Fighting poverty through entrepreneurship

At Agrisud, they do not accept the idea that today almost one billion and a half of individuals are living in poverty and are often experiencing great difficulties to feed themselves daily.

It is well known in the South as in the North that poverty is caused especially by economic exclusion, which gradually leads to social exclusion. They are now convinced that one way of resolving this situation is to help those people back into the economy. How? By helping them become entrepreneurs.

This is why Agrisud promotes the economic revival through the creation of Very Small family Entreprises (VSE), especially in the agricultural sector: production of vegetables, fruits, breeding, product processing… Because they are economical as well as agro-ecological, those businesses are viable and sustainable. This is also due to the fact that they are integrated in their local market. The entrepreneurs have each been assisted all along the process of professionalization that took them from poverty to autonomy.

Thanks to this process, peasants in North Kivu or Haiti, areas often shaken by conflicts and/or natural disasters, were put back on track. Once they regained their place in the local market, they were able to invest into a sustainable agricultural activity. Also, in northern India, very poor women were able to diversify their traditional farming by producing and processing their spices for the local market. In southern Morocco, breeders gained autonomy thanks to sheep farming. Similarly, some women in France were struggling and now produce top-of-the-range jams from Bordeaux’s food bank’s unsold articles, a good way to fight waste.