Our Mission: KOMAZA is a nonprofit organization committed to ending chronic poverty in Kenya by promoting health, economic growth, education, and infrastructure development. • Our Mantra: The best way to end chronic poverty is through social enterprises--combining a social mission with high-quality profitable business models. Everyone wins when ending poverty is profitable! • To this end, we will teach poverty-stricken Kenyans how to establish and maintain small businesses that will be money-generating, thereby generating a self-sustaining source of income that enables purchase of food, water purification units, and healthcare.
Note: KOMAZA is currently under the fiscal sponsorship of Foundation of Sustained Development located in San Francisco CA (www.fsdinternational.org )
Description
In March of 2006, KOMAZA was established in Kilifi District, one of the poorest and least developed districts in Kenya--over 60% of the 600,000 people live in absolute poverty (less than $15/adult/month).We firmly believe that the best way to end this chronic poverty is through social enterprises--combining a social mission with profitable business models. Our initial project is to teach poor rural farmers how to establish and maintain tree farms, and to establish markets for the wood the farmers generate.The local, regional, and international wood markets are extremely favorable--trees can be sold as diverse output products, including fuelwood/charcoal, building poles, sawn lumber, and electricity/telephone transmission poles. By selling to these various markets, Eucalyptus farming in Kenya has incredible intrinsic potential: investing $600 in 1-acre of top-quality planting inputs yields US$6,000-$30,000 of profit over 7-10 years to be shared between the local communities and KOMAZA (a return on investment of 10-60X--depending on output markets). With the current average income in Kilifi at ~US$300/family/year, such substantial revenues from tree farming can provide incredible capital for families to re-invest in further growth and development
