Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

Excellent Development Kenya has succeeded in obtaining funding from the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), worth $1.2 million over five years – our biggest grant so far! The funding will support our holistic approach to development, which centres on dam-building, terracing and tree-planting activities, providing us with a firm foundation for our future expansion plans. At our current rate of 30 dams per year, the money will cover three-quarters of our costs in the coming year, a proportion which drops as we grow to build 70 dams a year in three years’ time.

MCC is the relief and development organisation of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in Canada and the United States. It was founded in 1920 in Indiana, and currently has representatives in 55 countries, including Kenya. MCC has a strong focus on the promotion of peace, and takes an approach to development which is based on working with local partners across the globe. In order to effectively promote food security in developing countries, MCC has also founded the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, and the Foods Resource Bank in the US. These banks allow farmers and governments to donate grain to support food relief projects in developing countries. In Kenya they recently funded our Food for Work programme which formed our immediate response to the current famine. The Food for Work programme has enabled families to stay together during the crisis, rather than having family members leave to find food or work elsewhere. Moreover, it has allowed farmers to continue working on the dam-building and terracing projects which will provide them with a more stable environment in the future.

Between MCC and Excellent Development there is a mutual appreciation of the approach taken to development and MCC’s representatives in Kenya have been a source of great support to us so far, including funding us $90,000 to build dams in the last year alone. They have clearly been impressed with the effectiveness of our work and we are of course delighted that the organisation has agreed to continue to support us in this way. Long term funding gives us the security to plan ahead and create sustainable futures for the communities we work with as well as reach out to new communities.