POVERTY: Central America: Boosting Small Enterprise to Fight Poverty

Danilo Valladares : May 06, 2011

Small and medium-sized companies in Central America are the targets of foreign development aid programmes aimed at fighting the region's high poverty levels.
One of the initiatives is the Access Programme for Rural Associations of Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Central America, implemented by the Guatemalan Exporters Association (AGEXPORT) and financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialised United Nations agency.
'We are mainly seeking to generate employment, and through that, to secure access to food and nutrition security and improve people's quality of life,' the programme's director, Iván Buitrón, told IPS.
The initiative, which got underway in March at a total cost of three million dollars, will provide training to more than 80,000 rural entrepreneurs in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala over the next three years.
When asked about the programme's aims in the region, Buitrón said, 'One is to strengthen capacities in business, administration, accounting, costs, sales and delivery.'
Other goals are 'to support organisational development in production and productivity, and ensure that products reach the standards of quality and volume demanded by the markets and follow traceability requirements.'
Another focus, the AGEXPORT official said, is disseminating 'knowledge, to facilitate access to international fairs to learn about successful initiatives and the importance of meeting safety standards and green production standards.'
Working together is fundamental to helping small and medium enterprises (SMEs) take off. 'It's essential for the state to invest in infrastructure and in stocking up for production, for the private sector to contribute to the technical aspects of market intelligence, and for both to complement each other in public-private alliances,' he added.
The programme thus seeks to reduce poverty by boosting incomes in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, which are classified by the World Bank as four of the world's 56 lower middle income countries - between 976 and 3,855 dollars in GNI per capita.
For example, 47 percent of Nicaragua's 5.7 million people live on two dollars a day or less, according to the country's National Development Information Institute, as do half of Guatemala's 14 million people, according to United Nations figures.
Despite the high poverty levels, Central America has potential. 'There are many opportunities, and there is demand for products from this region, but what are lacking are policies of support and incentives for speeding up access to markets,' Buitrón said.
The needs of SMEs are clear. 'We have a problem with intermediaries, because they set the prices, and since demand is low, we have to accept them, even if we end up actually losing money in the end,' Alberto Ortiz, a craftsman from the village of Samayac in the southern Guatemalan province of Suchitepéquez, told IPS.
Ortiz, who makes leather belts and bags, finds it hard to overcome the barriers standing in the way of selling his products. 'We have tried to set up an association, but we've had problems, and the government institutions haven't given us a hand,' he complained.
He has no doubt that the IFAD-financed training programme will be a great opportunity for developing small businesses, 'principally for selling our products,' he said.
Lina Martínez, manager of the Garifuna-owned company Wabagari Distribution that makes cassava-based ethnic products in Honduras, under the Casabe O'Big Mama brand name, told IPS that SMEs 'lack the capital and productive and technological capacity to generate volume.'
Martínez, whose company makes 'casabe', an unleavened flatbread made from cassava flour, says 'soft credits' are needed to meet these needs. 'It's important to focus on products with better packaging, and to provide loans with soft interest rates. That would be an excellent alternative,' she said.
Her company sells its products to Wal-Mart, through the U.S. hypermarket chain's 'Una Mano para Crecer' (A Hand to Grow) supplier development programme.
But there are risks when it comes to how aid to SMEs is implemented.
'The support has to have flexibility that provides maneuvering room to allow businesses to respond in a proactive manner to the real situation they encounter,' Yasmin Martínez, with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of El Salvador, told IPS.
'But these programmes sometimes come with so many limitations that the money ends up in the hands of consultants who tried, but were unable,' to help get SMEs off the ground, she said.
Yasmin Martínez believes the gap in technology and training and a lack of innovation are the main problems faced by SMEs in El Salvador, not to mention organised crime, which through extortion 'suffocates our businesses,' she added.
SMEs are vital to the economy in El Salvador and the rest of the countries in the region.
In El Salvador, 99.6 percent of all businesses are SMEs, which number more than 174,000 in total and account for 65.5 percent of all jobs, generating nearly 488,000 direct jobs, according to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Ingrid Figueroa with the Central American Integration System's (SICA) Centre for the Promotion of Micro and Small Enterprise in Central America told IPS that fomenting small-scale business initiatives, improving access to financing, and strengthening financial education are major challenges that must be addressed in the region.
http://www.globalissues.org/news/2011/05/06/9544

MALARIA: elimination 'most feasible' in Latin America

María Elena Hurtado and Mićo Tatalović
29 October 2010


Flickr/trebol-a

Malaria elimination is most feasible in Latin America and least feasible in Central and West Africa, according to a study mapping 99 malaria-endemic countries.
Malaria elimination has been ongoing since the 1900s, Richard Feachem, director of the Global Health Group at the University of California, San Francisco, said at a press conference in London, United Kingdom, today.
Feachem said that a reasonable estimate for global eradication of malaria is 2050–2060. He was speaking at a launch of a series of papers on malaria elimination in The Lancet.
One paper examined how likely different countries are to stop transmission of Plasmodium falciparum malaria with existing control measures — and thus eliminate the disease.
The study used existing data to rank countries according to technical and operational feasibility of elimination. This included factors such as the intensity of disease transmission, the state of health systems, infrastructure, political stability, and political commitment to achieving and sustaining elimination.
A lack of data on Plasmodium vivax meant the study could only produce robust estimates for P. falciparum.
The results show that eliminating P. falciparum is most feasible in Latin America, where less than a 50 per cent reduction in 2007 transmission levels is needed to achieve elimination.This is due to economic development, improved health systems, and good accessibility to populations at risk in the region, as well as the relatively low transmission levels of the disease.
Latin American countries on the road to elimination are: Argentina, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama and Paraguay. Haiti was on this list before the January earthquake.
In Africa, only a few countries — including Botswana, Djibouti and Swaziland — are well placed to eliminate P. falciparum with existing methods. In this region a new vaccine will likely be necessary for malaria elimination, said Geoff Targett, emeritus professor of immunology of parasitic diseases at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and member of the Malaria Elimination Group.
Countries in West and Central Africa face the greatest obstacles. They need a more than 90 per cent reduction in 2007 transmission levels to achieve elimination.
"Before embarking on an elimination campaign, countries must conduct a comprehensive and rigorous feasibility assessment that draws on detailed evidence that is not easily summarized at global scales," Andrew Tatem, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Emerging Pathogens Institute of the University of Florida, United States, told SciDev.Net.
Justin Cohen of the Malaria Control Team at the global health organisation Clinton Health Access Initiative said that "this work demonstrates that quantitative approaches can provide objective insights into the feasibility of malaria elimination — a sometimes contentious subject".
The Malaria Elimination Group will have its annual meeting at the Mexico–Guatemala border in ten days time "to review the Central American experience with representatives from those countries to ask about their views on what is possible for them," Feachem said.
"It will take a lot of regional collaboration, and the cross-border dimension will be critical because there are significant population movements across those borders." Such cross-border movements can import malaria cases to countries that have eliminated the disease.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/malaria-elimination-most-feasible-in-latin-america.html