Alleviating Poverty through
Biblically Based Business

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About you:

 

 

 

 

 

Our (bit of the) solution...

Reconxile’s approach is to work with this desire to change (your desire to change) and to empower and support people in their first few steps; to provide a practical pathway to being sufficiently different. 

Our aim is to inspire, enable and support people at the grass-roots level (that means us, you and me, and people like us) to get personally involved in engaging with the problem.  We believe that only in this way will the impact in developing countries be sustainable, and only in this way will attitudes in the richer nations begin to change. 

But what actually do we mean by ‘personally engage’?

Reconxile subscribes to the concept of ‘a hand-up, not a hand-out’.  We have seen the disabling effect of two decades of simple giving, and recognise the growing focus on building independence rather than dependence as an important development.  We want to see people able to support themselves and their families through their own efforts.  But, as you might imagine, there is very little employment in areas where poverty is most severe, and so there is little opportunity for people to find paid work. 

The more enterprising people in these communities do try to set up businesses of their own, encouraged by the recent growth in microfinance schemes.  However, they do not always pick good businesses, and often they do not really know how to run them.  Even a very simple business such as buying and selling pineapples can be difficult if you do not know how to calculate your income and your expenditure, and it gets even more difficult for them when they have to consider microfinance loan repayments and cash-flow. 

But these small simple businesses are the only real option for these communities.  Such small businesses are the only sustainable way:

  1. to use what skills/labour they do have

  2. to ensure their independence of the need for charity

  3. to build dignity and self-determination

  4. to create future employment for their community

They have the energy, the ambition, and the drive.  Our challenge is to help them to correct their misunderstandings, to get alongside them and to ensure that they have a grasp of the basics.  It really is that simple.  They need a skill set which is almost second-nature to us in the West – so much so that we would call most of it ‘common sense’ – and we need to share it with them.  That is what we mean by ‘personally engage’.

And if we accept this challenge, the impact can be awesome.  With just one team we have generated over £2M of benefit in and around the Kampala area and the number continues to grow at 10% per month – and this benefit was initiated by just one team of three people in two one-week visits.  Imagine what we could do with five hundred small teams.  This is our vision!

 

 

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