Looking back at MEDA News

As part of celebrating MEDA’s seven decades of working with entrepreneurs, The Marketplace is retelling stories of significant events from the organization’s history.

From the fall of 1987 to the fall of 2009, MEDA published MEDA News, a quarterly, four-page newsletter.

The items below are excerpted from those newsletters.

Winter 2007

US First Lady cites MEDA

It was likely the first time Mennonite Economic Development Associates was mentioned by an American First Lady and “it sent chills up my spine,” says Allon Lefever.

Vice-chair of the MEDA board, Lefever was one of five panelists invited to share “best practices” at a White House conference Feb. 15 on controlling malaria in Africa.

He had just returned from Tanzania, where MEDA distributes insecticide-treated bed nets to pregnant women and infants.

Laura Bush addressed the meeting to encourage wider cooperation among faith-based, business, and government efforts to combat malaria, the largest single killer of African children. She referred to the President’s Malaria Initiative, a five-year, $1.2 billion program to combat malaria in 15 of the hardest-hit African nations, which was launched by her husband, George W. Bush, in June 2005.

MEDA devised and manages a Tanzania government program to use commercial channels to make bed nets available throughout the country. Recent new US funding has enabled MEDA to expand the program to include young children.

Mrs. Bush cited MEDA’s program as an example of public-private coordination.

Summer 2008

New programs a boost for youth

Behind the headlines in war-torn global hotspots, MEDA is reaching out to help young people create a better future.

A major new initiative builds on MEDA’s successful Egypt program, which offers loans with educational and safety components for children who work in small family businesses.

The new $5 million program, called Financial Innovations for Youth (sponsored by the MasterCard Foundation), expands the concept to the next age group. It introduces new financial services, along with improved workplace safety and financial education, to prepare older children for safe, productive jobs and possibly businesses of their own.

It will operate in Egypt (Cairo and Aswan) and Morocco (Casablanca and Rabat).

Another new youth venture, called Secure Futures in Afghanistan, aims to bring advancement opportunities to apprentices (ages 12-18) in informal construction workshops in the city of Kabul.

The success of MEDA’s Behind the Veil program in Pakistan has expanded and extended the model in a new four-year project called Pathways & Pursestrings.

The $8 million initiative ($7 million from the Canadian International Development Agency) builds on the embroidery project by adding other impoverished Pakistani women besides those who are sequestered, and including three additional value chains: seedlings, milk collection and decorative bangles.

Feb 1993

Changed Lives

A man walked into the PRISMA (MEDA’s micro-enterprise) office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and asked how to get involved with the program. When asked about how he heard about PRISMA, he replied:

“My neighbor is Franz Guzman. He used to be lazy, and sat around drinking all the time. Now he’s cleaned up his shop, he works late into the night, and I never see him get drunk. I asked his wife what happened, and she said all these changes took place after he started coming to PRISMA. Well, any program that can make changes like that in people, I want to be part of.”

Winter 2000

USA Today calls MEDA hot

USA Today’s internet edition selected MEDA’s web site as a “hot site,” which led to meda.org being featured in “The Net: New and Notable” column in the paper’s Dec. 9 print edition.

The paper said MEDA “thinks it has found a way for people to make a charitable gift that keeps on giving. That is, by providing entrepreneurs in the developing world and North America a ‘hand up, not a hand out.’ “