Sustainable Rural Enterprises and Livelihoods (Surelives)

Project Description

The program’s basic concept is to expand the programmatic and geographic focus under a holistic approach to:

• Improve food security, nutrition, health, & general wellbeing of rural communities.
• To assist farm households in making shift toward commercial-based enterprises, with the aim of promoting sustained economic growth.

The vision to achieve this is providing rural communities support to meet their basic household needs & introduce innovations for diversifying and intensifying the production, harvesting, & marketing of agricultural & natural resource products.  Value-added processing will be explored to increase rural incomes & competitiveness.

The elements will be implemented to achieve the following objectives using extension and training:

• Improve the economic use & management of natural resources on a sustainable basis with reduced soil & forest degradation.
• Increase & diversify farm productivity to improve household food security, nutrition & incomes through agroforestry, soil & water conservation, & low-cost systems of irrigation involving a broad range of crops.
• Enhance village & household health with services to improve basic health standards in targeted villages by introducing low-cost methods to provide safe water & sanitation.
• Develop opportunities to establish smallscale enterprises with strong links to sound markets to increase incomes with greater independence & reduce risk.

The benefits realized by communities will accrue from the synergistic effects of a holistic approach involving a diverse range of interventions.  The results will lead to growing demands among communities within and outside project sites to participate in all components of the program.