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she also co-teaches health classes. She works
mostly via informal education techniques including stories,
games, puppet shows and other activities that are simple and
entertaining. Alexandra has also initiated a Mothers'
Club in which 11 women participate. Their central
activity is a very successful garden that produces nine
different kinds of vegetables. The produce from this
garden is divided between the participating women, who use it
to improve family nutrition. The remainder of the
produce is sold daily at a market in a larger city not far
from her site. The proceeds from vegetable sales are
used to purchase more seed and diesel fuel for the garden
irrigation pump, thereby making the project
sustainable.
Microenterprise Development Volunteer
Alison Gordon
is a first year
Volunteer working with vocational training program in a
Department capital. Her primary responsibility is teaching
business classes and consulting with local entrepreneurs to
improve the management of their respective small
businesses. Allison helped start a restaurant
(sponsored by her counterpart agency) that includes gardening
and canning micro-enterprises which employ a total of 14
women. Alison assisted with the market research and
business plan for the restaurant, and taught the employees
basic accounting. These small businesses have been able to
provide jobs for previously underemployed women on a full-time
basis, which has substantially increased their income. Alison
has also assisted in team building workshops, and has
collaborated with her counterpart agency in the design and
implementation of a micro-credit program, including developing
a database program to improve the monitoring of loans and
payments. As a secondary project, Alison helped |
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design a literacy program that has improved the reading
and writing skills of 60 women who are now able to work more
effectively in their respective businesses. Another of
Alison's secondary activities has been teaching aerobics to
her colleagues at the vocational school.
Natural
Resources Volunteer Frank Aragona lives in a small town in the
high valleys of the Department of Cochabamba. Frank's
situation is unique in the sense that he is one of a few
Volunteers whose counterpart entity is the community
itself. In recent years, this agrarian-based community
had switched from cultivating traditional crops to relying
primarily on a monoculture of onions as their primary source
of income. Based upon a community wide request for
Volunteer assistance, Frank was selected to serve in this
site. Upon his arrival he identified a number of
problematic long-term impacts that the switch to onions had
caused, but which were not initially recognized due to the
income generated by a new crop with promising initial
yields. He formed a community Agricultural Committee to
explore alternatives to onion cultivation, and has trained
farmer-promoters to serve as local extension agents.
Working with the Committee and farmer-promoters, Frank was
able to secure funding from an international NGO for a
four-part project that addresses the current problems caused
by onion cultivation and provides viable alternatives
including beekeeping, improvements in onion crop cultivation
and management, agroforestry, and guinea pig (cuy)
breeding. These four alterna |
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tive activities will allow the residents to improve
their quality of life by increasing and diversifying their
income sources and, at the same time, using the land in a
responsible, sustainable manner.
Volunteer Seth Nickinson
was recruited
as Bolivia's first Information and Communications Technology
(ICT) volunteer through the Microenterprise Development
Project. Working with a League of Municipalities
(Mancomunidad) that represents 14 municipal governments, Seth
has helped strengthen municipal governance and promote local
economic development. Seth and the Mancomunidad have developed
an integrated ICT strategy that seeks to harness interest in
the Internet, develop ways to fund technology and provide
Internet access in communities, prepare people to use the
Internet appropriately as a development tool, and use ICT to
support small businesses and community economic
development. Seth has also assisted Volunteers working
in crafts development by presenting workshops to artisan
groups regarding the use of the Internet and its potential to
increase their income. He recently designed an electronic
artesania catalog that promotes and markets the work of 180
women artisans. As the first ICT Volunteer in country,
Seth has frequently given presentations exploring ICT as a
development tool to Volunteers and Trainees, and worked with
PC/Bolivia program staff to develop a workable strategy for
integrating ICT across our project sectors.
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