SID has won a grant from the Bancker-Williams Foundation to help women farmers on Bolivia's Altiplano increase their sales and income by 40% and develop sustainable business enterprises.
Three groups of women farmers have formed producers' associations – for milk, cheese, and yogurt – and they are requesting assistance. SID proposes to help these three producers' associations, and their 64 women farmers, to identify a wider range of buyers, negotiate sales agreements, make business plans, improve their productivity and product quality, improve their organizational structure and capacity, and, thereby, increase their sales and income.
In addition, the project will serve as a model for other women farmers and local NGOs. We will share our methodologies and lessons learned in order to improve the success of other local projects.
On the Altiplano, men tend to dominate relations with organizations from outside the community. For this reason, men have benefited much more from the training and technical assistance that NGOs have provided to farmers. Women farmers on the Altiplano have had less access to formal education, and they have had less experience in dealing with and negotiating with buyers.
The women's producers' associations provide an ideal vehicle for overcoming this unequal access to opportunities. Women group together for solidarity, thus sharing the risk, and they sell together in order to get orders and prices they could not get individually. The producers' associations help them to make advances that would be difficult for them to make individually. Most importantly, helping women's producers' associations gives SID and other NGOs an opportunity to focus exclusively on women and thereby overcome unequal access to opportunities that has been their experience to date.
SID has been helping male and female farmers in communities throughout the Central Altiplano to reclaim their eroded soils and pastures and increase their productivity and income for more than 10 years. Farmers have made considerable progress in achieving both these aims. Now many farmers, in particular these women's producers' associations, would like to go a step further, and establish sustainable agro-enterprises. Women farmers tend to take more responsibility for animals and animal products. The project is a logical response to the economic growth and further potential of these farmers. The three producers' associations will serve as an example for other women throughout the Altiplano.
The Bancker-Williams Foundation supports grassroots organizations working in global population control, environmental protection, improved status for women of all nationalities and countries, protection of endangered species, and the preservation of multiculturalism.
