The more detailed information only deals with Women for Women (W4W) International. The Women of the Cloud Forest and Ten Thousand Villages don't really reveal too much of how they work with the artisans, and that will need to be clarified through further contact with these organizations.
One of the main focuses for W4W is helping women from war-torn countries to develop their own financial independence and stability. They do this through job training as well as making a variety of services available to help women start and manage their own businesses.
Examples of job skills taught are silversmithing, horticulture, and food processing. Business services include access to capital through microfinance. W4W provides microcredit to "solidarity groups" instead of individual entrepreneurs. This is to provide support for individual women, as well as ensure that loans are repaid (an individual gets a loan through the group, and the group is at whole responsbile that the loan is paid back). This type of model was/is still used with high levels of success by the Grameen organization in Bangladesh.
W4W also links small artisans with larger outside retailers (notably a successful partnership with Kate Spade, a high-end woman's accessories producer), and also places their goods for sale on ecommerce sites such as Global Girlfriend.
Another example of an interesting initiative which might benefit from the kind of tools that the Eden system would have to offer is the Commercial Integrated Farming Initiative (CIFI). This program is a three year pilot that is designed to help women develop agricultural and cooperative development skills that will enable them to general income for both long term economic independence as well as food security. There are two such pilots, one in Rwanda and another in Sudan, and the organization's goals is to have 3000 women enroll in each program, and earn sustainable incomes through organic commercial integrated farming.
The overall learning goals of the program include integrating crop and animal husbandry, choosing marketable products to produce, and cooperative development and governance. The long term goal of the program is to establish "a core of functioning cooperatives capable of producing and marketing high-quality, high-value agricultural products."
Although some organizers simply link small labor to bigger companies to market the items, W4W is attempting through CIFI to make fully self-sufficient cooperative business women in developing countries (they're planning on another farm in Afghanistan), and such women could most definitely stand to benefit from business management tools that could be offered through the Sahana Eden platform.
My info dump is almost done, the next post is going to pose some questions that I've been thinking about, and that I'll be asking the organizations if I can successfully make contact (emails going out this weekend).
I also am giving an introductory presentation at the RCOS meeting today, and will post a link
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