A Sweet Venture
Making sweets brings sweet profits to some women from Aokoie, a Muslim community in Ranong Province, Thailand. The primary occupations in the area are fishing, merchandising and working in the rubber plantations. Vegetable gardens are secondary occupations. A small group of women began making sweets to sell in the village market as a way of earning additional income for their families, with each woman investing 500 baht ($16.87) as business capital. Lacking management skills and using traditional time intensive methods to produce the sweets, their profits were very slow in coming.
ADRA met these ladies in January of 2007. Realizing the potential of this small venture we included these women in the Vocational Development component of the Community Development and Recovery project from the tsunami of 2004. ADRA began by providing ten of the women with training in business plan development and general accounting. Many women in the main group are unable to read or write, however the ten women receiving the training shared their knowledge so that all the women had a better understanding of marketing, management and product processing.
To further broaden their knowledge, ADRA took the ladies to visit another sweet making group in a neighboring district in February. The group of sweet makers in Had Sai Keaw produces a sweet called "Thongmuan" using a thongmuan machine which works three times faster than the traditional plate making style that the women from Aokoie were using.
On March 9th, ADRA delighted the women of Aokoie by presenting them with their own thongmuan machine. Now the women produce sweets much faster and more efficiently leading to greater profits. Six of the original ten women trained received further training from ADRA in accounting and stock accounts, and methods for increasing their productivity. The Aokoie women are now creating a variety of sweets.
ADRA continues to assist the sweets making group of women from Aokoie and they are now selling large amounts of "Thongmuan" to a retail shop in Kaper town, a neighboring community. Recently the group has been receiving large orders for sweets from several restaurants in the area as well.
With the training and support provided by ADRA, these ladies are changing not only their lives but also those of their immediate families. The tsunami of December 2004 may have taken their possessions, but it did not remove their courage, resilience, and determination to lead a better life. ADRA is proud to partner with these innovative women of south Thailand.
