Updates from Two Millennium Villages Projects

Hello, hello, happy blog-readers!

We are happy to say that we have recently heard from our partners in the Millennium Villages Project that two of Eliminate Poverty Now's earliest projects are continuing to grow and achieve their original goals! 

The news isn't very specific at this point, but we wanted to draw your attention back to these projects since they haven't been featured recently, and we are really excited about both of them. In general, these projects have been well received by the people in the communities, with potential to help even more people than had been originally thought. There have been growing pains, as is to be expected, but the overall message of the news we've been receiving has been encouraging!

 

The first of these projects is the Women's Cooperative Garden in Sama, Mali, which is part of the Tiby, Mali Millennium Village cluster. As you can see in the photo below, things are going well! The grass is green, and the people are happy, and those are two very wonderful things.

Mawa, head of the Women's Cooperative, with Judy, 2010

Judy wrote a great, in depth blog post about the garden when she and John were in Africa two years ago, so be sure to check it out. At the bottom of that post, there is another photo of Mawa, where you are better able to see the necklace she is wearing in the picture with Judy here. This necklace is made of African glass beads, and was a gift from Judy to Mawa. Have you seen the Nanyuki Handcrafts site? For all of you jewelry lovers, the pieces are gorgeous, and help Kenyan artists support their families.



Speaking of photos, we owe special thanks to Nina Sharma from Millennium Promise for the beautiful photos in this blog post!

Mawa, 2012

The Women's Cooperative Garden was started in 2009. That same year, EPN also started a cooperative commodity warehouse in the Ruhiira, Uganda Millennium Village cluster. The official name of the warehouse is Kigarama Marketing Cooperative Society, Ltd.

In spite of the risk of loss of harvested crops due to moisture, mold, vermin, theft, etc, we are happy to say that in its first year, there was less than a 5% storage loss! This news means many good things for the future of this project, and we're excited to see it continue to grow.

A front view of the warehouse

That's all for today! John and Judy will be blogging while they are in Africa, so there will be tons of new photos and updates coming during March, on all of EPN's projects.
  
Oh, and have you looked around the blog recently? We've been updating and adding pages, to make it more user friendly. Please take a minute to scroll back to the top and see what we've been working on! 

Many thanks for reading!