We are glad that our people are beginning to understand the importance of working together. This realization is what made a group of people (for the time being nine families) join together and ask for Sainam’s assistance regarding the Micro-Lending Project.  This new project is about a pig-farm co-operative, or the “Liang Mou Co-op” in Laos.

They requested our help to buy the small piglets, which they will be rearing, and the fodder for the first four months of activity. They will raise the piglets and, once they are ready, they will sell them to larger farms that will then proceed to butcher them.  Our co-op will not butcher the animals.

We agreed to help them, and so we added the co-operative to the Micro-Lending Project thanks to the newly found support of “Il Caffè” (www.caffe.ch), the Swiss newspaper that is helping us.   We also did so because we found the whole project economically viable.  To finance the “Liang Mou Co-op” we thought it may very useful (and even funny) to find some shareholders who will help these families, even though these shareholders will never receive any dividend.

Here are the details of the project:

Each of the nine families will buy ten piglets at the price of about ฿ 1.500 each. 

We would buy them food for the first four months of activity, costing about ฿ 6.000.

Total cost for the start of the project for each family: ฿ 21.000 / € 480

Total cost for the start of the co-op, for 9 families:  = ฿ 189.000 / € 4.320

This means that we would need about 63 shareholders to start the “Liang Mou Co-op”, given that the price of a “virtual share” would be € 70.  Each subscriber would receive a share certificate, and more important, a regular report of the co-op’s activities.  Once the first batch of pigs are sold, the co-op members will totally pay back the loan to Sainam, and from that moment on they will be totally independent in their work.  In light of the success of the other similar activities, we have reason to believe that the co-op may well expand in the future, so what is reimbursed will be used in case of new families asking to join the “Liang Mou Co-op”.

Here are the numbers of our others co-operatives:

1. GANDHI AGRICULTURAL COMMUITY – Our farming co-op now has 259 families who are members (for a safe estimate, lets say there are four people per family, thus we have about 1.036members total).

2. OMSAP SAINAM – Also known as the Poor People’s Bank now has 325 members

3. SAOPANAKIT SAINAM – The Village Insurance currently has 183 families who are members (once again, that would make about 732 members in total).