Rural Living Conditions

We support programs to protect and enhance natural resources, reforest the land, implement conservation agriculture, provide clean water, ensure food security, and improve the livelihoods of people living in rural communities. The projects we fund are diverse, but they have key goals in common: long-term, sustainable results and self-sufficiency for the people concerned.

Here are a few examples of our programs:

• In Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania we are partnering with the African NGO Total LandCare (TLC) on a multi-year initiative to preserve forests, build schools and provide villages with clean water, eco-pit latrines and fuel-efficient stoves. We are also helping to plant tens of millions of trees for household fuel consumption;
• In Indonesia, we are partnering with the local government in Surabaya on a program to conserve more than 800 hectares of mangrove forest in Surabaya’s East Coast, thereby protecting biodiversity, ensuring employment for mangrove farmers and fishermen and creating eco-tourism opportunities for surrounding villages;
• In Thailand, we support a project, “Water from Health to Wealth,” to construct rainwater collection tanks in the drought-stricken northeast of the country. They supply fresh water to more than 280 villages year-round.