What is Microdevelopment?

“Microdevelopment” began as a category of financial services developed within communities that lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microdevelopment practices include building community-managed savings groups; internal lending and credit building; and establishing micro-businesses based on culturally-respectful values. Today, it stands for the co-design of community-led economies to safeguard and restore their 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: 

1. PARTICIPATION

People 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

People 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

People 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

People reconnect across generations, localities, regions, and cultures to regenerate the land and society based on deep respect.

what we do 

Started in 2008 by a group of students at the University of Oregon, our goal at MAPLE Microdevelopment is to collaborate with communities around the world with the tools they need to achieve culturally-significant goals and values. Over the past decade, MAPLE’s programs have benefitted thousands of people across three branches in Eastern Uganda, Mapuche ancestral lands in Southern Chile, and Eugene Oregon, USA. We do that by co-designing community-managed financial services, such as community-managed savings groups, internal lending and credit building, and establishing culturally respectful micro-businesses. Micro-businesses evolve into life-changing projects related to topics such as organic agriculture, native tree propagation, wetland conservation, clean-water technology, and ancestral weaving practices.

Our Mission

We collaborate with communities to co-design community-led economies and other tools necessary for strengthening their own economic, social, cultural, and ecological resilience.

Our process to build resilience & empowerment :