Roads tend to help people. If there's a road near your village, your kids can get to school faster, you can get things like medicine and seeds more easily, and you can get the produce you grow to markets. But the road by itself isn't enough. Many of these farmers, because they have never had good access to markets, have no idea how to take advantage of this new opportunity. They don't know what people want to buy, at what prices, what new crop would grow well in their soil, where to get seeds for these crops.... you get the idea.
That's where this project comes in. NGO staff come into these villages and say "Hey, you have this road now, so why don't you grow something that you can sell to markets that you can get to now? You have good soil for tomatoes, you could grow them in the rainy season and get a high off-season price in Nepalgunj. What do you think?" As you can expect, it takes a little longer than that - distrust of outsiders, fear of taking risks (if you had half a hectare and kids to feed, wouldn't you be a little conservative about planting some unknown crop on your tiny plot of land?), and inexperience with markets mean that it takes a lot of visits to get a whole village to switch a bunch of their land from rice to tomatoes.
But a bunch of them did it - usually a few intrepid risk-takers at first, then more joined in when they saw their neighbors' success. The NGO taught them all about how to grow tomatoes, helped them find buyers, even built irrigation systems for some of them. And it's working. I talked to a woman who built a big beautiful house and sent her kid to English school with her tomato profits. She seemed pretty happy about it.
And then the NGO leaves. They always do. And then what?
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