malo, noun

1: uncooked rice

English

trader, noun

1: a person who buys, sells, or exchanges goods

Bambara + English

Malo Traders,
social venture

1: a cross-cultural social venture

2: combatting extreme poverty and malnutrition in Mali by paying farmers a living price

3: minimizing post-harvest losses by at least 10% due to more efficient processing equipment

4: fortifying rice with minerals and vitamins using politically and culturally appropriate technology

5: creating the first brand of Malian rice that adheres to international export quality standards

Echoing Green’s mission is to support young entrepreneurs by providing them with moral and financial support.

Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to solve deeply-rooted social, environmental, economic, and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach their potential.

We are among 27 organizations and 40 individuals invited to New York on May 5th for three days of intensive interviews and look forward to meeting the Echoing Green staff, fellows, and our fellow finalists.

The World’s Most Unreasonable Trailer from Unreasonable Institute on Vimeo.

Cultivate Life by Colby Pfister

Of the one billion people suffering from hunger in the world, 70% are farmers. Despite countless hours laboring in the field, the lack of access to financing, services, equipment, and a fair value chain means that hundreds of millions of people across the world struggle to farm themselves out of poverty. Per the International Rice Research Institute:

One fifth of the world’s population—more than a billion people—depend on rice cultivation for their livelihoods.

In most of the developing world, rice is equated with food security and closely connected to political security. Changes in rice availability, and hence price, have caused social unrest in several countries.

In Mali alone, enough rice to feed 580,000 (4.1% of the total population) people each year goes to waste due to the lack of proper storage and processing technology. With 80% of the labor force engaged in agriculture, improving their production capacity and purchasing power is a necessary condition for Mali to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals.

The challenge, above anything else, is to produce this additional rice with less land, less water, and less labor, in more efficient, environmentally-friendly production systems that are more resilient to climate change, among other factors.

Our raison d’être at Malo Traders is to ensure that farmers do not go hungry.  Over the past fifteen months we’ve worked on a business model designed to make Mali not just self-sufficient when it comes to rice but a major player in the international rice market.