Wema board member Alice Sücker is extremely grateful for the commitment shown by the family-run company from Fürstenfeldbruck. “We're greatly dependent on regular donations,” she says. “There’s a lot of competition online among the various aid organisations and loyalty is very short-lived.” This means that friends, acquaintances and local businesses are often the principal source of financial support, Sücker adds. Companies like CIM regard their commitment to regional organisations as a meaningful contribution. “I feel it’s the duty of any successful company to give something back,” says Friederike Kammann, head of HR. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a sports club in the next village or development aid in Africa.”
Donations are used meaningfully and sustainably
Companies often find it difficult to choose the ‘right’ aid agency to make a donation to. Organisations which raise their profile with elaborate advertising campaigns can quickly raise the suspicion that they’re spending too much money on marketing and suchlike. This doesn’t make it any easier to find the best recipient for your donation. It’s not just about doing something good, but also about making sure that donations are used meaningfully and sustainably. For Wema-Home founder Marianne Dötzer, this is the crux of development aid. “We don’t just turn up in Benin and tell the people there how to do things,” she explains. “They come to us. And we help them get off to a good start."
Together with the rest of her team, Dötzer, a trained camera woman, spends three months in Benin each year visiting various projects and sites, talking to the locals, strengthening existing partnerships and forging new contacts.
She still benefits from the time she spent there in the 1970s, when she was a development aid worker with the Development Service. Back then, she started running a volleyball team in the village where she lived. “I thought it would provide a bit of fun for the local young people”, she says. Since the response was so overwhelming, she ended up setting up a volleyball league and travelled all over the country. “We often went to high schools and taught the students and teachers how to play volleyball,” she continues. She often bumps into students she taught in those days – now employed as mayors, senior military officers or even government ministers. To this day, she maintains connections with former students who have supported some of her projects.
The fact that Dötzer got involved with development aid in Benin in the first place was more down to chance. “I was never interested in going to Africa,” she says. “But once I got to Benin, that was it. I felt in my heart as if I never left again.”
Benin is one of the poorest and least prominent countries in West Africa. It’s located in a coastal region which is plagued by water scarcity and poverty despite its abundance of raw materials. Besides its immediate neighbours Nigeria, Togo, Burkina Faso and Niger, Benin is sadly botton of the league among the countries in this group, with the lowest per capita income in percentage terms. Despite the widespread poverty among the population, political conditions have been stable since 1990 allowing for sustainable development work.
“After we founded the charity, the first project we were involved in was building a school,” says charity director and treasurer Alice Sücker. Although Wema-Home wasn’t officially set up until 1994, the project started much earlier. “In the beginning, I financed it privately and through donations from friends,” recalls Marianne Dötzer. Once the charity was established, the infrastructure for larger-scale fundraising and tax concessions. The school was built one module at a time. “Four modules altogether,” adds Dötzer. “We built everything with sand, gravel, cement and water.” Because of the heavy tropical downpours and flooding that hit Benin every year, earthen buildings are too dangerous in the long term due to the risk of collapse.
The running of the school was eventually taken over by local teachers and the state. “It’s the only way,” Dötzer says emphatically. Sustainable development aid is viable only if long-term use is organised and guaranteed. For Wema-Home e.V., this way of working has always been the prerequisite for supporting their wide range of projects. If the team are approached with proposals for new projects during their visits to Benin, everything has to be put to the acid test before getting started. “If someone comes to us with an idea for a project, the first thing we say is that they should make a cost estimate and think about how to proceed,” explains Dötzer and adds that many projects unfortunately turn out to be unfeasible right from the start. But many proposals are sound and well thought-out. “Then something can be done.”
‘Jardins Sacrés’ – a model project showcasing social development aid
Since the charity was founded, numerous projects have been initiated by the locals and driven forward by Wema-Home e.V. In addition to the primary school which now has over 800 students and is managed independently of Wema-Home, the charity also runs environmental, agricultural and other educational projects. “Things have really snowballed over the last few years,” says Alice Sücker, and sounds amazed herself at the variety of projects. A sponsorship program was set up for the primary school children back in the 1990s. Because although the building opened up a wealth of new educational opportunities for primary students, not all families could afford to send their children to school. “We still have 37 children under the sponsorship scheme and they’re supported through donations from Germany.” In 2000, under the impetus of behavioural scientist, chimpanzee expert and activist Jane Goodall, the organisation members considered how they could get the locals to embrace environmentally sustainable practices. “Goodall’s idea was to get primary school children involved in environmental projects,” Sucker explains. The way Wema went about this is both unusual and creative: They decided to designate a ‘jardin sacré’, or sacred garden, at every primary school across the country – a place untouched by human impact. “Protection from bushfires and no deforestation,” explains Marianne Dötzer. “Many people were against the idea at the start and wondered what the point of it all was.” But the Wema-Team were persistent. Dötzer activated her contacts in the municipalities and ministries and managed to get numerous mayors to sign over one hectare of land to their local primary school. “All official and notarised,” adds Wema-Home ‘finance minister’ Alice Sücker. These small pieces of land which are preserved and protected by the schoolchildren have an amazing effect on the surrounding area, say the two women. Not only does a diverse range of plants grow on the plots, but the children get a proper feel for what environmental protection really is. “In the beginning, there was a good deal of resistance in some places,” says Dötzer.
The project was initiated over twenty years ago. In the meantime, the idea of protecting the environment in the literal sense has become firmly established in Gobada, Benin. 107 ‘sacred gardens’ have been set up across the country and more and more schools are interested in becoming part of the project. “The students who were involved with the very first jardins sacrés are now our most committed conservationists,” says Marianne Dötzer and tells a few anecdotes about former primary school pupils who are campaigning against environmental exploitation and destruction.
Diverse projects in Benin – with German funding
Wema-Home is also involved in a number of educational programs around arable farming. The project which is perhaps most reliant on donations, and set to run until the end of 2022, is an agricultural project to promote and expand ecological and sustainable agriculture. The project volume is around 500,000 euros, says Alice Sucker, with 75% funded by the German government. “It’s up to us to raise the remaining 25%,” she adds. However, the coronavirus pandemic has noticeably reduced people’s willingness to donate to charity. “Whether we’ll reach our fundraising target for 2021 remains to be seen,” admits Sücker reluctantly. The project started up in 2016 with 600 farmers trained by skilled farm managers and agricultural engineers. By 2020, the group had grown to 2250 participants in Benin. “We now have 12 graduate agricultural engineers from Benin who travel around the country teaching farmers the principles and techniques of ecological farming in the region,” Sücker explains. Quality management and a high level of documentation are additional services that have to be provided by the charity. A key feature of the project is that the farmers will be able to pass on their knowledge in the future. How things will continue after 2022 is still unclear, but the charity hopes to receive enough donations to continue. “If we can manage financially, we would like to carry on with the project and expand into other areas,” confirms Alice Sücker. Farmers who have already benefited from the initiative will be able to continue even without the funding, however.
“Helping people to help themselves”, says Marianne Dötzer, “that’s the basic principle behind all of our work. Because what would be the point if there was no-one to carry on once we’d left?” If they stopped working now, they say, everything in Benin would be able continue as before. The women’s groups they’ve started practically organise themselves, the schools and jardins sacrés are also firmly embedded in Benin’s local and state structures, and the agricultural projects are managed without any support from Germany. What makes Wema’s work so valuable is the fact that it doesn’t force the locals into dependency, but provides them with the tools required for healthy, independent economic and social development. It’s a common misconception that development aid is about building up something for people in poor countries. It's more about changing the conditions so that life can be improved. This is exactly what CIM sees as the greatest strength of Wema-Home e.V. and why the company continues to support the work of the charity to enable new projects in Benin.
CIM GmbH Fürstenfeldbruck
Wema-Home e.V. (https://wema-home.de)
Donations to:
WEMA-HOME e.V.
Postbank München
Account no. 13325801
Sort code: 700 100 80
IBAN DE84 7001 0080 0013 3258 01
BIC PBNKDEFF
