The issue opens with an interview with Dominique Lesaffre, president of the Association Développement et Civilisations, which hosts the international secretariat of the RIEH. Dominique Lesaffre presents the concept of the human economy and explains how the 17 experiences featured in the issue were selected. The interview highlights, among other things, two characteristics of the human economy:
The effort to develop a local economy always goes hand in hand with a desire to improve living together.
Introducing an economic dimension into social action projects gives communities a much greater capacity to act.
A World Tour of Initiatives
The issue then offers a true world tour of the human economy by giving voice to various social groups engaged in economic initiatives to ensure the resilience of their territory:
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Kivu, in an environment scarred by war and violence for decades, several mini-enterprises and associations created by groups of young people, in both urban and rural areas, help meet challenges and respond to the needs of the population.
In Sri Lanka, NAFSO (National Fisheries Solidarity Movement) launches numerous initiatives to address the food crisis.
In Lebanon, the social enterprise “Fair Trade Lebanon” enables people in disadvantaged rural regions to earn a dignified living from their work by accessing the international market.
In Plessé, France, a rural municipality of 5,377 inhabitants, the local government has launched a “Sustainable Agricultural and Food Policy” to ensure the continuity of farms, preserve agricultural land, promote economically viable, diverse and sustainable agriculture, encourage short supply chains, protect local resources, and communicate positively about local agriculture by relying on the collective intelligence of the population.
In Mexico, Oralia Carrillo Pérez of the Transdisciplinary Center for Economic Humanism explains how the struggle for life and livelihoods always takes place within the spatial limits of a territory.
In Sanzana, Mali, a youth association leads the local development process, organizes the layout of the village territory, and works for peace and social cohesion.
In India, ARED (Association of Rural Education and Development Service) encourages the creation of community organizations to mobilize the population and strengthen its capacity to act in the face of challenges related to education, health and sustainable development.
In Burkina Faso, the Naam groups, a powerful peasant movement bringing together more than 650,000 members, create credit instruments to mobilize savings in support of local development projects.
In Central America, the regional network of microfinance institutions (Redcamif) created SICSA, a company based in Honduras to pool funds to support micro-entrepreneurs. SICSA manages a portfolio of USD 10 million in favor of 134,000 micro-entrepreneurs.
In Palestine, DAMAN, a non-profit Palestinian credit guarantee company created by local microfinance institutions, supports the most vulnerable people, who are too poor to access commercial banks.
In Kahele, in war-torn Kivu, women have organized themselves into Village Savings and Credit Associations (VSLAs) and Common Initiative Groups to support one another in emergencies and collectively engage in Territorial Action for the Environment, Agriculture and Reconstruction.
In Loos-en-Gohelle, France, the municipality involves residents in revising the Land Use Plan and adopting a “quality-of-life charter.” It creates spaces for creativity to collectively assess projects and improve internal governance, and launches the “fifty-fifty” system to foster the co-construction of initiatives of general interest, with priorities such as sustainable agriculture and food, renewable energy, biodiversity protection, quality-of-life improvements, and economic attractiveness.
In Marigot, Haiti, the TK association (Tèt Kile Ti Peyizan Ayisyen) and the Karl Lévêque Institute have launched, with the support of the RIEH, a project called “Territorial Mobilization for Food Sovereignty in Haiti.”
In Puente de Fierro, a neighborhood of La Plata in Argentina, after a catastrophic flood that caused the death of 89 people, a group of researchers and women leaders from the neighborhood began implementing an action-research methodology and created a non-profit association to launch grassroots initiatives enabling residents to regain control over their environment.
In Madagascar, a social enterprise, Nutri’zaza, has committed itself to fighting malnutrition by offering adapted food products and distribution networks ensuring maximum availability.
In Tours, France, the Local Employment Committee created Co-Hop, an “employment-oriented enterprise” with the aim of hiring, on permanent contracts, people who have been unemployed for more than a year. This initiative is part of the “Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territory” program, which applies a simple idea: instead of financing unemployment through benefits and various social aids, why not directly finance the creation of useful jobs for the territory and accessible to anyone who has been excluded from employment for a long time.
