We're spending our year in Cameroon working as volunteers for an NGO
called RELUFA (a French acronym for "Network in the Fight against Hunger
in Cameroon"). Ann is doing interviews with clients and assisting with
REFLUA's CAP microfinance program, for which I'm creating a database and
information system. RELUFA's coordinator Valery (who works here in the
office in Yaounde) and a couple of people from U.S. partner
organizations recently did a U.S. tour and met with people in Congress
and got media interviews with WBEZ in Chicago (see picture above) and
others to promote some of their efforts. Valery even addressed a U.N.
expert group in New York.
RELUFA has a few different projects. Their CAP program extends small
loans to people without other access to credit, to enable them to start
or augment a small business, such as selling tshirts or fruit juice,
running a food stall, raising small animals, and many other projects.
Candidates are interviewed and screened to help prevent loan defaults.
This summer they also ran an extension program for students over the
holiday break, which was an unusual step here since there is no culture
of summer jobs here, or of working while you study.
Another project is transparency of extractive industries, also known as
PWYP: Publish What You Pay. The history of where the money from foreign
oil and mining operations in this part of the world actually goes is not
a happy one. So the idea is to get these companies to publish what they
pay, and to whom, in order to shine a little sunlight into the payment
process and get some of the benefits to local people.
RELUFA also has a food bank program for farmers up north, who sell their
crops at harvest time, and then end up buying some of them back at a
several hundred percent markup from speculators when things get tight.
Providing the community with crop storage in the form of a "food bank"
will give them something to fall back on instead of having to buy back
their own crops.
RELUFA also has a gender justice program, which has been pretty quiet lately. We may help generate some new activity there, once Christi gets back here from the states in January. Women, especially widows, can have a rough lot here. For more information on that, check out http://www.relufa.org/programs/genderjustice1.htm
There's a lot more to it than this, of course. If you're curious to see
some pictures of all this, and read more details on RELUFA, including
links to the WBEZ radio interview, check out the September 2007 Joining
Hands newsletter on Cameroon at
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