Business Training for Rwandan Fair Trade Producers
During a busy 10 days in Rwanda Andrea Wilkinson visited six producer organisations, met several stakeholders of the project, presented at the trainer graduation day and saw 5,000 trees that had been planted as a result of the environmental training by one of the producer groups.
“The evaluation trip was a great success, it was incredibly exciting for us to mark the end of the first year of this project and to start seeing the results,” said Andrea. “And what results they were! All of the tier one producer organisations (many of whom are already exporting their goods) are developing business plans and have made great strides in updating and developing their financial systems.“
Beatrice from BN producers (who make banana wine and mushroom flour) was extremely happy with the training. Beatrice said: “We as a management team have learnt so much, we now take our money to the bank instead of keeping it in the office, this is much safer. We also now keep records of all income and expenditure and we are happy to say that we are making a profit. Before we would not be able to tell you this as we kept no books. Now we keep them and we are equipped because of the training to read them and plan for the future.”
Another of the groups, COOPABU a co-operative based in Butare in the south of the country, told Andrea that they have learnt that money really does grow on trees in Rwanda. As a result of the training that they received in January with our environmental partner REDO (Rural Environmental Development Organisation), they realised that they needed sustainable sources of raw materials in order to make their products which are wooden craft products and sisal baskets. They used the knowledge they learnt at the training and wrote to their district officer to ask for assistance in a tree planting mission. In April over 500 of their co‑operative members planted 5,000 trees and sisal between the trees in order to have a sustainable source of raw materials. They are an inspiration to other producer organisations.
The 10 days ended with a graduation ceremony that acknowledged the endless hours of hard work and commitment put in by the trainers. They had completed training in business skills and ‘training for trainers’ from our project partner Traidcraft, and they had also developed a comprehensive training manual that is specific to Rwandan small to medium sized enterprises and will be used throughout the three years of the project and beyond.
There were representatives from the Rwandan Private Sector Federation, the chamber of arts and crafts, RWAFAT (Rwandan Federation for Alternative Trade) and many other NGOs that had come along to hear more about our project – not to mention the national press and TV station! This was a real celebration.
One of the trainers, Yves, said in his speech: “This is the beginning for us to put into practice what we have learnt, we will train all of the 50 producer organisations and help them to change their businesses for the better, to make more profit, to run more efficiently and to make a difference to the lives of their co-operative members and workers. This is the beginning and we will see it through to the end.”
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[...] Truly, a good part of Rwanda looks at fair trade participation with much optimism after the event, specifically on aspects of profits, group efficiency and alleviated living conditions of their members. More details related to this post could be found at : shared-interest.com [...]