Latin America & Caribbean

Climate change has exacerbated the dryness of the eight-month dry season in Peru’s highlands. As a means of adaptation, the Cusichaca Trust and the Asociación Andina Cusichaca are using a DM grant to restore proven Inca-era agricultural practices to conserve water and increase crop yields.

A couple of months ago, journalist Cynthia Graber visited the project and featured it in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Andes are some of the tallest, starkest mountains in the world. Yet the Incas, and the civilizations before them, coaxed harvests from the Andes’ sharp slopes and intermittent waterways. They developed resilient breeds of crops such as potatoes, quinoa and corn. They built cisterns and irrigation canals that snaked and angled down and around the mountains. And they cut terraces into the hillsides, progressively steeper, from the valleys up the slopes. At the Incan civilization’s height in the 1400s, the system of terraces covered about a million hectares throughout Peru and fed the vast empire.

Hello everybody!

My name is Beatriz, I am a social change-maker from Peru. In 2003, thanks to the Development Marketplace, a group of enthusiastic, passionate young people in Lima received funds to start the first Cybercafé for the blind in Peru. During the first year, more than 250 visually impaired were trained in word processing and E-Mail.

 In 2004, the World Bank invited us to Washington, to exchange lessons and experiences among other Latin American projects. Certainly, this opportunity was extremely beneficial to our project. Now, thanks to private sponsorship, our Cybercafé has become ATECNODIS, an NGO that promotes access to information and technology for the visually impaired.

Development Marketplace winner Pachamama Coffee Cooperative (PCC) was featured in the New York Times not too long ago. Its newest initiative CoffeeCSA.org found its roots in humble beginnings. Springing from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement which began in the 1960’s in Switzerland, consumers receive their produce directly from the farmer through a household subscription paid for in advance. Then on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, the consumer cum subscriber receives a portion of the overall harvest.

CoffeeCSA.org is a platform that allows consumers to pay in advance for a coffee subscription ranging from one month to one year. There consumers have a direct link to farmers who grew their coffee in Ethiopia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru or Guatemala. And the advance subscription provides a more stable income to farmers. It’s a great adaptation of an old model for coffee farmers who often live on only $2 per day.

A Development Marketplace project in Ecuador believes that farmers who understand fine chocolate and the value of positioning it in the global market are more successful in selling the final product and responding to market demands.