NEF (Near East Foundation) takes special pride in providing this overview of our work in poverty reduction and community organizing in one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest countries in the world. For the past 15 years, NEF-Mali has been spearheaded by our Country Director Yacouba Deme's exceptional leadership skills and extraordinary innovativeness.

A committed humanitarian and "can-do" individual, he has led a team of over 40 people in developing multi-faceted, grass-roots approaches to reducing poverty and building local institutions in 120 villages, which required working in several languages. He and his team have changed the lives of thousands of people in a myriad of ways:

* increasing their food security by introducing soil and water conservation and improved agricultural production techniques; * teaching literacy to rural women to enable their participation in micro-credit programs; * starting a rural radio station to help illiterate people vote intelligently; * helping communities build small-scale engineering projects, such as dikes and dams, to better manage Niger River floods; and * providing community-based, natural-resources management to support local short-term livelihood needs with long-term sustainability and forest management.

NATIONAL IMPACT

This innovative approach to addressing the interlinked challenges of strengthening local democracy, reducing poverty, and improving the management of natural resources has not only solved local problems in the Mopti region, where NEF activities are concentrated--it has also shaped national laws and inspired national development strategies. NEF's Country Director has demonstrated an uncanny ability to conceive and implement practical solutions to the institutional and structural factors that shape rural poverty and disempowerment.

For example, working within the nascent legal framework of Mali's decentralization, Deme and his team facilitated simplified, community-led forest management plans to balance local needs with forest conservation. This approach was later adopted by the national government as the model for involving communities in forest management and for enabling poverty reduction through sustainable natural resource management.

After replicating NEF/Mali's successful approach to participatory natural resource governance in dozens of villages, supporting numerous local nongovernmental organizations in the process, NEF-Mali has now initiated an ambitious plan to develop a participatory, multi-level, multi-country approach to govern the use of land and water in the Niger River Valley. The initiative brings together communities with grass-roots development organizations, and offers the potential of significantly changing the way marginalized communities take charge of their resources.

For an illustrated overview of this program which has directly benefited 322,600 people--40 percent (129,000) of them women, and another 445,600 people indirectly, in one of the poorest countries in the world, see this presentation at: http://www.neareast.org/main/documents/NEFMaliPresentation.pdf

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