Greetings from Bangkok ...
I work with homeless and slum families in an effort to help them development meaningful family incomes, while ensuring their children's education. A major focus in recent years has been training young people in plant tissue culture. This has demonstrated a viable six-fold increase in earning potential with an investment of only about a hundred USD per student!
The next hoped for extension of this madness is to minimize their commute to work by building a plant tissue culture within the community, gradually giving full ownership to the community through a micro-finance scheme within their own control. This is what I envision as "sustainable community development" ... too many of the NGO community development models fail to sustain themselves or to transfer ownership and capacity to the communities themselves.
Oh yeah, bananas ... what better tissue culture crop to produce slum community income while supporting the needs of similarly impoverished rural communities!
Regards/Roger, in Bangkok
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