Skip to content
Early in the partnership with a new village, Shanta staff spend significant time discussing what projects the villagers think will make long-lasting poverty reduction for themselves. What are their priorities to accomplish during their 6-year partnership with Shanta Foundation? How can we support them to create sustainable change? Along with leadership development, implementing community banks, [...]
How did you get involved with Muditar? When my previous work project ended, I discovered the Muditar vacancy announcement on the MIMU website and was interested in the job responsibilities. I believe that I am the best person for these responsibilities, so I applied to Muditar and was hired. I've been working in Muditar since [...]
Eighteen-year-old Khun San Mhway lives in Htee Lone village with his mother and is the youngest of nine children. His father died when he was five years old, leaving only his mother to raise the children by farming corn and rice and working as a day laborer. There is only a primary school in the [...]
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. [...]
