Wait, what am I doing here?

Hmmm, I haven’t really explained that yet, now have I? Read on for the inside scoop....

The UNDP runs an initiative called “Growing Sustainable Businesses” (GSB) that’s dedicated to helping the business sector make good business decisions that just happen to help poor people. This basically consists of thinking up ways to make money by creating jobs for the poor or providing affordable goods and services to the poor – and then working with businesses to implement these ideas. This creates a sort of “the-more-we-serve-the-poor, the-more-money-we-make” model for the businesses, which is great because it gives them a real incentive to keep making people’s lives better. (I love this stuff!)

For instance: a big Moldovan carpet/yarn producer needs lots of wool to make its carpet/yarn. Moldovan farmers raise a lot of sheep for milk and meat. But the local farmers don’t know much about how to produce good wool, plus the local wool collection system doesn’t work very well, so the big company buys 97% of its wool from New Zealand. And the Moldovan farmers (many of whom are extremely poor) just gotta do without this extra source of income.

As some of you business-minded folk are probably already thinking, it would be cheaper for the carpet dudes to just buy their wool locally – if only there were grade-A wool to be purchased and an efficient system to get it into their hot little hands. But they’re unfortunately not sophisticated enough to develop a well-functioning local supply chain themselves.

That’s where the UNDP GSB comes in. My boss Malgosia and her counterparts at USAID Moldova have been working for the past year to spiff up this supply chain. They’ve been focusing on two things:

• Providing farmer training (“No, Andrei, shear your sheep like this”)
• Working with local financial institutions to increase the wool collector intermediaries’ working capital so they can pay farmers on delivery and thus enable more sales (Translation for my non-businessy readers: arranging decent loans for the dudes who bring the wool from the farmers to the big company so they have enough cash to pay farmers before they themselves are paid)

Right now the project is just in the pilot stage, but so far, so good. I’ll be spending my summer working on this and a number of other projects with similar aims – I’ll definitely fill you in once I do anything noteworthy. So far my job unfortunately has been mostly administrative, data entry-ish stuff – Malgosia’s out of the country this week and she’s the only one here I’ll be working with, so I haven’t been able to dive into anything real yet. But I’ll do something good for the world soon, I promise. :)