Community projects

Yara was heavily involved in helping communities in Southeast Asia affected by the tsunami that ravaged the region in 2004. A dedicated endowment of USD 250,000 was set up to fund a number of projects in the region.

Yara’s assistance has been most evident in some of the lesser-known areas affected by the tsunami. Lhokseumawe, a city with a population of 200,000 on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, 275km from the regional capital of Banda Aceh, is receiving assistance from Yara.

Devastated by the tsunami, Lhokseumawe did not receive nearly as much media coverage as other areas and has suffered from insufficient funding to rebuild and restructure the local area as a result. Yara provided help in cooperation with local fertilizer producer PT PIM and helped rebuild two local schools.

Yara’s Tsunami Rebuilding Fund has also aided fishing villages in Sri Lanka with financing to help rebuild the fisheries-based economy. Yara also pledged support to the Karapitiya hospital in Galle for the purchase of ear, nose and throat equipment. As well as this, Ceylon Oxygen, a former Yara subsidiary company, donated 16 motorized fishing boats worth $20,000 to local fishermen.

As part of its Africa Program, Yara has supported two Millennium Villages in Africa, one in Kenya, another in Malawi, through the Yara Foundation for an African Green Revolution.

The Yara Foundation made a rolling commitment to the Millennium Villages Project, which aims to lift villages in Africa above the poverty line. The Yara Foundation sponsored two Millennium Village pilot projects, the Sauri Millennium Village in Western Kenya and the Mwandama Millennium Village in Malawi.

The Sauri region of western Kenya covers 10 villages and more than 5,000 people. Yara provided USD 200,000 annually from 2004 until 2007 and additional funding in 2008. Yara’s co-sponsorship with employees funded the Sauri school nutrition program and provided additional support in the shape of school uniforms and scholarships.

The results of the project have been remarkable. The community moved from chronic hunger to a tripling of crop production and a surplus of maize they were able to sell in nearby markets, and malaria prevalence has dropped from 55 to 13 percent. And in a community-driven initiative, 46 houses owned by widows and AIDS victims have been repaired in the ‘rebuilding falling houses’ scheme. According to Pedro Sanchez of the Earth Institute, Sauri has turned into a blueprint for local development that is now being implemented in almost 80 villages in 10 African countries.

In the village of Mwandama in Malawi, nearly 90 percent of the 5,100 inhabitants currently live below the poverty line, on less than USD 1 per day.  Yara committed to provide USD 200,000 annually for three years, and in addition employees at our Sluiskil plant in the Netherlands pledged funds to build 15 boreholes to bring drinking water to the surface.

Back in 2002, management in Yara’s Guatemala plant identified a lack of literacy among employees as hindering ambitions for the plant. They consequently launched the ‘Sowing Our Future’ program in an effort to counteract this.

The program attracted 31 employees in 2002 and more than double that number in 2004. The plant has now set a target that 75 percent of its operative staff should have reached high school graduation literacy level in 2009.

Improved literacy has led to improvement in the employees’ understanding of productivity and rational use of resources, resulting in improved efficiency at the plant. “Sowing Our Future” also provides administrative personnel with university, masters and English scholarships, with the aim of furthering their education and helping them learn a foreign language, and thereby increasing their future opportunities.

The performance of the program allowed Yara Guatemala to be considered by the American Chamber of Commerce of Guatemala in a contest called ‘Contribution to the Community.’ Other international companies took part and Yara Guatemala was awarded the ‘Team Workers Development’ category prize for the program.