Peace Corps CED program – What is it?

The Community Economic Development (CED) program in Mongolia follows the same basic outline of every Peace Corps CED program internationally. “CED is a process by which communities enhance the quality of life of their residents by creating new community and business wealth. It is an integrated, holistic strategy that works at the community level to build citizens’ capacity to take control of their own economic futures.” Let’s go with the key words: sustainable, capacity-building, and grassroots.

Contrast between community and traditional economic development

Community Economic Development:

• Economic vision comes from residents seeking improvement
• Perspective is long-term, sustainable, and fair to citizens
• Focus on the development process
• Overall goal is the development of people and communities
• Objectives:
  • Create jobs and benefits for residents
  • Improve income distribution
  • Produce goods and services for residents
  • Invest community resources in self-sustaining activities
  • Revitalize depressed local communities
• Resources start with local people and local material resources
• Expertise supplements local expertise and talent with outsiders

Traditional Economic Development:

• Economic vision comes from investors seeking profit
• Perspective is on short-term profit
• Focus on products and results
• Overall goal is economic growth in general
• Objectives:
  • Short-term profits
  • Produce economic activity
  • Invest community resources in whatever is most profitable
  • Promote growth in a cost-effective manner
• Resources use the least costly human and material resources
• Expertise supplements outside expertise with local people’s experience and talents

Over the summer, I’ll go to a CED technical training session every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. The past two weeks have been very interesting in my technical training sessions. The first session CED volunteers visited the Sukhbaatar market to observe how businesses are run in MN. The small market IS what a business consists of in MN. A small stand at a local market is a Mongolian small- to medium-sized business. During the market observation, we had a translator to every four people. We asked questions about different aspects of their businesses to gather information.

From the market observation, the CED volunteers learned many new things about MN business. Overall, there is a lack of salesmanship and competition within local MN businesses. Some of this is a result of the recent change to a democracy from communism. Within the market, the stores that sell the same items, such as shoes, toiletries, or clothing, are all placed around each other. The price for a bar of soap is the same at each and every stand. The salespeople stand or sit around their stand without paying attention to the customers that are passing. If I was interested in an item, I had to call, or sometimes “beg”, a salesperson to assist me. Sometimes the salespeople look quite annoyed to help a customer.

The entrance to the Sukhbaatar Market (market = 3AX in MN)

In Sukhbaatar, the most famous local items are sourdough bread, smoked fish, and honey. During another CED session, we visited a local bread-maker. The bread “factory” employs 8 people and is run from a side room to the owner’s house. The factory produces about 700-800 loaves of bread per week and sells both wholesale and retail. The bread factory runs 24 hours a day. Though, I’m not sure what that means for the employee work schedule. The owner gave us each a fresh loaf of bread. I took it home and gave it to my host mother. (Maybe this wasn’t a good idea – considering how many carbohydrates I already eat. It might’ve encouraged my mom to cook more carb-enduced meals. I’ll write more on Mongolian food in the next post.)

This past week was very eventful in the CED program. Our group of 8 was split in half to have a practicum at the local Sukhbaatar Chamber of Commerce. Tuesday, my group worked at the school with translators. At our placement sites, most CED volunteers will have at least a part-time translator. During the session, we learned special tips for working with an interpreter on the job. I have a feeling that my English will get worse as my time in Mongolia passes. I will be speaking in jargon-free, simple sentence structure English to my translator and basic Mongolian to the rest of the population.

Tuesday, the other four CED volunteers went to the Chamber of Commerce for their practicum. The director of the Chamber of Commerce instructed each of them to research a different topic about a farming tool from China. The group said it was pretty simple, besides the frustration of dealing with the slow technology. And the fact that none of them know anything about farming. They felt they should have done background research, but time didn’t permit that. Or the Internet speed.

On Wednesday, my group visited the Chamber of Commerce thinking that we would be given a similar research assignment. Were we wrong. The director wasn’t at the office that afternoon, so we worked with a part-time manager/translator, instead. Our task was to teach an impromptu class on “How to Use the Internet.” Our group was quite surprised to be given this task – considering how broad it is. We had three students to instruct on “How to Use the Internet” and two working computers. One of the other CED volunteers has extensive knowledge about the Internet from working at a marketing agency in the interactive/design/development department, and I have some knowledge from my internships. Honestly, though, anyone who has ever used the Internet could have taught this class. I’m talking basic, basic, basic.

We taught the three students where to find the Internet Explorer and Firefox icons on the desktop. We taught how to type in an address in the address bar. We taught how to search on Google.MN for a specific topic – for our class we choose “education.” Then, more specifically, we choose “education Ulaanbaatar university,” for the search terms. We had the students try a search on their own, and I think they all got the hang of it. Those tasks took about 45-60 minutes.

After that, we didn’t really know what to teach for a beginners’ class on “How to Use the Internet.” We asked the students what they wanted to know – their response: how to send an e-mail. Before we could do that, we had to set them up with an e-mail account. Yahoo! Mail is very popular with Mongolians, so we had them fill out the form for a Yahoo! account. The form had fields like: name, birthday, username, and password. Yahoo! would only accept writing in English, not Cyrillic – so that took the students a little longer than normal to figure out. 45 minutes later – all students had their on-line forms filled out. We pressed “Send” – but guess what? The page had timed out. Of course. Why didn’t we think of that? …

The result was that one out of three students accomplished obtaining an e-mail account. She wanted to send an e-mail – but didn’t have anyone’s address. A CED volunteer offered for her to send him an e-mail in Mongolian, and then he would translate it and write her back. How nice. The situation was a little frustrating because it took so much time to teach tasks that I could do in about 2 minutes. However, now there are three more Mongolians who know how to “use” the Internet… wohoo. Plus, we have experience on teaching random tasks with the help of a translator.

Speaking of “Wohoo,” I could really go for some cold chocolate milk, like Yoo-hoo. In my next post, I’ll tell you about Mongolian food and the carbohydrates in all its glory.