Programs / Microfinance / Communities / Pajarillos «

 

Community Overview
Caja Establishment Date	March 2010
Population	900
Major Professions	Agriculture (Coffee, Beans and Corn)
No. of Active Caja Leaders	27
Stage	Microenterprise Operation

 

 

Business Profiles coming soon!

 

About Pajarillos

Pajarillos is a mountain community located about an hour and half drive from

Honduras’ capital Tegucigalpa, in the department of Francisco Morazán, within

the municipality of San Juan de Flores. The views from this quaint community

amongst the mountains are absolutely incredible

.

Pajarillos has a population of approximately 900 people distributed in
140 homes.  Pajarillos is an agricultural community relying on the

production of coffee, corn and beans for sustenance. 

The average family only earns about 1,750 Lempiras ($90.00) per month,

which averages to less than $1.00 per person per day.

 

Despite their arduous work schedules on the fields, community members

have been open and available to welcome Global Brigades' Microfinance team

members and participated actively in their training sessions.

 

Pajarillos is a community where Global Brigades started to work a long time

ago. Back in 2009, they already featured a water system (which was already

present though), Public Health infrastructures in most houses and a

Global Brigades-established rural bank.

 

Nearly five years later, this community bank is the one with the highest total capital among all those created by the Global Brigades’ team. Caja members finished the construction of their own meetinghouse that is used for monthly meetings, and grain storage. Indeed, Producción en Marcha operates an agriculture store, which sells pesticides and fertilizers necessary for farmers to prevent plagues and increase their production. Thanks to this service, farmers no longer have to travel to the closest city Cantarranas. All the profits from the store are reinvested back into the community bank to give out loans or invested in other community projects. The community bank also purchases corn directly from the farmers in the community for a fair price. They store the corn in metal storage bins called silos and wait for the market price to rise and then sell the corn to make profits that are also reinvested back into the bank. 

 

Pajarillos' Economic Challenge

The people of Pajarillos are very hard working.  Each family rents its own small plot of land where they grow corn and beans, the staples of their diet. However their production is very limited due to their dependence on the rainy season because they do not have any irrigation systems, they can only plant during the two rainy seasons, cutting their potential production in half. In addition, their crops suffer lacking fertilizers and other inputs they simply don’t have the cash to purchase. A couple months out of the year the sugar cane factory near Cantarranas provides some the opportunity to earn $4.25 per day performing the back-breaking work of cutting burnt cane fields with their machetes. Women work in the home, caring for the children and preparing meals, while men work in the fields.

 

Nevertheless, this activities are highly seasonal, providing the families with a very fluctuating income throughout the year. For this reason, it is tantamount for them to smooth their income over the
months, to avoid falling short of resources outside harvesting periods.

 

Many community members work by the day for the standard pay of HNL 100 (around USD 5) as masons or peasants on others' land, but this is far from representing a stable and predictable source of income. On top of this, the agricultural activity tipically requires investments to be made beforehand, that is to say, way earlier than the crops are harvested and sold producing a revenue. It is evident that the necessary purchases of fertilizers and seed become very difficult when savings are not available. To overcome this hurdle, community members often resort to the support of 'coyotes', middlemen who exploit the lack of access to market that the people in Pajarillos suffer to buy their harvests directly in the community and re-sell them at much higher prices in the markets of bigger, farther away cities. Besides making big profits to the expenses of the isolated peasants, coyotes are also aware of the lack of funds to invest in fertilizers and seeds that farmers suffer from, and often lend them money in advance, discounting the amount later on when they buy the harvested crops - of course at very high interest rates. Obviously most of the problems that campesinos encounter performing their agricultural activities derive from the complete lack of access to savings and credit in the community.

 

Before Global Brigades helped the community establish the Caja Rural, the community had absolutely no access to any financial institution or its services. The closest savings&loans cooperative was located in San Juan de Flores, the little town at the bottom of the valley,  around 2 and a half hours away on foot. Very few members of the community own a mean of transportation which makes the distance between Pajarillos and San Juan de Flores very complicated to overcome. For these reasons, people in Pajarillos were living as subsistence agriculturalists and living on a day-to-day basis.

 

Microfinance in Pajarillos

Pajarillos was the second community the Microfinance Program in Honduras expanded to in June 2009. The Microfinance Brigades in-country team and brigaders from ? different universities have worked in this community since then. During this time, staff and volunteers have worked with community members to:

  •  Train and establish a Community Rural Bank (Caja Rural)

  •  Provide educational seminars to adults and children in the community on the importance of savings.

  •  Promote voluntary savings in the community to reach a level of sustainable capital for the Caja.

  •  Door-to-door community visits to further encourage community members to trust the system of
      the community bank and open accounts to actively save

  •  Provide community-wide workshops to sensitize community members about the importance of
      creditworthiness and reliability in repaying loans

  •  Door-to-door community visits to teach the basics of household budgeting and accounting to
      families and women

  •  Concede loans to all Public Health beneficiaries to finance the completion of the projects and collect
     the totality of the overall loaned capital

  •  Fundraised to finance the construction of the Caja Building and actually complete its construction

  •  Launched the trade of basic grains, pesticides, and fertilizers at reduced price from the Caja, with   
     great success

Microfinance/Business Brigades Chapters that Worked in Guaricayan
Brigades Chapter	Month	Program	Volunteers
London School of Economics, UK	March 2010	Microfinance	23
Wake Forest University, USA	December 2010	Microfinance	22
Chapman University, USA	May 2011	Microfinance	18
University of California Berkeley, USA	December 2011	Microfinance	10
Ivey School of Business, Canada	February 2012	Microfinance	31
University of Washington, USA	March 2012	Microfinance	8
DePaul University, USA	March 2012	Microfinance	20
Washington University and Boston College, USA	July 2013	Microfinance	12
College of Charleston and Northeastern University, USA	August 2013	Microfinance	28
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA	October 2013	Microfinance	21
Brandeis University, USA	February 2014	Microfinance	17

 

Project Photos

 

 

Current Status

Last Visit: 16th March, 2014

Our work in Pajarillos is not done yet. The biggest wish of the Microfinance team now is to capitalize on the strength of the ‘Produccion en Marcha’ Rural Bank to enter with the Business program and leverage the potential of this community. Soon Business brigaders will come in to work with family members and the bank board to advise ways to further improve the solidity of the economic structure of Pajarillos, by creating flourishing micro-businesses that will allow community members to make the best out of their savings.

 

 

Visit Other Programs in Pajarillos

Global Brigades strives to implement a model of Holistic Development in communities through a system of collectively implementing health, economic, and education initiatives to strategically meet a community's development goals. Learn more about the other programs being implemented in Pajarillos:

MedicalDental Community Health WorkersPublic HealthArchitecture