Capitalizing on Rainfall in Jordan

Abu Ayman is the vice president of a business cooperative helping local farmers get better prices for their fruit.

More rain falls in north Jordan’s Ajlun Governorate than anywhere else in this arid country. Yet despite the water’s beneficial impact on fruit crops, farmers in this economically distressed area haven’t always capitalized on their climatic advantage. One big reason is the lack of facilities to properly store, process and preserve the food grown in the region.

"A cold-storage facility," says 52-year-old Ajlun resident Abdullah Al-Momani, known as Abu Ayman, "has been a dream of the community for more than 20 years."

Since June 2002, Mercy Corps has been improving the lives of farmers and other rural Jordanians by supporting citizen-driven projects that revitalize the social and economic life in the countryside. Mercy Corps and a local organization, the Jordan River Foundation, jointly implement the Rural Community Cluster Development Program (RCCDP), which is funded by Jordan's Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation.

In Ajlun, the project helped local farmers realize their long-held aspiration by assembling a local business cooperative that oversaw construction of a cold-storage and food-processing facility. With a place to store their fruit, small farmers now control the timing of their produce sales, allowing them to reap a bigger profit.

“Within 48 hours of establishing the cooperative,” says Abu Ayman, who was elected vice president of the group, “more than 220 shares were purchased by residents of my village alone.”

Mercy Corps’ role in implementing the RCCDP is to provide training and institutional support to strengthen the activities of the Jordan River Foundation (JRF). JRF is a local agency committed to empowering Jordanian citizens, especially women and children, to improve the quality of their lives through sustainable social, economic and cultural programs. The Foundation implements the infrastructure and community-mobilization components of the RCCDP. Abu Ayman, for example, says his yogurt-making business improved as a result of the project's small-business management sessions.

But profits are not the only payoff of the agency’s work. The new cold-storage facility and the "open and transparent" workings of the cooperative, Ayman reports, “have bridged tribal divisions in the community.”