collectives
In Sri Lanka’s village of Ulla, we discovered that the best way to help teenage girls was through micro-entrepreneurship. We learned that if the girls could find a way to make a living, then the other, much less desirable, outcomes could be avoided. But what businesses to start? The community was used to fishing and its related industries, and was used to supporting tourism, but neither of these areas offered great opportunities for the girls. Other prospects involved travel far from home, where exploitation is rampant, such as work in the garment industry producing brands sold by multinational corporations.
The community helped us to zero in on better opportunities. They observed that locally produced items such as fish, chili, rice and the like seemed to leave the village with very little value added. These were sold at rock bottom prices in exactly the form in which they were produced. Then, in the markets, these same items reappeared in highly processed forms, at highly marked-up prices, as bags of rice flour, or chili powder, or some other processed form. The community realized that this was happening, that they were paying marked-up prices for the very things they were producing, yet they lacked the capital to do anything about it.
So, Community Friends considered providing investment capital to seed businesses in Ulla village. Businesses that could recapture the profits that were leaking out of the community, profits that could stay local and recirculate through Ulla. But more than capital was needed: for these fledgling businesses to succeed, the young entrepreneurs would need technical skills, a place to do business, and other support.
Again, it was the community of Ulla that came through for itself. A group of parents and teachers got together and developed a solution. Collectives of six girls would be formed. Each collective would have a teacher and parent volunteer to provide mentoring. The parent assigned to the collective would provide temporary space for the new business, at least until it could afford space of its own. And one girl from each collective would be assigned the task of bookkeeping and management duties, again to be trained by a local mentor.
Thus, Ulla started two businesses in September 2007, each collectively owned by six teenage girls, producing chili power and rice flour.