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Newsletter
May 2006
• Welcome Message
• Keeping Kenyan Bee-Keepers Sweet
• Teach
A Man To Fish – Brushing Shoulders With Hollywood!
• Milking It for All It's Worth - Adding Value in the Dairy
• Tell the World - How To Go Global in 14 Steps
• Share Your Story With Us
It’s
Not About Men, and It’s Not About Fish…
It’s about Education!
Three months on and we’ve another
fine catch of stories for you, with even more examples of
how income generation within schools can help support the
cost of that education.
We’ve news from the cutting edge of
agricultural education including a school in Kenya that's
not only providing livelihood skills, but selling the equipment
that makes it possible.
There’s also more on a Paraguayan
school that's teaching students how to climb the 'value ladder'
in its dairy.
...and finally, discover why we've
been taking a break from transforming vocational education
to hang out with a Hollywood legend.
Keeping
Kenyan Bee-Keepers Sweet
An agricultural college in Kenya
supporting its programs with income earned from providing
school-made equipment to its most successful students.
Vital as education is to reducing poverty,
it can’t work its wonders in isolation. You can teach
people to fish all you like, but if they don’t have
the basic equipment for the job, they’re still going
to go hungry.
For enterprising schools however, this represents a two-fold
opportunity. By training agro-entrepreneurs in livelihood
skills, and then selling them the equipment needed to put
their new skills to use, schools can meet the twin goals of
providing a quality education and generating income to support
their activities.
Nowhere is this better exemplified that
at the Baraka
Agricultural College in Molo, Kenya. Its beekeeping programs
– taught both within the school and through outreach
programs – have offered thousands of smallholders over
the years an unrivalled chance to learn how to earn a living
from producing honey.
Nonetheless Baraka realized several years ago that with greater
resources it could create an even bigger impact. It made a
strategic commitment to generating its own income through
school-run enterprises, and established a workshop that now
provides employment for 8 full-time production staff.
 With
quality beekeeping equipment often expensive and hard to find
in rural Kenya they saw an opportunity to fill an existing
gap in the market – one that would complement their
educational work.
The initial investment required to start
out in beekeeping is a substantial commitment for the typical
subsistence farmer. Baraka’s know-how means however
that they can provide a quality product, at a competitive
price, and at a convenient location for their customers. The
workshop now produces a full line of beekeeping equipment
from hives and smokers, to protective clothes.
They’ve not only found another way
to support their beneficiaries and local bee-keepers, but
the money they generate from it can be ploughed back into
extending their outreach activities.
All of which proves you really can have your honey cake and eat it!
Teach
A Man To Fish – Brushing Shoulders With Hollywood!
Robert Redford lends his support
to social entrepreneurs, including TeachAManToFish
director Martin Burt, who are trying to change the world from
the bottom up.
 It’s
not every day that you get an endorsement from a Hollywood
legend, but that’s what happened when TeachAManToFish
took part in the recent Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
in Oxford.
 Robert
Redford has long supported the Skoll
Foundation. Created by Jeff Skoll, the first president
of eBay, it aims to identify the people and programs already
bringing positive changes to communities throughout the world,
and empower them to extend their reach, deepen their impact,
and fundamentally improve society.
There
being nothing like a celebrity to attract a little media coverage
the BBC weren't far behind, helping us to bring the idea that
education can pay for itself to a whole new audience.
It’s not quite
as glamorous as being in the movies, but we still get excited
about being on TV. Why not check out our performance on the
small screen:
-
Watch the BBC News TeachAManToFish
clip.
-
Watch the BBC News Robert Redford interview clip.
Milking
It For All It’s Worth – Adding Value in the Dairy
The school in Paraguay that’s
maximising income generation from its herd by 'adding value'
to its dairy products.
This year the San Francisco Agricultural
High School in Paraguay, run by the Fundación
Paraguaya, is set to sell enough goods and services to
cover nearly three quarters of its annual operating costs.
How can a school manage to do that?
One way is to increase production, so the school has more
products to sell. A still more effective way is to add value
to those products, so that they can be sold for higher prices.
The milk produced at the San Francisco Agricultural High School
is a case in point.
When the Fundación
Paraguaya took over the school it had, on average, 11
cows producing 60 litres of milk per day - not even enough
to supply its own needs. So, the school set about increasing
milk production - first by improving the care and feeding
of the animals it had, and then by adding more productive
cows to the herd.
 By
the end of 2005, the school had, on average, 30 cows producing
460 litres of milk per day - enough to meet its own needs
and still have about 6,000 litres of milk per month left
over to sell.
Selling milk was good business. But the school had a better
idea.
In March 2006, it opened a small milk processing plant, which
can process up to 500 litres of milk per day. Now it is now
turning some of its milk into yogurt, cheese and caramel.
One litre of milk makes about a litre of yogurt. However,
yogurt sells at three times the price of milk, and there is
a big market for yogurt in Paraguay!
By adding value to the milk, the milk processing plant is
helping to speed the San Francisco Agricultural High School
toward its goal of becoming financially self-sufficient. At
the same time, the plant teaches students how this simple
agro-industrial process works and shows them how adding value
increases farm income.
As students at the San Francisco Agricultural High School
are learning:
Practical agricultural
skills + Business know how = A better future
….and that goes both for students
learning how to overcome rural poverty and for the
schools striving to teach them.
Tell The
World – How to go Global in 14 Steps
Thinking big. According
to mathematical geniuses, if you told just five people about
us, and they did the same thing, then within 14 steps the
whole world would have heard of us!
We've added a nice little feature
to our website that makes sending an email to a few friends
about us child's play. Someone's got to get the ball rolling,
why not you?
Go on, speak to the world – click
here!
Share Your Story
With Us
This is your newsletter.
By now you’ve hopefully got a pretty good idea of the
type of programs we’re interested in – entrepreneurial
schools in developing countries finding creative ways to generate
income to support their educational activities.
If you know of any institutions following
this approach with an interesting story to tell, send us an
email and we’ll try to include it in a future newsletter.
Don’t be shy about your good work.
Share your story with us - who knows what new opportunities
it might open up!
Write to: nik.kafka@teachamantofish.org.uk
Help Us Find Potential
Partners
Although the internet has created unrivalled
possibilities for agricultural schools across developing countries
to share their experiences, finding these schools and putting
them in contact with each other is no simple task.
If you have any connections with agricultural
schools that might be interested in our network please make
sure you get in touch!
Email: nicola.radford@teachamantofish.org.uk
Links
For free membership of our network
– visit www.teachamantofish.org.uk/joinournetwork.php
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– www.teachamantofish.org.uk/supportus/donate.php
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