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Due to recent military threats, members of several of our partner villages were forced to flee into the forest for one week at the end of November. These threats have taken place for the past six months, and the villagers have been moving to the forest on and off depending on the severity of the [...]
Two weeks ago, Shanta signed an MOU with the People’s Action Forum (PAF), a local, non-profit development organization in Zambia. This agreement establishes an informal partnership with the shared goal of bringing Shanta’s Village Development Model to Zambia. Our signing ceremony was the culmination of a two-week trip to Zambia for our Myanmar country manager, [...]
Khin Mar Myint, a 42-year-old woman with a 6th grade education, lives in Aung Si Thar village in Pauk Township. Her family's main business is farming ground nuts and chili, and she also owns a grocery store. Before her village established a partnership with Muditar, her daily life consisted of farming, selling items at the [...]
I’m not sure anyone understands project resiliency (or the lack thereof) until the bullets and grenades start flying. Recently, Shanta got a crash course in extreme resiliency when fighting broke out in an area of Myanmar (Magway State, to be exact) where we have several partner villages. The fighting is between the People’s Defense Force [...]
Ohn Hmin village partnered with Shanta Foundation in 2019 and is situated in the Pauk township within the restricted military zone with minimal access to essential services. Nonetheless, with two more years remaining in the partnership with us, they are successfully creating a path out of poverty by identifying numerous projects to complete with the [...]
If #shiftthepower is to be more than the catchphrase du jour among progressive development professionals, we must reconsider how MOUs are developed and ratified among development partners. All too often, the MOU development process reflects the historical inequalities between the global north and the global south, i.e., white, western, development funder/practitioners and their brown-skinned beneficiaries. [...]
We are eager to share the results of Shanta's hard work this year, in collaboration with Muditar, all of our village partners, and you, because without your support, none of this would be possible. Feel free to contact us for further information on any of our programs. We love to talk about the incredible work [...]
Drought? Pandemic? Flooding? There is a lot to be said for a development model (i.e., solution to poverty) that can succeed under difficult, even disastrous, conditions. Given that disasters like this are even more destructive in less developed countries where infrastructure is lacking or primitive, it is essential that any effective development model be able [...]
Over the course of a 6-year partnership with Shanta, villages create committees to manage the different projects and areas of interest they have chosen. This might be an education committee to increase school supplies or improve teacher housing, an infrastructure committee to build roads or bridges, and so on. A Village Development Team (VDT) is [...]
Years ago, I was talking to a potential donor about a development project in Latin America. Before I could get a full sentence out, this person interrupted me and blurted out, “I won’t support what you are doing because all of Latin America is corrupt.” As you can imagine, I was taken aback by that [...]
