Welcome to AICCAfrica News

African Institute of Corporate Citizenship (AICC) is building Gender Based Violence survivors capacity to operate rural enterprises as part of empowering them economically. Survivors can increasingly run their own enterprises, but if they are not fully trained, their socio-economic contributions and entrepreneurial potential will largely remain unrecognized and untapped. This is why AICC through its Public Private Partnership (PPP)  approach engaged Some institutions like Small and Medium Enterprise Development Institute (SMEDI) and Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS)  to train the survivors as upcoming entrepreneurs to enhance their knowledge, skills and abilities in business development skills so that they can manage their small scale businesses on a more sustainable basis. The upcoming entrepreneurs (survivors) are likely to face challenges such as lack of access to business and lack of proper marketing information, facing some financial problems as well as lack of book keeping skills and lack of business/ technical skills.

African Institute of Corporate Citizenship (AICC) under the spotlight initiative project is considering survivors of Gender Based Violence (GBV) as one of the most important players in the development of Malawi as they can play an important role in agriculture value chain and other vocational enterprises. AICC’s philosophy is inspired by the principles of non-violence and self-reliance. Self-reliance refers to economic or financial self-sufficiency as well as collective self-reliance. With collective strength, the survivors will be able to combat the outside exploitative and corrupt forces like unscrupulous traders and other market competitors.  Often, survivors are chronic victims of poverty and are more vulnerable to external shocks. Every misfortune leaves them increasingly powerless and takes them into deeper poverty. For AICC, only work and a steady source of income can break this cycle. Survivors are more vulnerable and powerless because they have unequal access to information and technologies, though they are involved in small scale farming, they lack knowledge and they often do not own their tools of production. However, they play a crucial role in feeding their families. This is why AICC places these survivors at the center of its strategy against poverty and as part of building resilience communities.

In a country where land  is limited and scarce for both urban and rural people, the 65 year old father of four children is one of the farmers who has been cultivating on a small piece of land which could hardly sustain their livelihood especially that they were using local farming methods. “Our farming has always been tailored to just feed ourselves and that has not enough because the harvest was never sufficient to feed myself and the kids” Says Nandolo who comes from the area of Chibwana Village, Traditional Authority Amidu in the district of Balaka. After years of struggling with poor yields, profits have poured in for Jimmy Nandolo, a chairman of Nkhonde Cooperative. The difference started when AICC offered the cooperative members training on how to use improved basic farming practices, like improved ways of preparing their land, applying herbicides and planting their legume crops.