Global Citizens of America is a new series that highlights Americans who dedicate their lives to helping people outside the borders of the US. At a time when some world leaders are encouraging people to look inward, Global Citizen knows that only if we look outward, beyond ourselves, can we make the world a better place.

When Lufina was in the third grade, her parents died, leaving her with no other option but to drop out of school and take care of her many siblings. Now a single mother of five, Lufina lives in Ufulu, a rural community in Malawi, and, until recently, worked as a tomato farmer.

But each year the tomato harvest seemed to bring diminishing yields, and she worried that her own children would have to quit their studies to work, much like she did long ago.

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That’s when she learned about an opportunity to become an entrepreneur at a local beekeeping initiative started by Melissa Kushner, the founder of Yamba Malawi. The nonprofit organization — committed to helping lift vulnerable children out of poverty — created the project and is partially responsible Lufina’s newfound success.

Today, Lufina’s oldest son, 18-year-old Harold, is on track to graduate from secondary school and pursue his dream of becoming an accountant.

She is one of 40 people in Ufulu that now works as a beekeeper, Kushner said. Since 2016, the community has produced nearly 1,000 pounds of honey, bringing in enough capital to create lasting change.

“We decided to target the most vulnerable households in some of our communities with this intervention so that they can get more direct revenue going to children like Harold and his younger siblings, but also teach a lot of women who don’t have other opportunities, a new skill,” Kushner, the recipient of last year’s Waislitz Global Citizen Award, told Global Citizen.

“Because you can’t really survive anymore in Malawi with subsistence farming,” she added, “ People need to diversify their incomes to survive so we’re responding to that.”

To date, the organization has built six businesses across ten different communities — all in poultry farms and honeybee hives.

Since the business launched in Ufulu in 2013, the community has produced over 500,000 eggs. The profits from these businesses have provided around 6,580 children with services such as feeding programs, nursery school, home-based medical care, and school scholarships.

“We focus on helping orphans and vulnerable children and we do that by building businesses that invest in them,” Kushner explained.

In Malawi, over one million children are orphaned, according to Open Arms Malawi, an organization that provides services to abandoned children. Many, Kushner said, lost their parents to HIV/AIDS.

The founder herself lost her father before she was born and after a trip to Malawi, she saw the need and knew she could “do something.”

The organization was originally founded in 2006 as Goods For Good, when she began collecting surplus goods and delivering them to community organizations where Yamba Malawi now builds the poultry farms.

“It was super helpful,” she said. “But I had this nagging feeling about creating dependency. I thought to myself ‘if you are hungry, should I give you a pair of shoes or should I help you learn how to grow food and manage your business so you can feed your family?’”

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Now, entire communities are connected with local, grassroots organizations that provide people with the technical, financial, and life skills needed to run their businesses and plan their family’s futures.

And in turn, the communities are choosing where the money goes.

Orphaned children are being selected for scholarships; homes are being rebuilt from the ground up; FAO emergency food bags are being swapped for massive, community gardens.

“Ufulu took some of the revenue that they generated from their poultry farm and they planted the most gorgeous, nutritious garden,” Kushner said. “It’s amazing that they took the initiative. They planted the seeds, they cultivated the land, and they're going to harvest it and feed their own children with it. To me, that's mission accomplished.”

Global Citizen spoke with Kushner about her experiences working with these communities and what the future may hold for people like Lufina and Harold under the US current administration.  

GC: What inspired you to start Yamba Malawi?

Kushner: Personally, I'm interested in the cause because I lost my father three weeks before I was born. Realizing how that affected my life, I was really drawn to children who had lost parents or were made vulnerable because of their circumstances and particularly drawn to children living in poverty who were dealing with those challenges. That's how I got started. I ended up in Malawi because my mentor and first boss out of undergrad had run the UNICEF office in Malawi for many years and she brought me over. I saw the need there and I knew that I could do something.

How does funding small business development translate into helping vulnerable children?

I think more and more in the development space, people are turning to business solutions as a way to lift people out of poverty. Obviously, we can't put kids to work so the question becomes: How can we design business interventions that guarantee the improvement of children's lives?

This is the kind of question we're working to answer through our programs at Yamba Malawi. So that's doing things like picking households that are showing commitments to their children, where families are vulnerable but are open and willing to help their children. We include a lot of coaching with our business. So, from day one, we're making it clear that it's not just a business for business sake. It's a business to help children, to help your children, to help in making investments for your children today and for their future.

What kind of setbacks have you faced, if any at all?

Malawi is an amazing country and feels like a second home to me so it's hard for me to speak of the challenges. But I would say that Malawi is really resource-constrained and we have a lot of macro-economic and micro-economic challenges. Building profitable businesses is hard and with low levels of education, there's also just a steep learning curve. So, first it's hard to find profitable businesses and once you do, it's all about making sure you're imparting the skills onto people so they can harness the opportunity and better themselves and their children.

Also, we have environmental challenges, overpopulation challenges. It's not easy. But I think that makes the wins that much more satisfying.

Are you looking to bring these programs to other countries?

We're really good as a team about keeping the perspective that the decisions that we make are affecting real people's lives. I think that really staying close to the people that we're serving really helps us keep that perspective because every decision we make affects a child like Harold, affects a woman like Lufina, and the second that you lose that perspective and you get so caught up in numbers, you tend to not make the right decisions.

The budget cuts  — how does the current administration impact your work?

You know, when we found out about the results of the election, we had a call the next day with Malawi and we asked them what they thought. The first thing that they said was that they were scared about what it means for foreign aid and investment and I think that that fear is coming true.

It takes many years, in my opinion, to have real gains and to have real impact. And I think that's the saddest thing for me. Yes, immediate, terrible things will happen and people will suffer but the long-term gains that have been made will be undone and that to me is the hardest part. It's easy to give somebody emergency food, and it's necessary and important but actually building economies and lifting people out of poverty I think are going to be really impacted.

How has receiving the Waislitz Award helped Yamba Malawi?

It was a huge boost for us. Fundraising is hard, advocacy is hard, and when an institution like Global Citizen and Alex Waislitz believe in you, it gives you that boost of confidence. It definitely helped us get more exposure. Also, as we focus more on raising institutional funding in the next couple of years, it will definitely help us to be able to say that we were this recipient of this award.

What do you believe it means to be a Global Citizen?

We all have the same general needs and desires and want to be able to have the opportunity to succeed and to thrive and I think that's what it means to be a Global Citizen. At Yamba Malawi, we often say it shouldn't matter where you're born. Everybody — no matter where they're born — deserves the same opportunity. At Yamba Malawi, we live that every day. We're working to try to make things a little bit more fair.