Project Overview
In Mozambique, CARE’s SEED (Sustainable and Effective Economic Development) program offers innovative approaches to poverty relief that are built beyond the beneficiary/recipient structure of historic aid organizations. SEED projects are designed instead to train and ultimately self-sustain, continually benefitting communities long after CARE has moved on to assist others.
Recent projects include:
- Paravet program (combining paramedic + veterinarian skills) that provides vocational training, creating a new capacity-building and income-generating role that services rural livestock keepers too poor or too remote to have access to traditional veterinarian care. The paravet program has succeeded in improving animal health, returning more dollars per pound to ranchers for the sales of their animals, substantially improving their return on investment through improved livestock care.
- Leveraging traditional arts and crafts to provide economic opportunities to women and People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA). Identified as unique economic growth opportunity, basket weaving groups partnered with CARE to create and market handicrafts made from renewable materials. In a region where 33% of the head-of-households 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 in a work environment that socially and economically benefits both individuals and communities.
- VSLA (Village Savings and Loans): simple, accessible, highly effective collective investment partnerships based on shared goals and community that provide rural Africans the means to accumulate personal savings, pay for medical expenses and start their own businesses.