Rural Employment Generation

New economic opportunities are required for rural people who have seen incomes dwindle when traditional pursuits of agriculture, mining, or logging no longer provide sufficient livelihoods. The burden falls particularly on women, who often lack mobility to search for new employment and income opportunities because of family obligations. In heavily agrarian societies, such as those in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Mexico, the Foundation has supported activities conducted by indigenous non-governmental organizations to bring technical expertise and credit to women. The assistance enables them not only to improve the yields of their subsistence and cash crops, but also to earn cash from such processing activities as soap making, palm-oil processing, and corn milling. Other activities to bring in off-farm income include craft production, tailoring, and other small retail enterprises. Foundation support is directed toward the disadvantaged, often through intermediary organizations composed of village groups that have joined forces to meet needs that the villagers have cited as most important. These multivillage intermediary organizations are active in Mexico and India. In supporting them, an overall Foundation goal is to strengthen citizen organizations that underpin democratic societies.

In the United States, credit is a central tool of rural development institutions. It helps create new microenterprises and small businesses for people who have had little relief from poverty in either factory, farm, or resource-based work. As enterprise development has grown as a means of relieving poverty in the United States, the Foundation has targeted its resources to a few key rural institutions capable of achieving a regional or statewide scale of activity and of serving a diverse group of people. Such institutions include the Southern Development Bancorporation/ Arkansas Enterprise Group; the PPEP Housing Development Corporation/Micro Industry Rural Credit Organization; and the Northern Economic Initiatives Corporation (through a grant to Northern Michigan University) and North Coast Business and Industrial Development Corporation (through a program-related investment). They are expected to serve as models and produce lessons applicable to both governmental and private efforts to address the poverty of distressed rural regions through enterprise development.