Sustainability
While most aid programs can make a visible impact, the real challenge is creating permanent change. By sourcing local employees and supplies, utilizing replicable methods, and initiating income generating activities, we ensure that HELP’s assistance will make a lasting impact in the community.
Hiring locally produces a team of long-term personnel with a strong sense of ownership. Many foreign-aid workers are on contract and will eventually return to their own countries. Malawians, by contrast, are permanent residents motivated by the desire to improve their community. Roughly 90 percent of our staff is Malawian, and we constantly invest in job-skills training for our employees.
HELP strives to make its projects low-cost and culturally relevant. An impoverished farmer without access to mainline power and water cannot use an expensive automated irrigation system. We select projects that we know the community will accept and continue on their own.
HELP draws on the sustainable philosophies of our friends at Teach a Man to Fish and the Peace Corps to create different avenues of income. This is done both in the United States and Malawi.
Many of our Entrepreneurship Classes act as businesses. We hope that the income generating classes at Nanthomba Primary School will one day earn enough to fund daily operations.
