Dear Friends,
I’m writing this letter from seat 23D on a flight bound for Kenya. I’ve spent the past month in the U.S. planning out 2012 and beyond with Nuru’s dedicated and talented staff, and now I can’t wait to return to our project in Kenya to catch up on the progress that our Kenyan staff has made in empowering the hard-working farmers of Kuria with sustainable solutions to end extreme poverty in their communities. But before touching down in Nairobi I want to reflect back on the year prior and set the stage for the content you’ll find in this Annual Report.
We began the year working with 537 families and ended with more than 1,400 families enrolled in Nuru’s Agriculture Program.
2010 was a year of explosive growth for Nuru. We began the year working with 537 families and ended with more than 1,400 families enrolled in Nuru’s Agriculture Program. Even with this explosive growth, new farmers’ crop yields increased by 250% on average. This increase is absolutely transformational to a family who can now feed their children and sell the surplus to earn disposable income for the first time. For those farmers who live far from any town and don’t have access to local markets, we launched an agribusiness run by our Kenyan staff that offers to purchase our farmers’ excess maize at accessible locations and at a fair market price. That maize is then resold to local markets at a profit with all revenues invested back into the Agriculture Program to pay for the next season’s loan inputs.
Also in 2010 our Community Economic Development Program laid the foundation for mobile banking services that will allow farmers to save their increased income and plan for their families’ future. Our Healthcare Program trained and deployed Nuru Community Health Workers (CHWs) to provide basic disease prevention and affordable health and hygiene products to the extreme poor living in remote, rural areas. The Water & Sanitation Program increased access to clean water for over 1,755 community members via two new deep wells and created a new Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) framework aimed at increasing sustainability and buy-in for clean water and sanitation. Lastly, our Education Program continued to iterate on its approach to increasing child literacy. We used the design thinking process to produce a new prototype: a Learning/Drop-In Center that also serves as a hub for outreach to public schools. This well-researched model will provide alternative education programs and a menu of low-cost, proven initiatives for public schools to implement themselves.
As you know, Nuru is all about true sustainability. We create financial sustainability by embedding revenue models into our five programs. In 2010, those models produced over $315,835 in program-sourced revenue! This moved us closer towards our goal of financial independence for the entire project before our U.S. staff’s exit. As important as financial sustainability is, true sustainability also requires leadership sustainability. Our Leadership Program is a comprehensive process and curriculum that identifies, screens, trains and equips service-minded leaders from the community to scale Nuru’s model. After 9 months of research and design we began testing our prototype in February 2011.
2010 was also a year of explosive financial growth. More selfless donors are catching the vision of our sustainable, scalable model and are excited by the measurable, life-changing results we’ve accomplished thus far. Their contributions and yours have allowed us to exponentially increase our impact, and we rely on your continued support as we aggressively scale our programs into neighboring communities and additional countries trapped in the cycle of extreme poverty. Because of you, we are empowering more and more people with the choice to lift themselves out of extreme poverty… permanently.
Stay in the fight,
Jake Harriman
Chief Executive Officer
Nuru International
