Underlying Causes

Farmers: Half of the poor on earth are small rural farmers. In the poorest place, East Africa, the number rises to 75%. To care about poverty forces attention on the issues of farmers, agriculture, and by extension, food.

 

Hunger: In East Africa, food is in short supply. For example, where Cheetah Development is working in Tanzania, 12% of rural women are underweight, 38% of children under age 5 are chronically malnourished, and 41% of rural children are stunted. The Global Hunger Index for Tanzania is 21.1, signaling alarming levels of hunger. 89% of the population lives on less than $1.25/day.

 

Missing Food: Because people are hungry, it is often assumed there is a shortage of food. So poverty reduction and agricultural programs often focus on increasing crop yields. However, the problem of hunger is not so simple.

In Tanzania, which is typical of developing nations, 50% of agricultural output rots. Farmers are reluctant to increase yields because they are seeing the waste of much of their work. Meanwhile, in many commodity categories, import levels are around 50% of annual requirements.

 

Underlying Problems: People are starving, food is rotting and farmers are mired in poverty. There is a lack of food storage, processing, preservation and distribution usually provided by businesses in the agriculture-to-food value chain. There is a flood of food at the end of the harvest. A few months later hunger and malnutrition set in. Seasons of wet/dry become a cycle of feast/famine.

These value chain businesses are missing because there is not investment capital to create them. Nor is there a way to insure effective use of the investment.

Until now.

 

Sustainable Solutions: Cheetah Development is introducing a new model of businesses finance, micro venture capital. This investment model addresses the “Missing Middle” gap in business capitalization. Based on the principles that have made micro-finance successful, it goes a big step further in both size and assistance. The needed ingredients for success are delivered: capital, technology transfer, and business mentoring.

Instead of creating dependency, Cheetah invests in the ideas and dreams of the local people to help them unlock their own resources. In essence, Cheetah is leveraging the existing resources of the poor to lift them up. And Cheetah puts much of its work with women where for the greatest impact.

The Cheetah Model is not aid in the traditional sense but an investment requiring repayment. The discipline of repayment teaches profitability. Profitability means sustainability, solutions that last. Cheetah invests $5000 to $500,000, filling a gap known as the “Missing Middle.” And the value chain focus helps numerous people with relatively small investments. Cheetah estimates that a one-time $50 investment per person is enough to PERMANENTLY change their income by orders of magnitude.

 

Continuing Forward: Human development has always naturally followed economic development regardless of history, culture or geography. Therefore, it is not surprising that the enterprises where Cheetah is investing are already working to create human development initiatives, like quality healthcare, maternity and baby care, and AIDS/HIV interventions.

Getting at the underlying causes works better and creates lasting results. It ’s time our caring made a lasting difference.

 

 

Why? Because it’s right. Because we can. Poverty is not intractable.
Won’t you join us?

 

Learn more? Go to Economic Development

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