FIDA, a Paraguayan rural development foundation, works with extremely poor indigenous families living in a 30,000-square-kilometer area of the parched Central Chaco savanna.
FIDA won last year’s Inter-American Award for Excellence in Business Development for its sound management and innovative efforts to raise the living standards of its members—Indian communities that have traditionally been hunters and gatherers and have turned to subsistence and cash crop farming on small plots of land.
In 1991, the leaders of 12 communities belonging to four different indigenous groups and Mennonite aid agency ASCIM created the NGO. Its president, Florencio Caporale, is a young Indian chief. The exec-utive director, Eduardo Klassen, is a Mennonite of German ancestry. FIDA, which is not a religious organization, is based on the principle of helping people help themselves.
The foundation offers services such as technical assistance and training, marketing, technology extension, accounting and credit. Just as important for the 2,000 families living in its isolated territory, it runs a trading post, mechanical repairs shop, gas pump, tree nursery and trucking and farm equipment rental service. Before FIDA, traveling salesmen appeared only sporadically. Now, the foundation’s trucks visit communities once a week to deliver goods and pick up farm products. Teams of accountants visit community leaders every month to help them with their bookkeeping.
FIDA encourages its members to diversify their crops and livestock, both to improve their food supply and to sell what they do not consume. Backed by IDB loan and grant resources, the foundation launched a program to help farmers increase their cattle herds (to produce more beef and milk), boost output in their vegetable gardens and start raising goats.
One of its most successful programs promotes sesame production. Starting with just two farmers, FIDA organized training meetings to explain the whole process—from preparing the land to selling the seed—using films and brochures in the communities’ languages. By 2000, more than 1,300 farmers were growing sesame on nearly 1,300 hectares. That season’s 430-ton harvest brought in about US$240,000.
While these achievements have prompted some to tout FIDA as a model to be replicated—no other organization provides comparable services in other destitute rural areas of Paraguay—its leaders are in no rush to expand. Better to grow slowly, they say, with your own resources.