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5 Fieldwork NGOs Fighting Global Poverty

Fieldwork NGOs Fighting Global PovertyFieldwork NGOs are non-government organizations that fight against global poverty directly within areas of need. Whether it be by building wells, establishing schools or educating local farmers, fieldwork NGOs take a hands-on approach to improve poverty-stricken communities worldwide. While there are countless organizations doing amazing work to fight against global poverty, this list highlights just a few. Here is a list of five fieldwork NGOs fighting global poverty.

5 Fieldwork NGOs Fighting Global Poverty

  1. The Water Project
    The Water Project provides clean drinking water to communities across sub-Saharan Africa. Importantly, the group focuses on creating reliable sources of clean water that are easy to access in terms of proximity. This includes building wells for groundwater, constructing dams to create larger local deposits and other similar processes. Once a resource is built for a community, the Water Project also makes sure to do maintenance checks to keep that resource functional. Currently, the Water Project is maintaining 1,294 clean water resources across sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the organization’s efforts are impacting 462,000 people worldwide.
  2. Child Empowerment International
    Child Empowerment International brings education to wartorn areas of civil unrest. This NGO makes its intent clear on its website: “Our Mission [is] to reduce poverty through education and empowerment.” To achieve this mission, Child Empowerment International establishes schools in areas of need, teaching leadership skills and ways to contribute to their local communities. Child Empowerment International primarily focuses on children in areas traumatized by war. So far, its efforts have been stationed across Sri Lanka and Uganda, with the intention of spreading aid elsewhere as the NGO grows. In Sri Lanka alone, there are 80 CEI schools and programs teaching more than 6,800 children in need. In Uganda, CEI programming provides 300 students with quality education services.
  3. Build Health International
    Build Health International is an NGO that builds health infrastructures in impoverished communities worldwide, all within the constraints of locally available resources. Build Health International creates architectural plans for hospitals, designing them to be cost-efficient while still high quality. In addition, this NGO focuses on using renewable resources, such as solar panels, to keep facilities energy efficient. While Build Health International primarily focuses on building hospitals, it also aids local workforces by providing short-term construction jobs. Build Health International emphasizes the importance of maintaining close relationships with assisted locals, adjusting health infrastructures to best suit community dynamics. Today, Build Health International has completed over 50 major projects across African, Haiti and Latin America.
  4. One Acre Fund
    One Acre Fund addresses the irony of a global phenomenon — that the majority of the world’s hungriest people are farmers. In remote communities across sub-Saharan Africa, the One Acre Project has a multi-step process in eradicating hunger and empowering rural communities. One Acre Fund not only provides seeds and tools to communities in need but also educates local farmers on agricultural techniques and market facilitation practices. This hands-on approach builds up communities for long term success, setting them on a self-sustaining path for sustenance and a chance for economic prosperity. Through the One Acre Fund’s aid, 809,900 rural families were assisted in 2018; as for 2019, the project number of families assisted is 925,000.
  5. Mercy Corps
    Mercy Corps is an NGO that applies an array of fieldwork to in-need communities all over the globe. This NGO was originally founded as the Save a Refugee Fund, determined to assist Cambodian refugees fleeing from the nation’s war and genocide. Over the course of nearly four decades, Mercy Corps has assisted over 220 million people worldwide. Mercy Corps educates farmers about agriculture and self-sustaining methods, helps local communities start and maintain viable businesses, provides programs to decrease inequality between women and men, and many, many more outlets for assistance. Mercy Corps provides these services to over 40 countries across the globe, from the islands of the Philippines to the war-torn regions of Iraq.

With thousands of NGOs providing fieldwork aid to communities worldwide, these five mentioned are just a small fraction of the overall picture. Improving one’s quality of life is a multi-faceted effort, as seen by these fieldwork NGOs fighting global poverty.

– Suzette Shultz
Photo: Wikimedia

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Assisting Africa: Reducing Poverty One Acre at a Time

Reducing Poverty One Acre at a Time
Andrew Youn is a 2006 Kellogg Business School graduate who is been helping farmers in rural east Africa to grow out of hunger and extreme poverty for more than a decade. His organization, One Acre Fund, supported 305,000 families in 2015 alone in doubling, tripling, and quadrupling their crop production. Andrew is committed to reducing poverty one acre at a time, and his work in Africa demonstrates this dedication.

The One Acre Fund

In 2006, One Acre Fund began its work in Africa in Kenya with an initial batch of 38 farmers, most of whom were women; today, the organization’s reach has expanded its operations to many countries including Rwanda, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi.

The organization provides skill training, loans, crop insurance, material like fertilizer and hybrid seeds to small-scale farmers who typically have one acre of land or less. Undoubtedly, reducing poverty one acre at a time is a challenging mission but this group appears up to the challenge.

A Group’s Dedication to Poverty Eradication

Similar to Clint Borgen and The Borgen Project, Youn and his organization believe that with willingness and commitment, extreme poverty can be eliminated in our lifetime. In a recent TED talk, the One Acre Fund’s founder speaks about “three levers” that make this seemingly formidable task, achievable.

He states, “Let’s not feel sad about the state of the world, let’s engage our brains, let’s engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are.”

Youn goes on to explain the model he’s using for reducing poverty one acre at a time. His organization utilizes field officers to deploy hybrid seeds and tools to small-scale farmers in rural areas. This course of action allows farmers to pay for their resources in flexible installments, which comes to then cover most of the operational costs.

The organization also utilizes field officers to impart hands-on training on how to apply modern farming practices such as micro-dosage fertilizer and seed spacing throughout the season. As a result, farmers have reported an increase in crop production by up to 500 percent in the past.

Combatting Poverty One Acre at a Time

One Acre employs an army of 2,000 field officers who served 400,000 families last year; currently, the company aims to triple in size over the next four years. In recognition of his efforts towards reducing poverty, Youn received the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2010.

In addition, Forbes magazine listed Andrew Youn in the prestigious Impact 30 in 2011 — a highly selective list of 30 of the world’s top entrepreneurs who use business to solve social issues. With his current trajectory, Youn and his organization will most surely continue to take poverty reduction one acre, and country, at a time.

– Himja Sethi

Photo: Google

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Smallholder Farming in Africa: 5 Major NGOs

Almost three-quarters of Africans rely on smallholder farming for their livelihood, yet one-third of all Africans go hungry. To meet that need, those farmers must increase their production dramatically over the next 40 years—and most of the world’s uncultivated land is actually in Africa. Clearly, smallholder farming in Africa is a big deal. Want to know the major players in the development of African farming? Read on.

1. TechnoServe

This is one of those organizations that has been working behind the scenes, primarily in Africa, for decades. Since the 1960’s, TechnoServe has been quietly targeting failing food markets, identifying unmet demand in those markets, finding the businesses that can meet that demand, and partnering with those businesses so that they grow and uplift their communities. Their emphasis is on partnership—they want to find the locals already doing great work and help them do it better. In 2011 alone, they helped their partners collectively earn $315 million in revenue and impacted over 2.5 million people’s lives in over 30 countries as a result.

2. One Acre Fund

This is the organization that claims to, within three years, represent the largest network of African smallholder farmers. How? They predicate their entire model on one simple idea: when a farmer increases their harvest, they lifts themselves and their community out of hunger and poverty. Toward that end, the organization offers a comprehensive “market-in-a-box” that lends farmers crucial agricultural inputs (seed and fertilizer), trains them how to use it, and connects them with markets to sell their yield. Their simple model has already reached over 60,000 farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi, and they project that they will reach 1.4 million farmers by 2020.

 3. Farm Africa

One of the leading African agricultural development organizations, Farm Africa does it all: bringing farmers better tools, showing them how to double or triple their harvest, and training them how to navigate the market. What makes them different? They say it is their unique, compound approach of agricultural innovation and marketing savvy. Because they are highly specialized in farming, they have a wide inroad into the development of Africa’s unfarmed land and untrained famers. In 2012 alone, they increased coffee crop revenue for farmers in Ethiopia by 600% and helped 30,000 people in Tanzania double their crop yields.

4. Self-Help Africa

If you really want to know what’s going on in the African farming world, you need to know about Self-Help. For over 25 years, this organization has been supporting farming entrepreneurs in Africa with microcredit programs, enterprise development, community cooperatives, access to inputs, and policy advocacy. Because the success of smallholder farmers lies at the heart of so many poverty-related issues in Africa, their mission is to empower Africa’s rural population. They work in nine countries across Africa and have reached millions of Africans with their services.

5. Practical Action

Yes, the name is broad—but so is the organization. Although Practical Action is one of the great champions of agro-economic development in Africa, it works all over the world. Its focus is “technology justice”, which is the equitable application of technology for positive social impact. So what are they doing in African agriculture? The answer: radical community development, policy advocacy focused on food rights, and over a dozen groundbreaking agricultural innovations, to say the least.

– John Mahon

Sources: IPS, Practical Action, One Acre Fund, Farm Africa, TechnoServe
Photo: The Guardian