An Update on Recent Tragic Events in Pauk

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 [...]

Zambia Expansion Update: Remembering The Main Thing

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, [...]

Women’s Leadership Success in Pauk

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 [...]

Prioritizing the Library

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 [...]

MOU: Memorandum of Unequals

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. [...]