Empowering One Village on Plums
By: Kevin Yang, CAS ’20
On top of a mountain where Sanhuali are harvested
Keru – Shanghai, China
Rural China takes mountain climbing quite literally. Three steps up and I realized this was going to be different from what I or my mentee had expected. Our steps were soil and mud. Small plants with razor-sharp leaves accompanied our thirty-minute hike, a hike that our host and everyone in the village made on a daily basis between April to June, the harvesting season for Sanhuali, a local specialty plum known for its juicy sweet and sour taste. At the top of our mountain, we saw forests of Sanhuali trees. The village was surrounded by mountains, each covered by Sanhuali trees, and every family owned several of these trees. We were in a village that had successfully used government funding to elevate its economic welfare through the selling of Sanhuali.
This village was the second part of my first consulting project with Keru. We took a group to six high school students to Guangdong to understand the in’s and out’s of the fruit market in Guangzhou city, learn from a village near Qianpai town that successfully used Sanhuali plums to develop economically and then come up with marketing strategies for our local social enterprise partner OneVillage in Nanyoung Village.
OneVillage was founded by one of six college graduates in the entirety of the village’s history. Through our interviews with local villagers, most kids here never considered education as a choice. The village only had a primary school going up to the second or third grade. To continue further education, the nearest school was at least an hour away. Hence, most kids drop out and go off to labor in the cities to help their family survive. Around the age of 18, they marry and have a kid, then send the kid back to their village for the grandparents to raise. The cycle repeats itself.
Our partner hopes to change that, by paying local farmers – all of whom farm Sanhuali – at least three times the standard market price for their Sanhuali and then sell it through online channels to consumers. By offering higher prices, OneVillage wants to create incentives for parents to stay in the villages so that their children aren’t left behind and left vulnerable to poor influences.
Seeing this work was inspirational for me as I want to enter the social impact field, but also it took me out of my comfort zone and provided me with a lot of opportunities for reflection on my own life. I had grown up in resource-rich cities. My income had never depended on a fruit that existed for only three months. Education was my only choice growing up. I had read and seen videos before about left-behind children, child labor, migrant workers etc…but the villagers I met added flesh to that text.
The Global Research and Internship Program (GRIP) provides outstanding undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to intern or conduct research abroad for 8 to 12 weeks over the summer. Participants gain career-enhancing experience and global exposure that is essential in a global workforce. Placements and funding awards are available.