The Basics: What am I doing in Colombia?!?

Many of you already know that my 15 incredible months in South Africa came to an end in December when I said good-bye to the Small Enterprise Foundation and an offer to stay on in the research department. While the job was interesting and rewarding, the location was socially isolating, very far from home, and … well… not part of my original plan to spend a year in a new part of the world before returning to work in Latin America.

       

Cape Town, South Africa

So… after a month visiting friends and family in the U.S., trying to unpack and make sense of all that happened in the past year, and recharging my batteries… I am writing to you from Bogotá, Colombia, where I have accepted a job working with Fundación Capital, a Panamanian NGO working towards poverty alleviation through the accumulation of human, physical, social and financial assets. Some of you may remember that I met (some of) the team from Fundación Capital (FundaK) when they were so generous as to fly me over to a workshop on financial inclusion (that is, striving to include the poor who historically have been denied access to financial services such as savings, loans, insurance, and remittance transfers into the financial system) in Cusco, Perú. You may remember seeing the Machu Picchu pictures after that event. Well, meeting the FundaK team, participating in the workshop and meeting all of the interesting guests with such a varied mix of experiences… was when I finally started being able to see past my daily troubles and really appreciate the experiences in South Africa that I was living through at that time. The workshop itself was as inspiring as being able to visit the amazing Incan ruins. At the workshop in Perú, FundaK asked if I would be interested in working with them to host a similar workshop in South Africa, which was the event in Johannesburg that you also may have seen photos of last June.

This year I will be working on FundaK’s 

Sitio Nuevo, one of the two sites that will host the pilot
of Proyecto Graduación, which I will manage

“Graduation Program” which focuses on creating pathways for sustainable livelihoods for the extreme/”ultra” poor, for whom microcredit is often not the most useful assistance. These are the people who spend 80% of their income on food and still don’t obtain their caloric requirements daily. The program is based on a model that started at BRAC in Bangladesh in 2002, and ever since that model began demonstrating evidence of success, a small proliferation of similar programs has sprung up across the globe. The concept begins with food aid, gives knowledge of and connections to health-related programs offered by the government or other local NGOs, provides access to a savings account and promotes savings, does a market study to consider the economically viable livelihood opportunities in the local context, and then allows the program participants to select which of the feasible livelihood alternatives they would like to pursue, then provides training for that livelihood, and finally transfers an asset that is related to their chosen livelihood to the participant so that the participants can follow the Livelihood Plans that they make for themselves.

SEE PHOTOS from my first days in Colombia