What is Microdevelopment?
“Microdevelopment” began in 2008 as a category of financial services developed within communities that lacked access to conventional banking and related services. Over time, it expanded to include practices like community-managed savings groups, village asset-building, and micro-businesses aligned with community values. Today, it represents the co-design of community-led economies that both safeguard and restore village environment and land.
Microdevelopment starts by engaging with people living in a particular place, within particular cultures, across generations, at a particular time to listen, learn from, and co-design practical, affordable, effective approaches to local development. We focus particularly on the role that cultural identities, as well as the role of ecological wisdom, play in successful local development activities, with broad understanding that no single approach to development can serve people living in quite different cultures and ecosystems with the same effectiveness. New approaches to microdevelopment are needed if people are to identify with them, commit to them, and manage them sustainably over the long term.
There are three guiding principles of microdevelopment that MAPLE follows when working with communities:
PARTICIPATION
Collectives are willing to work hard to sustain local development projects when they have participated at every stage in project design, implementation, and management such that the outcomes fit their needs, values, and aspirations.
2. SHARED WISDOM
Collectives share their wisdom of the local ecologies within the co-design process, necessary for sustaining the land, water, air, and regional bio-diversity upon which their lives and livelihoods depend.
3. CAPACITY-BUILDING AND ACCESS TO FINANCE
Collectives are able to sustain local development projects when they have the training required to build their capacities for project management and sustainability, when these activities produce local value, and when people have access to the ways and means of financing of their own initiatives.
4. REGENERATION
Collectives can reconnect across generations to embrace new economic methods and enhance livelihoods. They also experiment with innovative approaches to restore and revitalize land and cultural practices.
what we do
Founded in 2008 by a group of students at the University of Oregon, MAPLE Microdevelopment aims to collaborate with communities worldwide to co-create tools and capacities for achieving community goals. Over the past decade, our programs have made a positive impact in villages and collectives across three regions: Eastern Uganda, Mapuche ancestral lands in Lake Budi, Southern Chile, and Eugene, Oregon, USA. We specialize in co-designing capacities for community-managed organic agriculture, native tree propagation, wetland conservation, clean-water technology, and the revitalization of ancestral regenerative and restorative economic practices.
