Cooperative Craft Production In Small Impoverished Villages
A group of philanthropic American entrepreneurs will finance and help to establish cooperative businesses that employ and share ownership with most of the population of small, very poor villages in underdeveloped countries. These businesses will produce mainly hand crafted items that are indigenous to the region. Their products might be as diverse as jewlery, art work, carvings, furniture, clothing, hand-made quilts and woven fabrics, table ware, pottery, perserves and local crafts of all kinds. They will use only the natural resources of their immediate area and employ the unique skills of the local people. Training will be designed to improve work and business management skills .Whatever onsite supervision they need and want will be brought in. Small local farm cooperatives might be created to produce and market a variety of food products to help feed the employees of the new cooperative businesses and the local population as inexpensively as possible. The original investors will provide the necessary equipment, supplies and materials as well as whatever other start-up capital is required to sustain each venture and its employee/owners until the businesses become fully operative and profitable. Health care, improved housing, schools and other necesities will be porvided by contributions solicited from private and public humanitarian funds.
A very important component of the first years programming will be the establishment of on-site training programs that will improve the village employee/owners working skills and help them understand and apply sound management principles in the context of cooperative business practice. These training programs might be designed in cooperation with local business people to help meet the specific needs of the populations involved.
The hand crafted products of the village cooperatives will be marketed and widely advertised in the United States and in other relatively prosperous first world countries as high end, functional art. Marketing contracts with large retail businesses abroad might be secured early in the program as part of a well publicized international war on poverty. The idea of combining substantial earnings with humanitarian efforts and regional development objectives that serve the arts might be attractive to potential investors.
All business desicions will be made with the participation of everyone involved. Profits earned will be shared or reinvested as determined by the cooperative share holders. About thirty percent of the stock might be owned by the investors and the remaining 70% will be divided between all the people working in the businesses in any capacity. Earned profit will be distributed according to the numbers of shares owned. The initial investment will be treated as a low interest loan that will be repaid over time as profits increase.
At the beginning of each venture, everyone involved will be paid at approximately the average local wage rate, which is likey to be very low. As soon as possible, all salaries should be assigned a minimum and a cap based on living costs in the area. The amount paid will eventually be commesurate with each indivduals skill level and productivity as determined by an elected peer group. All individual income will increase incrementally as profits are earned and shared.
By pre-agreement, some portion of the profits earned after wages by the cooperative labor owner group will be used to pay back the initial investment with the understanding that some percentage of the money paid back to the initial investors will be used to finance similiar cooperative businesses in other villages. In this way, 100% of the village co-ops will eventually be controlled by its employee/owners and the concept will spread using its own resources.
Most aspects of this anti-poverty programs might be funded by the U.N., religious organizations, the U.S. government or a whole range of Non-Profit Foundations. The start up costs, including the first year of operations, are estimated to be about $1,000,000.00. This initial investment might support one or more village cop-ops with approximately 100 employee owners, each of whom supports a family of about five to six people. Each of these families would have an income of about $4,000.00 for the first year. This first model venture would therefore support a total of aproximately 600 people in about 100 families at a total cost of about $400,000.00 a year per family or about $450,000.00.a year per family. The remaining start-up capital of about $600,000.00, would cover the cost of facilites, equipment, materials, marketing expenses and advertising, supervision and contingencies until wholesale income abroad begins. It would probably take approximately one year for income to cover operating costs and to begin generating enough profit for the first one hundred employee/owners to start to pay back the original investment.
I can imagine hundreds of villages on multiple contintents being reconstructed in this way, using similar economic formats in the kind of working democratic process described here. The peace corps, in addition to hundreds of independent volunteers from all over the world, might join the effort and expand the possible services that could help with the material and help needs of the villages undertaking to build similar programs. All volunteers would spend their first few months studying the language and getting acquainted with the culture of the specific area they choose to work in.