Never Ending Food was recently visited by the Village X Organization. Village X is a micro-financing initiative established by their CEO, Mike Buckler, who used to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi. This initiative uses crowdfunding and mobile technology to help fund small-scale, community-identified, projects.
These projects are varied and include things like: clean water initiatives, solar stations, health worker/teacher housing, animal husbandry, nursery schools, agricultural projects, and more.
They recruit and train local field officers, and a single field officer may may cover up to 30 villages a year, using local transportation and mobile technology to reach up to 40,000 people. These officers help to map out areas of need, call village meetings, help communities prioritize their needs, assist with the creation of budgets and proposals, disperse funds, and follow up with monitoring and evaluation.
The team seemed very excited about some of the things that they saw at Never Ending Food and were already brainstorming ways to integrate some the Permaculture ideas into their work. We wish them all the best!
