Feedback Madagascar is one of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that we support.The project we support promotes yam farming with training on yam cultivation techniques, the creation of demonstration plots and household plantations. Working with twelve community forest management associations, over 250 people are already producing and yams are taking off.
Famous for providing the fuel for Usain Bolt’s sprinting successes, the yam is commonly confused as a sweet potato (they are un-related), they are similar in properties.
“Anyone for yams?”
The project is based around the Malagasy rainforest, where people are reliant on inadequate rice and cassava harvests; the cultivation of yams reduces the impact of the annual famine and dramatically ups people’s nutritional intake.
And yams are fun. To raise awareness of yams and their benefits, alongside rainforest conservation, there are now yam festivals. Associations take stands, organise competitions, cook offs, speeches and full-on carnival singing and dancing.
As part of the project, training on culinary techniques is included to make the most of the yam.
Here are 6 of their suggested recipes:
Yam Pudding
Yam Crisps
Yam Pizza
Yam Soup
Yam salad
Baked Yam.
Here in Fruit Towers, we think they all sound delicious and the soup sounds like a great defence against winter.
If you fancy trying your hand at Yam Pudding, here is an embellished Western version:
Ingredients:
800g grated uncooked yams
300g milk
120g golden syrup
3 eggs
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
120g brown sugar
1tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground nutmeg
Preheat oven to 160˚c
Grease baking dish (approx 8”x8”x2”)
Combine all ingredients
Bake until a knife comes out of mixture clean, approx 1 hour.
Serve warm with cream or ice cream
For more information on Feedback Madagascar, please visit our foundations page: www.innocentfoundation.org/ or their own website: www.feedbackmadagascar.org
Did you know 80% of the Indian population live on less than $2 a day?
Jeevika Trust (http://www.jeevika.org.uk/) is one of the amazing charities the innocent foundation supports to fight poverty in rural India. Jeevika Trust has touched more than 100,000 lives over the last decade and continues to work with people on the margins of rural society – low-caste and tribal people, especially women – to help them build and sustain their individual, family and community livelihoods.
Last week, Jeevika Trust organised a sponsored walk to raise money to support their water projects. This is the event Geraldine and her boyfriend took part in. The route is roughly 6 miles (10 km) long, which was harder than she thought it would be. Incredibly, millions of women and children walk this distance every single day, sometimes twice a day, to find and carry back water for their family.
To start the walk, they were warmly welcomed by Rosemary and her boyfriend Matt in Hampton Wick. Rosemary discovered India during her gap year, teaching English and drama classes to children and fell in love with the country. She is now Jeevika Trust’s Communications and Fundraising Officer.
After a quick chat with Rosemary and Matt, they were off to Bushy Park. It lies North of Hampton court Palace and is full of stags and deers roaming freely so they made friends on the way…
The route itself offered diverse landscapes, lovely paths, bubbling steams, and kept them entertained watching old and young alike on sport pitches and cycle paths. The last part of the walk was along the Thames…
Ending in a private garden on the river, where they over-indulged with tea and lemon drizzle cakes. They enjoyed meeting with Andrew (on the picture below with Rosemary), Jeevika Trust Director, to learn more about their projects in India: http://www.jeevika.org.uk/whatwedo/CurrentProjects.htm.
So a big thanks to Jeevika Trust for organising such a great event. May they continue the fantastic work they do in India.
How to try and sum up 14 pretty incredible days in a single blog post...
I've met over 50 rather special individuals who have benefited directly from our innocent Foundation
Drunk about 20 cups of hot milk, straight from the yard
Been given one jack fruit
Had 2 delicious coconuts from the tree
Been lucky enough to sit in on 3 of the monthly meetings run at local village level by disabled people for disabled people, where the big decisions get made.
And almost been launched through the roof of 1 Indian bus (note to self: never, ever sit on the back row).
Trying to give a picture of all the people that I've met is a lot more difficult. I've been totally blown away by the sheer determination to drive change that I have witnessed this past fortnight- but one of the most striking examples I've seen is a man I met called Poundurai.
ADD met Poundurai at a Federation meeting for disabled people that they attended about 5 years ago. He wasn't in a leadership role at the time, but they noticed his potential and began working with him more closely over the years to support the work that he was doing.
5 years on, and he now represents over 2300 disabled people in a block of over 40 villages in his area. He's the elected President of the Disability Development Trust, a co-ordinator of the governement disability programme, and Leader of the National Federation for the Blind, fighting tirelessly to make sure that disabled people get a fair deal. He and his team have helped more disabled people get bank loans than any other group in the area, they've taught parents of severely disabled children how to teach their children to wash and dress, and they've ensured that when things aren't right, they're addressed.
When I was there, we spoke to a lady whose postman had been skimming 500 rupees for himself off the government benefits that he was supposed to be delivering her in full each month. Apparently this is rather common.
From the look on Poundurai's face, I suspect the postman might think twice about it next time.
As some of you will know, I'm currently in India working with one our innocent foundation partners, disability charity ADD. I've been here for 10 days now, and it's been quite the adventure.
We had our innocent foundation day yesterday so I sent across a little video across of some of the things I've seen and learnt this week, which we thought we'd share.
Pop the kettle on, stick the headphones in, and learn about some amazing people. What they are doing is truely remarkable.
Every year, innocent gives one or two lucky employees the opportunity to go and work with one of the charities we support through our foundation, using some of our work skills. Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while may remember tales from Andrew in Malawi, JT in Kenya, or our Emilie in Ethopia.
Emilie in Ethiopia showing the bees who was boss
On Friday, I'll be following in their illustrious footsteps, lugging my camera and a notebook with me, as I head to India to work with disability charity ADD gathering materials for their fundraising and training needs. I'll be penning a few posts while I'm away but it sees only right that I do some introductions first...
ADD supports disabled people in 11 different countries across Africa and Asia to challenge disability discrimination. Their vision is to create a world where disabled people can enjoy their rights and participate in society as fully as they choose to, and we've been supporting the work that they do in India since April 2009.
Three quarters of the disabled population in India live in rural communities, and less than 2% receive any form of vocational training. ADD India works to educate people in the skills they need to earn a livelihood, and offers financial support through microloans- these are frequently used to boost incomes in India, but disabled people are generally excluded from these schemes.
The project that we're funding has so far delivered loans to over 200 people, enabling them to gain independence through their livelihood, and to participate more fully in the communities in which they live. Over the next few weeks, I'll be meeting a few of the people who have benefited from these loans, and be able to see first hand the impact that it has had not only on their lives, but on the lives of their families, who are often marginalised as well.
So there you are. Introductions done. I'd definitely recommend that you get to know them a bit better here, but if not, I'll be in touch shortly with some more info from the other side of the world.
I have recently come back from an incredible couple of weeks in Madagascar. It's a land full of contrasts with unique wildlife and beautiful landscape, but it's also home to some of the poorest people in the world.
During my time there I visited Project Lanirano run by Azafady on behalf of the Innocent Foundation. Azafady are a small NGO based in the south east of Madagascar and they do some fantastic work to alleviate poverty in the area and create more sustainable livelihoods for the local people.
Project Lanirano is an initiative that has two main aspects: an urban side, and a rural side. The urban element of the project assists women in making their small businesses more profitable, and the rural side teaches farmers new agricultural methods.
I think the best way to tell the story of my visit is to talk you through some good ol' pics:
Day 1
Here are some women receiving small business training. Many of the group were illiterate before they started so their progression has been immense.
I met a number of women who had already benefited from the small grants for their business. They told me their stories and it was incredible to hear how such a small amount of money can have such an enormous impact on their lives. The lady on the right gave me a zebu statue as a gift, which I clearly seem happy about but not sure she was quite so pleased by the look on her face.
This woman told me that because of the business grant she was now able to afford to feed her family 3 meals-a-day.
I spent the afternoon looking at a flash spreadsheet that held some frightening data about the women's income & expenditure. The average member of the group is living on 4p per day.
Day 2
This is me and Latena (Head of Sustainable Livelihoods for Azafady), just before we embarked on a bumpy mission out to the bush. Despite my smile I was feeling rather ill, having been up all night being sick. Not ideal.
This didn't deter me from visiting the rural side of the project where I watched a lesson in how to compost.
The locals have also started to grow their vegetable patch to get more variety in their diet.
After chatting to some of the locals about the new methods, my illness had finally caught up with me and I needed to go back to the Jeep to crash out.
The work Azafady are doing is making a huge impact on people's lives in Madagascar. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to see their efforts first-hand.
I recommend checking out their range of volunteering programs, including the community conservation I undertook prior to visiting the foundation project.
I would also like to take the opportunity to say a massive thanks to Samm & Latena and everyone at Azafady - you were amazing.
P.S I couldn't write a blog about Madagascar without including some pictures of Lemurs. So I bid you farewell with a few new friends of mine.
There was an article published in the Guardian today that we’re pretty disappointed with. We want to make a few things absolutely clear.
The innocent Foundation exists to fund rural development projects in some of the world’s poorest countries. Since it began in 2004 it has achieved an incredible amount, supporting 37 projects, committing almost £1.3m in funding, which in turn has allowed our charity partners to leverage a further £5.8m from other funding sources such as the EU. There are many things we’ve achieved over the years, but helping more than 340,000 people to live a better life, is probably the single thing we’re most proud of.
The Foundation is a professionally run charity that meets all the relevant legal requirements. The finances of the Foundation are managed conservatively, always maintaining sufficient funds to meet all our NGO funding commitments whilst making sure we have enough funds in reserve to mean the projects do not suffer if the business has lower or no profit years.
As we promise on our packaging, we donate 10% of our profits to charity (sometimes more than 10%). Like many businesses, the last few years have been tough but despite not making a profit in 2008 and 2009 we still donated a total of £273,000 to charity (most of which went to Age UK – a charity we’ve supported through the Big Knit).
It’s not likely we’re going to make a profit this year. We’re trying to grow our business, and we’re investing in this, but nevertheless we made a decision a few months ago to donate £250,000 to the innocent Foundation to make sure that it can continue to support new projects going forward.
The innocent Foundation is something that everyone who works for innocent is immensely proud of. We are committed to supporting the work it does and committed to running it professionally. To suggest otherwise, and infer that the Foundation is run half-heartedly or without proper care, is simply not true, or fair.
Pictures often speak better than words so here a a few highlights of Emilie's recent 2-day visit to innocent foundation project with Find Your Feet in Uttar Pradesh, India.
The first day started with a warm and colourful welcome.
This involved flower necklaces and face painting to fit in (kind of).
We then joined a proper mother's group and chatted about micro-loans.
Balance sheet secrets were shared.
Travelling to the second village involved a little adventure.
But it was all worth it - I was told all about the vegetable programme that Find Your Feet is running with the innocent foundation. The aim is to help the farmers diversify their crops and it's cleraly working - I got given more vegetables than I could carry.
And then the best bit: the village photo.
We ended the first day around the vegetable tree of luck - a beautiful use of my gifts.
On day 2, I thought I needed more than face paint to blend in, so Savitri helped me put on a sari -not an easy task.
The sari didn't really want to stay on after a few dance moves but this provoked roaring laughter from the local children.
We then visited one of Find Your Feet's water pumps in the middle of the fields. A great way for the villagers to grow vegetables all year round and not just in the rainsy season.
We followed this by a weaving class and general chat about setting up a business.
And last but not least - delicious Indian treats were passed round constantly. Here we have a mix of peas, biscuits, strange fruits and lumps of sugar (a rare delicacy)
Whilst 2011 may officially be the year of the rabbit, here at Fruit Towers it would seem that it's all about the lemurs.
Not content with giving them a starring role on our new OJ packaging, we're also really excited because the innocent foundation is working with Feedback Madagascar to fund a yam growing project.
'Where's the link?' I hear you cry.
Turns out that the Madagascan rainforests where these yams grow are also home to the only bamboo lemurs you can find in the world. So not only will this foundation project be helping to ensure a regular food source for local people in the area, who previously struggled when their rice crops ran out, it'll also be making sure that the bamboo lemurs' habitat is conserved.
Check out BBC2's "Attenborough and the Giant Egg' on March 2nd at 8 o'clock to learn more about the incredible work that Feedback Madagascar are doing.
Remember where you heard it first. 2011 (unofficially), the year of the lemur.
A couple of weeks ago Rozanne and I were in India for work, and we took the opportunity to visit one of the innocent foundation projects with our partner ADD. ADD supports organisations of disabled people to improve their livelihoods. In India, they are working primarily on improving agricultural skills and incomes.
The money provided from the innocent foundation is used to provide loans to disabled people and their families. The local Disabled People Organisation (DPO) consisting of members of the community determines who would benefit most from the loans, and supports the beneficiaries in their endeavours. The money is used for a wide variety of uses, such as buying animals, seeds or farming equipment.
We visited a number of DPO groups and beneficiaries of the loans during our visit.
Please allow us to introduce one of the beneficiaries, Mr Siddagangaiah (on the left).
He suffers from cerebral palsy and as such cannot do manual work. He used his loan to buy this rather fetching looking goat (on the left of Mr Siddagangaiah).
The idea is that the goat will have kids (that's what you call a baby goat) which can be sold for meat if they are boys.. (sorry guys) or for breeding if they are lucky enough to be a girl.
Mr Siddagangaiah already has 2 kids, and he hopes to slowly build a small herd. The money raised from the goats contributes to his family income, and importantly provides him with increased social standing in his community.
Other beneficiaries are using their loans to buy silk worms, grow flowers, and grow vegetables such as potatoes and beans.
Mr Ranganatha from ADD India was lucky enough to be given some fresh beans to take home for dinner.
It was fantastic to meet some of the people who are benefitting from these small loans, and to hear about the difference it makes in their lives. We thank them and ADD for making us so welcome and sharing their time with us.
We wish them well for lots of goat babies, and a bumper bean crop.
