Help Women in Mali Grow a Better Future

"There is a secret in trees. If you have trees and your neighbor too has trees, you will live in peace."

The Tiby Millennium Villages, home to nearly 75,000 people, are located in one of the poorest areas in all of Mali. A long dry season and sporadic rainfall makes it very hard to grow food reliably. Malaria is entrenched, adding to extremely high child mortality rates. The exploitation of natural resources for food, fuel, livestock fodder, and shelter has made the soil less fertile, leading to decreased food production.

But there is strength in the women of the Tiby villages, and hope for the future. Millennium Promise's tree nursery project offers women in the region a chance to learn how to grow their own orchards of fruit trees. Not only will these trees provide a nutritious supplement to their family's diet, but they can also give the women a salable crop of both excess fruit and extra saplings. The income from these crops can help a family survive and thrive.

This is an initiative that The Hunger Site has been funding since 2009; we've created this Gift That Gives More™ as an opportunity to directly fund this great project.

Training for the women participating began in April 2011. The first part of the training concentrated on how to grow trees from seeds, a technique which requires less financial investment but can take longer than other propagation techniques. The eighty women participating in the program learned how to construct a shelter for young seedlings, mix soil for germination, seed the soil, and care for their trees.

Women welcomed this initiative as it will help them to earn additional income and expose them to tree production techniques. Participants said they dream of creating women-run orchards for their villages. They added that this initiative will also help them overcome shortages of fruit in their locality, specifically during dry seasons.

You can help this excellent program continue and expand. Just $15 goes towards helping women in Mali grow a better future.

Millenium Promise's flagship initiative is the Millennium Villages Project (MVP). Offering an innovative integrated approach to rural development, the MVP simultaneously addresses the challenges of extreme poverty in many inter-connected areas: agriculture, education, health, infrastructure, gender equality and business development.