Malaya
"Malaya" means "help me" in the Kissi dialect of Liberia. According to the leadership of Malaya, the name of the organization suggests helping oneself and helping one another: a true community effort, this organization is an example of the ability and drive of war-affected people to solve their own problems and raise themselves out of chronic poverty.
Founded in 2007 in Bong Mines, a town about 100km away from Monrovia, but isolated because of poor infrastructure, Malaya is a rural women's group whose mission is to provide increased economic and educational opportunities to their families and community through farming. In September 2009, Niapele became Malaya's first wholesale reliable purchaser of crops. For most of the 2009-2010 school year, all of the commodities for the School Nutrition Initiative were sourced from Malaya.
Niapele's partnership with Malaya extended beyond the purchasing relationship, however, as we assisted the women's group in acquiring the necessary business skills.
Our work with Malaya was Niapele's first foray into knowledge-intensive programming. In the spirit of fostering ownership and sustainability, we did not provide Malaya with financial support - instead, we encouraged them and assisted them in developing their own financial capacity, so that they could reinvest in their organization and their community.
Through this partnership, we demonstrated that besides a critical need for cash infusions and financial support, community-based groups involved in economic empowerment and pursuing for-profit activities first and foremost require a patient, steady transfer of skills, knowledge and capacity.
Our involvement with Malaya, as with our other initiatives, corresponds to one of the priorities enunciated by the Government of Liberia. The 2008 National Food and Nutrition Strategy notes that: "..exploiting all opportunities for food production by addressing the production constraints farmers face, including in rice production...In producing food, several priorities are noted, including diversification of food production for both nutritional and economic resiliency reasons, improving post-harvest processing, and safeguarding of communal resources that are important food sources."
About Malaya
After the war, the once thriving town of Bong Mines lay in devastation. Malaya’s founder, Finda Francis, saw an urgent need for the community to organize and begin a “war on poverty” (the organization’s motto). With not much more than a huge amount of compassion and generosity, and a talent for bringing people together, Finda, along with Pastor Anthony Fargbon and a few other community members, created Malaya in 2007.
In the early years, Malaya's main activity was to provide a type of microloan (known as "susu" in West Africa) to support women in the community who were struggling to send their children to school, pay medical bills and support their families, by empowering them to start a microenterprise.
Read more about Malaya in our December 2009 newsletter
Niapele & Malaya
In addition to Malaya’s contract with Niapele to provide food crops for our School Nutrition Initiative, the partnership also included a capacity-building dimension. Niapele assisted Malaya in:
- Developing its financial and operational management capacity
- Improving the group’s ability to fulfill the quality and quantity requirements of a reliable agricultural supplier
- Aiding the group to register as an official organization with the Government of Liberia
- Linking the leadership of the organization with the appropriate government ministries to seek support for their continued growth
- Assisting the organization in securing new market outlets for their products
- The MacDella Cooper Foundation joined the SNI in December 2009 and is purchasing food crops to feed 60 scholarship children per month from Malaya.
- The MacDella Cooper Foundation joined the SNI in December 2009 and is purchasing food crops to feed 60 scholarship children per month from Malaya.
Niapele's partnership with Malaya was our first effort to source all food for the School Nutrition Initiative in Liberia in a responsible and sustainable manner that benefits the community, empowers women and supports the growth of national agricultural production and economic independence.
This was also our first experience working in the agricultural sector and outside of the capital, Monrovia. The experience with Malaya provided insight, skills, and experience that have enabled us to design a strong School Nutrition Initiative program in Bong County, that develops farms and school feeding partnerships in rural communities.
