Being given the opportunity to take responsibility for your own actions is not a privilege granted to everyone. Indeed, only those who are able to create new opportunities by themselves are ready for a better future. This is the reason why we support SMEs in southern and eastern countries by providing them with advice and training. In addition, we are actively involved in creating a better economic environment in these states.

Development is sustainable when it is based on the local people taking their own initiative. We therefore work on long-term projects with local partners, such as cocoa producers in Indonesia.

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Environment – Even before 2004, the Nias island group ranked among the poorest regions of Indonesia. More than 30 per cent of the population was living below the poverty line. The 2004 Tsunami and the 2005 earthquake only made their plight even more precarious. Around 90 per cent of the means of income and sources of food, as well as the infrastructure, were destroyed. It was the coastal regions and the urban populations that benefitted from the lion’s share of the global assistance. The hilly and barely accessible inland regions, where the population subsists primarily from agriculture, was largely neglected. The result has been that years after the natural disasters, poverty and even malnutrition in Nias are widespread. A preliminary assessment carried out by Swisscontact has shown that only a multilayered project can improve the health, as well as the income of the families in Nias.

The project – In Nias, Swisscontact has started a project that will make cocoa cultivation more fruitful, helping to raise the income of the farming families, and, at the same time, improve their nutrition thanks to additional vegetable fields. In model gardens, women are learning to cultivate new type of fruits and vegetables, which will specifically help to alleviate malnutrition among the children. Whatever the families do not need for their own use they are able to sell, thus providing themselves with an extra source of revenue. To improve cocoa cultivation, indigenous cocoa farmers are being trained to become trainers themselves. They will then teach their co-workers how to increase the harvest yield per plant through effective cultivation and thus increase their income. To enable them to sell the additional cocoa at a fair price, Swisscontact is facilitating the producers’ access to market and pricing information. This reduces their dependence on local buyers, who all too often exploit the fact that the farmers do not actually know the market prices of their own produce. By the end of 2011, the project in Nias will have enabled 1,200 households (around 9,500 people) to increase their income by some 50 per cent and so escape the clutches of poverty once and for all.