The first stop on our dust-addled expedition is an innovative livestock care program that CARE has established in the community of Mabote. CARE programs are not designed to deliver ongoing aid but are instead constructed on locally based training and coaching en route to self-sustaining operations and eventual the exit of CARE’s support. If it’s not designed to be sustainable, it’s not a CARE candidate.

Mabote’s Paravet (think paramedic + veterinarian) program is a hallmark CARE project, designed to serve rural livestock keepers by improving the health of their herds, returning more dollars per pound for the sales of their animals while creating a new income generating role in the community. In areas too remote and/or poor to support regular veterinarian visits to stock, Paravets are trained to provide information regarding animal husbandry along with services including prophylactic treatment against ticks, wound care and owner education about animal market value relative to weight and age, having introduced a scale that’s used at trade times, providing an objective dollar to value number to what formerly were, at best, guesstimate prices. The net result? The program offers capacity building – vocational training for the Paravet who services otherwise under or un-served rural areas that benefit directly from improved return on investment from healthier stock, a sustainable system designed to thrive long after CARE has moved on to other projects.

Back in the truck, we drive in tandem with extension workers on enduro-style motorbikes and these 2 wheeled escorts make our adventure hint at scenes from Mad Max, but in rural southern Africa, they are ideal inexpensive, efficient, low-maintenance vehicles to navigate the washboard + thick sand in these rugged, remote environs.

Our next stop is a quintessential Mozambique meeting place – under the shade of a large tree where another income generating program is underway – the creation of traditional arts and crafts to provide economic opportunities to women and People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA). In a partnership with CARE and local communities, basket weaving has been identified as unique economic growth opportunity: materials are from renewable resources and, as 33% of the head-of-household in this region are women who are caring for children or the chronically ill, it allows these individuals stay at or near home while producing product for market. CARE brought in designers who helped guide standardization to the art form, recognizing that wholesalers would want a handcrafted product that still had quality, size and specification standards that they could rely upon to introduce the product to larger markets. The investment is paying off remarkably well: Since the inception of the CARE program, satisfied wholesalers are now awarding weavers with double the income previously made on their wares.

The influx of cash into the community is, of course, great, but what we saw manifest in our visits to the weavers was confidence and community. Women and children gathered in the shade, hands busy with fibers, sharing news, commentary and song, volleyed across the group with the occasional eruption of laughter.

This same guide said that while the weaver’s shade tree is a place for labor and gossip, it’s also a place of social support, education and collective self-esteem building that’s critical to the wellness of the community. One of CARE’s goals is to tackle the gender divide that excludes women from economic activities and decision making in this region. When these women congregate, they converse and understand how they have been a party to increasing economic wealth to their community, another step toward levelling the gender divide and making for a rural area that might otherwise lose its population to urban centers a prosperous and proud community.

Then we visited the coolest bank in all of rural Africa. And what may be the coolest thing about it is that it’s not a bank. It’s just people – people who are too poor and too far away from a bank to benefit from a bank. Instead, they are all involved in a simple collective investment partnership based on shared goals and community has allowed countless rural Africans to start businesses, pay for medical expenses and eliminate debts without so much as a teller or a check ledger much less an ATM.

The group of 19 people collected on benches beneath an acacia tree in front of simple huts off a quiet road. They have opened their collective cash box and they speak in slowly in unison (translated to): ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TWO DOLLARS and TWENTY NINE CENTS. There is no written ledger. Introduced to this region by CARE, this particular Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) is structured on a verbal/memory based ledger. They are announcing what they all recall the last balance on their collective savings was the prior week. Why don’t they write it down? The majority of people in these communities cannot read – a written ledger system shifts the power from the collective to the literate while the verbal recollection system levels the playing field, making everyone equal participants and, in a land of poverty, every cent is recalled almost without fail amongst every member.

VSLAs are groups of no more than 25 people (usually 15-20) who assemble for a 9 month cycle. Groups self-select: members invite neighbors and family members who they believe have similar financial means and goals. Once the group has been assembled, individuals receive passbooks that have 5 squares available for “share investment” at each group meeting. At the first sessions, the group agrees to the value of the shares, and that is, for all intents and purposes, the last number that the group ever writes down. From that point forward, stamp pads fill in one to five squares on each session representing shares invested and all monetary values are announced by the group.

Once the group begins collectively investing their money, members can lobby for a loan (which VSLA members vote on) with a specified “service charge” instead of a percentage payment. This service charge, along with payments on the loan, become interest paid to the VSLA members – their gains on their invested savings.

Why only 9 months at a stretch? It’s just long enough to let everyone benefit from the results of shared saving while also allowing members reasonable window after which they can step away and re-evaluate if they want to participate and whom they want to participate with. We spoke with a number of VLSA members who leveraged loans to launch businesses… incredible how a few well placed dollars can do veritable miracles here and how satisfying for members to know that their relatively humble collective funds have been able to fuel the genesis of small-scale industry and success in their community while fortifying their own savings funds? Genius.