Community development project in Bali

Living and working with the community you can help to build capacity of local schools and businesses. Particular target groups are local women and fishermen and their families. Your skills will be used to train local teachers and the community to improve education standards and work on income generation initiatives. Whilst living in the community you will also generate income for local families.

Here is an example of an initial brief to a volunteer with business skills due to work on the project early in 2008 as written by our local partners-

‘We have technical training (e.g. development of fisheries resource management and conservation, and also techniques for collecting fish, and handling and packing them carefully, as they need to be kept in optimal health, ) and some very basic business training. But we think that the business training has not yet made an impact on what we want to achieve in terms of promoting a more sustainable and responsible trade. We think that this might be an area in which you can help, by looking into what is going on, identifying possible causes of non /under -achievement, and then perhaps suggesting ways in which the traders might be able to improve their businesses. Remember also that, while the traders at each level might have some business skills (since they have been running businesses of various sorts for years,) the collectors and in some cases also the middlemen who were once collectors, have no business training or skills, and some may never have been to school at all. And this is where one of the main problems lies.

Having zero business skills, the collectors catch, say 100 fish, 50 die and they get paid (if they are lucky) for the remaining 50, provided none of these fish are damaged. They do not understand the notion of the 50 rejects being money lost that could be in their pockets. Here is obviously where the collection handling skills etc training helps them, but they also need to develop a better sense of business, to stop them being taken advantage of by the traders further up the trade chain. Furthermore, they have no idea of saving money. The buyers even lend them money and/or equipment, knowing full well that they will probably never be able to pay it back. But the collectors are then obliged to repay their debts by selling to the trader/lender at an even lower price. (Remember also that it's the traders further up the trade chain who dictate the prices, and will go elsewhere if any of the collectors try to negotiate higher prices for the fish they catch and sell.) These factors conspire to keep most of them in debt spirals from which they can never emerge.

This problem requires a good understanding of the local context by looking at the way in which things happen in the trade, and then some creative thinking to give support in developing the capacity of the local initiative. Each volunteer placement is tailor made to match volunteer skills to community need.’