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Economic benefitsTed Swanston — Toronto, ON In addition to wanting every child in the world to sleep comfortably, Murray Dryden hoped to create economic benefits through local sourcing of bedkit items in countries where the children lived. Sometimes this is just not feasible. In some countries there is so little infrastructure that very minimal local manufacturing exists and bedkit items must therefore be imported. This increases cost due to transportation and other factors, and, unfortunately, can negatively impact the number of items our OVOs can put in the bedkit. Fortunately this was not the case in Nicaragua. Murray would be very pleased with the approach taken by the Rotary Club of Nicaragua with their excellent first-ever bedkit. A list of items appears on the first page. After receiving word that Nicaragua had been accepted by Sleeping Children to do a distribution, Rotary decided to explore opportunities to make the best use of the $35 (Canadian) per bedkit. The Rotary Executive invited the head of a small-business cooperative to a meeting to discuss local sources of supply. Following a process of evaluating alternative local sources and comparing quality and costs, Rotary made their decisions and ended up purchasing most of their bedkit items from small Managua manufacturers.
All distributions were either in or close to Managua. As a result, our team was able to find the time to visit the small family-owned firms that manufactured the mattress, t-shirts, and mosquito net. As teammate David Yeaman writes in the following article, these items were all of good quality, and interviews with parents of bedkit recipients confirmed they will be of great benefit to the children receiving them. |
