise program, Jane and ten other groups that received a similar startup capital had to come together to form a Business Savings Group. The group met every single month to save the little profit that they were making from their businesses.

As time progressed, Jane took up a loan from the Business Savings Group to expand her business which eventually bore fruit while the other group members diversified into other businesses. In addition to this business, Jane operates a kiosk that sells items such as sugar, tea leaves, bread, snacks, and sweets.

Jane says that she will forever be grateful to Village Enterprise for their involvement in poverty alleviation among rural poor households. She hopes that the extreme poor in rural western Kenya will continue to have their lives changed as hers has been changed.

“Sleeping without a meal and children staying out of school is a thing of the past,” Jane, who supports a household of ten, says with a bold smile on her face. This smile is shared by the hundreds of satisfied customers who eat at Jane’s food kiosk.

Jane is a perfect example of how we are making Village Enterprise’s mission of equipping people living in extreme poverty with resources to create sustainable businesses come to pass.

Francis Khamaluli
Assistant Country Director – Kenya

The post Mama Jane’s: Bringing Joy to Mugomari, Kenya One Donut at a Time appeared first on Village Enterprise.

First I visited businesses near the Kisere forest that are just starting our program. The poverty in the region is painfully real. Emma is a widow with a debilitating eye condition who supports ten dependents. A few weeks ago, after three months of business and financial literacy training, Emma and the other members of the Vision Business Group received their grant to buy and sell fish, groundnuts, and fruit. Their business is just starting, but Emma is already full of hope for the future. She told me that the grant has uplifted her but that right now she’s still unsure how she’ll feed her children each day. At the end of our time together, she handed me the four bananas left from the day’s sales to express her gratitude.

It was hard to walk away not knowing what would happen to Emma. The next few days, however, were an opportunity to see Emma’s future through visits to other Village Enterprise business owners such as Harriet Nafula. Harriet used to start her day like Emma, knowing that breakfast for her eleven children would consist of tea without sugar and not knowing what else she might be able to feed them. Now, each day is no longer something for Harriet to dread.

As part of the Rahema Business Group, Harriet runs a kiosk in the center of Moi’s Bridge, Kenya. They sell groundnuts, millet, oranges, avocados, and sweet bananas. Harriet and her fellow business owners have worked hard and sacrificed in order to rent both the kiosk and a storage facility, enabling them to easily add fresh stock to their prime location. The kiosk earns each family about $4/day, putting them all well above the extreme poverty level. And they haven’t even graduated from our program yet!

Thanks to Village Enterprise, Harriet can now give her children breakfast and buy meat for dinner. She even sends shopping money to her son who is away at school! And her produce is fantastic—easily the best avocado I have ever tasted!

Understandably, many of us see poverty as if through a snow globe, a small and faraway world. Please know that with each shake we are covering the ground with a fresh layer of hope. Harriet sums it up best. She told me to please tell the donors of Village Enterprise “thank you for taking away my stress.” She thanks Village Enterprise “for making me who I am.” I will let her words speak for us both.

Leah Newman
Marketing Communications Director

The post Forecast for Africa: Hope With a Chance of Snow Flurries appeared first on Village Enterprise.

To get started, Geoffrey and I were dropped off at a series of huts.  Off we went in search of the business owners.  You would think we’d know where to find them, but given there are no addresses in the rural villages where we work, you locate the program’s participants by asking anyone you see if they know where those you seek live. Then, you walk in the direction you’re pointed until you need to ask someone again to find your way. So we set off wandering around the villages and eventually found, through a trial and error process, some of the business owners, who I then interviewed via the translator.

The presence of a mzungu, or white person, in the community caused the typical stir.  It also spurred the usual parade of children as we made our way along the dirt paths through widely scattered clusters of mud huts and fields of crops. In such remote areas, young kids and even some adults have never seen someone who looks like me before. It was a sunny day, about 80+ degree weather, in a landscape that is transitioning to dry season. It was interesting to interview the business owners and to hear how they had used their grants and how the program was working for them.  I was able to see first-hand how the small grant provided by Village Enterprise, along with business and savings mentoring and training, is transforming the lives of the families I visited.

As we plodded along Geoffrey explained to me the current state of education in Uganda.  He teaches English and Social Studies to children ranging in age from 7 to 14 in a private school.  (Private schools are definitely preferred here for those who can afford them.)  He has an average class size of around 45, which is substantially better than government/public schools that could have anywhere from 100-200 children in a single classroom! He explained that Uganda is attempting to provide universal primary education, which is subsidized by the government, but for which parents still have to pay school fees in order for their children to be able to attend.  He also explained that class levels had a range of ages, especially for girls, since not all girls were able to start school at the right time (due to many poor families not being able to afford school fees when needed). Hearing his first-hand account on local education was insightful and gave me a new perspective as I looked at the many children tagging along on our spot checks.

After we got back to the drop off/pick up point, we joined a group of people in the shade of a grass-thatched awning, which I learned was a church.  I called my colleagues to let them know we were done so they could come pick me up after completing their respective spot checks. Overall it was a productive and interesting afternoon.

Kim Davis
Fellow

The post Checking In With Businesses In Okwangia Village appeared first on Village Enterprise.

When I was a little girl and couldn’t fall asleep, my father would read to me about my namesake Rebekah from a faded pocket Bible.  This name, he told me, means “bound.” After the Lord’s Resistance Army came through our village, causing widespread violence and destruction, we went to an Internally Displaced Persons camp. When the commotion of the IDP camp, the stench of uncertainty, and my mother’s soft widow’s sobs kept my eyes from rest, I felt the heavy meaning of my name wrap around my wrists and pin me to the hard dirt floor.

But now I am Rebekah and I am not bound.  I am free. Each morning as I make a fire and kiss the dawn, my mother is already awake and looking over the neatly-kept record books of her goat business.  She is my inspiration. She is my proof of possibility.

Just a few years ago, Mama, with the help of two other women and Village Enterprise, started the Cam-Cam Widows Association.  Their goat-rearing business has grown from only three goats to more than 30.  Sometimes my adopted sister Rose and I take our two younger siblings out to watch the goats.  Each one, I tell my brother, is a different part of your future.  “That little one, Abasi, will pay your school fees and that big one over there will build you a stronger roof.”  Abasi giggles at the thought of a goat building his home but Rose, who lost both her parents, never laughs.  She understands that these goats provide the income we need to purchase fresh fish and vegetables for dinner; it is the income we used to pay the hospital fees when she was sick from malaria last spring.  She is going to be a doctor one day so that she can save lives.  I am going to be a teacher so that I can teach other girls about possibilities.

Without the grant and business and savings training from Village Enterprise I would still be bound to poverty.  My mother no longer cries at night.  Now the firelight warms her smile as she puts the little ones — and then her record books — to bed.  Thank you for helping my mother create a goat business and a future for my siblings and me.

Asante sana,
Rebekah

The post Rebekah’s Story appeared first on Village Enterprise.

During the Business Mentor bi-weekly meetings everyone wanted a unique Christmas party different from the previously celebrated ones. Everyone wanted something different, special, and one that would speak out at the end of the day.

After several suggestions on how this should be celebrated all agreed that we should give back to the community. Each individual member in Village Enterprise Uganda felt that this was a great idea to give back to the community out of their own earnings as a way of being grateful and saying thanks for how far we have come.

We all agreed that we needed to give to a health center as we realized that Health is a factor that drains incomes from the rural communities and drives them into extreme poverty. Research was carried out to establish which health center had uttermost need, and we finally settled on Western Division Health Center 111 within Soroti town.

We were able to reach this decision for a number of reasons. First, this health center had stayed for 9 years since it was build, but without any power. This means that the maternity ward has not been fully operational for the same number of years. As compared to the rest of the health centers in the area its conditions are worse, yet it has the highest rural population visiting it. Finally, we believe that the donation fits in to our intervention, as we all know that disease is one of the factors that perpetuate poverty. By connecting power to this health center we believe that many lives of pregnant mothers and babies will be saved. Especially,  births that take place at night will now be easier and safer.

All senior staff contributed UG 50,000 each which is equivalent of 21 US dollars and the rest of the staff contributed UG 33,000 each which is equivalent to 14 US dollars. In total, the staff was able to raise over 300 US dollars.We have completed the whole process and are now waiting for Umeme, the electricity supplying company in Uganda to verify the wiring of the health center and connect the power.

This was a great Ugandan Christmas giving event!

Winnie Auma

The post A Christmas of Giving for Village Enterprise Uganda appeared first on Village Enterprise.

Every minute a child in Africa dies from malaria, a preventable and treatable disease.
– World Health Organization estimate for 2010

I hate malaria. The root word for the name – mala (bad!) – says it all. I’ve had malaria three times and can only describe the experience as horrible.

Malaria affects people in different ways; here is my experience.

It begins with severe headaches and back chills. For me, these symptoms last for two-three weeks and are driven by low concentrations of the disease organism. The level of plasmodium (the bug) in your system is so low that it is undetectable by the usual “peripheral” blood tests (finger prick). At this point your choices are to allow the plasmodium concentration to get worse (eventually you will test positive) or to pre-emptively self-medicate.

Once the plasmodium concentration gets worse, I begin to lose all of my energy. The parasites attach to the oxygen-carrying blood cells, and as a result any exercise or movement is severely exhausting. For whatever reason, it is worse at night, when you are less likely to go to the hospital. Days are only slightly better.

By this time, I have high fevers at night (105 degrees, the last time), total stomach malfunction (no details needed), and I feel incredibly weak. The slightest noise (and any talking) gives me huge headaches, and I am not the “best” person to be around.

The first time I had malaria I was in Mozambique. My neighbors had to take me out of my house and drag me to the hospital. The general pain was so great that I only wanted to fall asleep. My colleagues actually broke into my house, looking for me.

I wonder if this would happen in the U.S. People in East Africa have that sense of community that I haven’t seen in the U.S. or Europe.

How does malaria affect Village Enterprise business owners?

Our Kenya clients must pay a 100 Ksh (US $1.20) hospital fee, plus the additional costs of treatment and medical consultation. This can easily total 500 Ksh ($6) or more. Although this cost may seem low to you and me, the cost is very significant for most of our business owners. As a result, they usually wait to seek treatment until they are absolutely certain that they have malaria. By this time, their productivity has decreased dramatically, and they must travel to the nearest hospital (which can take several hours or days). This can mean they miss the best planting time, since the arrival of the rains and the mosquitoes are almost perfectly synchronized.

The most disturbing stories are those about the children of our business owners. A good friend of mine works at the local hospital in Kakamega, and he summarized the sad situation: “By the time they bring the babies to the hospital it is it too late to do anything.”

People living in extreme poverty make less than $1.25 per day, meaning the hospital fees represent a minimum of 5 days worth of work. Add to this the time lost traveling to the hospital and getting treated, and it’s easy to see how the cost of treating malaria makes is an extremely deadly disease.

A regular source of income from a sustainable business decreases the deadly effects of diseases like malaria. By creating business savings groups, our business owners are setting aside income that can be used for emergency medical care. While no preventative vaccine exists for malaria, we can all work to end the extreme poverty that causes a child in Africa to die every minute of a preventable disease.

World Malaria Day – which was instituted by the World Health Assembly at its 60th session in May 2007 – is a day for recognizing the global effort to provide effective control of malaria. It is an opportunity:
• For countries in the affected regions to learn from each other’s experiences and support each other’s efforts
• For new donors to join a global partnership against malaria
• For research and academic institutions to flag their scientific advances to both experts and general public
• For international partners, companies and foundations to showcase their efforts and reflect on how to scale up what has worked

Find key facts on malaria HERE.
Get more information about World Malaria Day HERE .

Konstantin Zvereff
Senior Director of Programs and Operations

The post I Hate Malaria appeared first on Village Enterprise.