introduction

The Women in Business Development Inc was set up in 1991, as the first non-governmental organisation of it’s kind in Samoa. The organisation is committed to finding income generating opportunities, especially for rural village populations. This enables families to remain in their village environments, rather than leaving to look for work overseas or in the urban areas.

WIBDI are committed to poverty alleviation and sustainable development of the rural villages, utilising the products of their environment to generate an income, and thus establishing and sustaining a rural village economy that is no longer fully dependent on remittances.

The context of Samoan culture and tradition has shaped the development of our programmes. It is because of the strong family culture in Samoa that WIBDI focusses its programmes on individual families and not whole village communities or individuals alone. Extended families in Samoa comprise a community in themselves, with families having anything from a few members to 100 or more people. By working with families we have one head of the family to contend with, rather than many village elders as leaders in a comunally based project. We also found that when a family was earning cash for themselves they tended to take more responsibility for the project, stick to it longer and put more money back into it.

Because it is so much a part of the Samoan way of life to contribute to their community through the likes of church and school donations, work done strengthening individual families has an automatic flow on effect to the wider community, as well as to the particular woman or youth that may be the focal point of our work.

WIBDI work very closely with the clients we are trying to serve. Our field staff visit each client every week to maintain the all important face-to-face contact, and to ensure both that our clients know what is going on and that we are listening and responding to our clients' needs.

Currently our key programmes include:

• Microfinance and small business training
• Skills training, for example, handicraft, printing, etc
• Fine mat weaving and sponsorship programme
• Organic certification of farms to international standards
• Virgin coconut oil (VCO) production
• FairTrade labelling
• Niche market linkages for VCO, bananas, coffee, vanilla, etc
• Disaster mitigation
• Regional outreach throughout the Pacific region
• Facilitating export to international markets