By Catherine Craig, Mamy Ratsimbazafy | Presidents of CPALI and SEPALIM
We are celebrating the month of June with new on-site living quarters for working artisans! Many of the artisans have to travel a full day to reach the training center and have no family to stay with overnight when working there. SEPALI Madagascar has just completed a very cute guest house with festive orange trim to welcome the artisan team.
You might notice that the new guest house does not seem to have a foundation - well you would be correct! The house has been built so it can be moved to the training center site once the training center is completed. Always vigilant and helpful, Amelia Thrall of the Boston Architects for Humanity has assured us that her team can draw plans to build a foundation at the training site that we can simply "drop" the house into. It sounds a little tippy, but Ameliahas never let us down - Thank you Amelia.
So the next question is, how about building that training center? Current thinking is that the center should be build in an area serviced by Jirama, the local electricity company. We had hoped to include the training center with the demonstration site - we have put so much work into making the demonstration site a functioning farm that it seems to be a shame NOT to put the training center there as well. Unfortunately, Jirama does not anticipate extending its lines to our area any time in the near future and we want the training center ASAP. So, we are back to the drawing board searching for a new site in which to build it. Never fear, we have come this far and will not let something as silly as the lack of a little electricity stop us.
Are you asking, just how well is SEPALI doing making a marketable product and is the training center justified? SEPALI Madagascar is doing very well, thank you very much for asking. SEPALI Madagascar has produced, and CPALI US has sold over $8,500 worth of silk products just since January 2015 (up from $4000 for the entire year of 2014) and more orders are being processed. We had set ourselves a $12,000 target for year of 2015 and we may surpass that by the end of July or sooner! Yes, we really need the site to accelerate production and hence support more farmers earnings through the sustainable use of endemic resources
So how do you like them mangoes?
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