MANQA SOSTEBIBLE

We need funds to activate our operation in the rural area.

We will apply the fund in two activities: reactivation of our gastronomic tourism project and reach the rural areas with our educational model.

1 - Our social business model offers opportunities for work placements through the recovery of local food. We would reactivate our gastronomic routes by linking urban centers to rural areas, taking into consideration all the biosafety necessary requirements.

2 - Regarding our educational offer, we currently have a demand for training work in rural communities of the Yungas of Bolivia, where young Afro-Bolivian, who do not have access to higher education, would participate. We have already made the first trips to coordinate and verify demands. Although Manq’a offers technical courses in the field of gastronomy, the local demand is for the offer of short courses (duration 1 month) in gastronomic topics directly related to the use of the diversity of foods produced by the agroforestry systems of the place. The identified community where these courses could be held is called Mururata and there they would reach the young people of the surrounding communities.

I am Ariel Tito Correa, a communicator and worked in different social projects in Bolivia. Then, I started working with ICCO when MANQ’A was being developed as a project. At the beginning, we thought it would be one more technical education project. But when working with vulnerable youth, we realized that cooking was only a means to achieve deeper transformations in society.

Since then, I began to deepen the educational model so that we could, through gastronomy, improve skills such as social-emotional and communication skills. It was then that I began to deepen this project, to expand the networks of alliances with the public and private sectors.  Since 2017, we have become a social company, and at this moment we have 32 people hired, 10 cooking schools in operation, a small shop for young entrepreneurs supported by Manq’a. We hope to continue scaling our model towards the rural area in order to strengthen the skills of rural youth so that they become agents of economic change in their own territories.

MANQ’A SOS is a civil society that seeks to improve opportunities for young people in situation of poverty and vulnerability. The purpose is that, through gastronomy, the inequalities and social and economic injustices are overcome and contribute to the inclusion and the exercise of the social and economic rights of these groups. We want inspire young Bolivians to create prosperity and life opportunities by revaluing and consuming local ecological products generating bridges between urban and rural.

We have a 10 validated gastronomic schools in Bolivia, that supports young people with comprehensive technical training and soft skills, labor insertion mechanisms, business training and support for the creation and / or strengthening of entrepreneurship and an advocacy strategy that seeks to empower young people in the exercise of their rights, promoting the development of public policies.

In the rural area, at this time, we started short courses training (one month of training) in the municipalities of Coroico and Huarina. However, we need more resources to be able to take these trainings to remote communities, whose young people do not have the resources to stay in town nor do they have internet access to take the courses currently offered.

The Manq’a Training Model is an innovative proposal in the Bolivian and regional context, since the offering of quality technical education responds directly to the local market demand. We work with a 7-Steps Methodology, which is a practical guidance for analyzing local demand, filling gaps and leveraging opportunities by creating a system that combines offering and demand for skills, promoting a high quality training to the youth MANQ’A.

We are the first organization to systematically provide training in the gastronomy, hospitality, entrepreneurship areas directly linked to the needs of local market. In this sense, our work has a strong focus on economic empowerment of youth, whether through employment or self-employment (entrepreneurship). In the case of rural areas, our objective is that training can encourage rural youth to link their diverse food production to the local market in an innovative, creative, sustained and dignified way.

MANQ’A has managed to build and implement a comprehensive youth support model that includes: (i) technical training in gastronomy/pastry, which is complemented by the development of their socio-emotional skills; (ii) a labor insertion mechanism that supports the insertion of young people into the MANQ’A’s network of friendly companies (more than 80 entities) and the MANQ’A social businesses (Catering, Restaurant and Gastronomic Tourism); (iii) training in business management, support and mentoring for the creation and/or strengthening of ventures; and, (iv) a political advocacy strategy that seeks to empower young people in the exercise of their rights in education and youth employment, and the right to healthy food.

In this year of 2021, we started offering short technical courses in rural municipalities. We conducted a needs study in order to better understand the needs of local youth. Now we are seeking for funds to provide these courses in rural communities whose youth do not have the resources to take such courses in the city. At the same time, we need financial support to adapt our social business methodology to suppor those rural youth to take more economic advantage, in a sustainable way, of their territories.