Reports

This project is to buy a reaping machine for 160 households in Tagrig village to alleviate their works and financial burden as well as family living condition.

The New Zealand Embassy funded this project

Kajee Gyal is from Tagrig Village, Shar Long Township, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, and China. She completed an associated degree at the English Training Program at Qinghai Normal University’s Nationalities Department.

What? Supply one reaping machine for Tagrig Village.

Who? 160 households of 868 people in Tagrig Village in Shar Long Township, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China

Photos of project implementation

The villagers are holding a meeting and the village leader is informing them of the good news that the reaping machine project is funded by the New Zealand Embassy.

The project manager and the driver are selecting the machine at the Qinghai Sheng He Machine factory.

The project manager went to Guide County Agricultural Management Center to see the agricultural management leader to get the license plate number for our reaping machine.

The villagers drove the machine into the public house in the village.

The local villagers are showing their appreciation and thankfulness with the white and yellow Tibetan khada to their benefactors: the New Zealand Embassy and Shem Women’s Group.

Project summary

Project title: Reaping machine project for Tagrig village.

Project goals:

The immediate goal of this project is to supply one reaping machine to Tagrig village. The overarching goal is to alleviate villagers’ workload during the harvest time and to improve the living conditions of Tagrig villagers. This project will decrease villagers’ health problems, especially women’s, and increase education levels. The reaping machine project will reduce women’s heavy labor burden and workload, and it will also help to save time and money and gives the villagers more opportunities to make extra cash income.

Location of the project:

Tagrig Village is a semi-nomadic village located in Shar Long Township, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, in PR China. Tagrig Village is about 8 kilometers from Shar Long Township, and it is around 143 kilometers from Shar Long Township to Xining city.

Project beneficiaries:

This reaping machine mainly benefited 160 households with 868 people in Tagrig Village.

Implementation organization/individual:

Khajee Gjal, Tagrig Village leader Jiulu, Village women’s officers Zhuomacuo and Shem Women’s Group.

Contact Group: Shem Women’s Group

Funding - source, amount, and date received

Khajee Gyal (Project manager) received 41,300 RMB (80% of the project money) from Shem Women’s Group on April 1^st 2010, and will receive the remaining 20% of the funds (10,325 RMB) after the project manager completes the project successfully with a final report.

Details of the project activities

1. Asked villagers about the problems they face by meeting with locals and the leaders.
2. Collected data from Tagrig Village for designing and writing the project proposal.
3. Found out the price of the machine.
4. Took pictures and wrote proposal.
5. Receive project funds on April 1^st 2010.
6. Purchased reaping machine on 13^th April 2010 in Qinghai Sheng He factory.
7. Delivered the machine to the village on 14^th April 2010.
8. Wrote final report from April 16^th to 26^th, 2010.
9. Sent final report with receipts to Shem Women’s Group on May 15^th 2010.

Project Finance

Original Budget

Item	Donor Contribution in RMB	Local Contribution in RMB	Local Government Contribution in RMB	Shem Contribution in RMB	Total Cost in RMB
Harvesting Machine	51,000	24,000	0	0	75,000
The equipment for the machine	0	0	0	0	0
Transportation fee	500	0	0	0	500
Project management expenses	125	0	0	0	125
Project management payment	0	0	0	500	500
	51,625	24,000	0	500	76,125

Actual Cost

Receipt #	Item	Donor Contrib ution in RMB	Local Contrib ution in RMB	Local Government   Contribution in RMB	Shem Contrib ution in RMB	Total Cost in RMB	Difference (between original & actual budgets) in RMB
#1	Harvesting Machine	51,000	19,910	30,390	0	101,300	-26300
#2	The equip ment for the machine	0	4,000		0	4,000	-4000
#3 #4	Transpor tation fee	445	0	0	0	445	+55
#5- #10	Project management expenses	180	95	0	0	275	-150
	Project manage ment payment	0	0	0	500	500	0
Total		51,625	24,005	30,390	500	106,520	-30395

Explanation

Originally we planned to buy a reaping machine with 75,000 RMB, but fortunately the government set up a new policy that if a village wants to buy a reaping machine then the local government donates 30% of the funds for a machine. Therefore the villagers could buy a bigger and better quality reaping machine compared to the original one. Thus they changed the original plan and bought a reaping machine that costs 101,300 RMB. So the 30,390 RMB was paid by the local government and 5 RMB was paid by the project manager.

Delays, difficulties and lesson learned

Delay

The local government paid 30% the project funds for the village, but they did not give the money at the same time that the project manager got funds from the donor, so the project manager had to delay the implementation of the project by about one month.

Difficulties

When the project was funded, the project manager hoped that she could implement this project quickly, because all the villagers expected to see the machine as soon as possible. But things were not that easy, as she faced a problem when implementing this project. After she received the first installment of the project funds, she needed to borrow or find a way to get the other 20% of funds in order to implement the project. She was worried about where to borrow the funds from.. She went to the village to ask the villagers who are familiar with her to borrow money, but none of them were able to help her, because they used their money to build houses this year. Then the village leader and the project manager went to the local Agricultural Bank to borrow the money, but unluckily, the bank leader had gone to another place and would not return soon. Then the project manager finally decided to go to another village where she has a friend whose father is a teacher and after she told him everything he supported her immediately. Finally she borrowed the 20% of the project funds and completed the project successfully.

Lessons learned

The project manager learned many lessons from implementing this project successfully for Tagrig Village. The most important is being patient and having a good relationship with all the people around her. For example, when she didn’t receive the subsidy money until  May 4, 2010, she felt very anxious, but she realized that anxiety can’t do anything, , so she patiently solved the problem.

Another one is the importance of having good relationships with many people and having more experience, which can make things run more smoothly. For example, the project manager is an ordinary young woman without any experiences and good relationships with the people in the community, and she also didn’t have much experience  meeting and talking with the leaders. Therefore, she needed to take village leader where her everywhere so that she could accomplish things more easily. So from this project she has learned that building positive relationships with others is very significant, as well as having experience with things such as solving problems like borrowing money; talking with the leaders; going to the market and buying the machine; giving speeches to the villagers or holding meetings with the villagers, etc.

Thank you letter

Translated thank you letter

Dear New Zealand Embassy and Shem Women’s Group

I am the village leader of Tagrig and my name is Jiulu. Tagrig Village is a semi-nomadic village, we are dependent on both herding and farming, but this place is very much lacking in rainfall, therefore, we do not have much grass and water to feed the livestock and water the fields. We have tried our best to work hard to change this poor living condition, but we have failed for many reasons and villagers don’t have other skills to improve their lives. Our only income source is migrant labor, but it is not a stable and reliable income for us, because most construction work places are unwilling to hire illiterate workers, so it is very difficult for us to find stable work to earn money and send our children to school.

But we are really grateful that the New Zealand Embassy helped us to improve our living condition, and supported us in buying this reaping machine. For us, this is the first time to receive this kind of great help from another country. We really appreciate your great compassion and help. Here I represent all the Tagrig villagers to thank for your great help from the bottoms of our hearts.

Sincerely from village leader Jiulu

April 16^th, 2010

Receipts

#1

It is 101,300 RMB for the machine. The donor contribution is 51,000 RMB, local contribution is 19,910 RMB and the central government’s contribution is 30,390 RMB .

#2

It is 4,000 RMB for the machine’s equipment such as such as 90hp rape machine configuration and board teeth.

#3

This receipt is for reaping machine’s oil fees; that means the villagers drove the reaping machine to the village and it cost 400 RMB.

#4

This receipt is also for the reaping machine’s oil fee and it is 45 RMB.

The project management expenses:

#5

This receipt is for the project manager’s transportation fee from Xining city to Guide county when the manager interviewed the issues in local village for the project and it is 24 RMB.

This is the ticket for the project manager from Xining city to Guide county when the manager impleminted this project and it is 24 RMB.

#6

It is 25 RMB for project manager’s return fee from Guide county to Xining city.

#7

It is also 25 RMB for the project manager from Guide county to Xining city during the implementation of the project.

#8

These two are the phone fee for the project manager during implementation of the project and it is 80 RMB in total.

#9

The above the receipts are for the meal fee for the the project managers and the machine driver during the implementing the project and it is 67 RMB in total in Guide.

#10

These are the taxi fees for the project managers during implementing the project, total of 30 RMB.

Original Project Proposal

Population

There are approximately 160 households and 868 people in Tagrig Village: 320 women, 368 men and 180 children.EducationIn this village, 20 percent of the people are literate (not including students). Most of the people went to primary school and then stopped going school. Ninety percent of children are attending school; there are 17 university students, 5 high school students, 10 middle school students and 60 primary students. On average, one child in each family attends school currently. Some students did not finish their high school education because their parents cannot afford their school fees. If a family has a high school student, then her or his parents need to pay 2,500 RMB for her or his tuition fee for one year.

Cash income

Ninety-six percent of villagers are farmers and 4 percent of villagers are students and government officials in Tagrig. The local villagers plant barley, wheat, potatoes and beans and also raise domestic animals such as pigs and cows. On average each family owns seven mu of land (1 mu = 0.0666 hectares) and most families own only one cow. The villagers produce butter and cheese from the cow’s milk, but because of the hot weather, there is not enough grass to feed the livestock, and they don’t produce much butter and cheese to sell.

The first way of earning cash is from migrant laborers. Adults who are able to work usually go to urban areas and do constructions work for two or three months during the summer. One person can earn up to 30 RMB per day (women can earn 25 RMB and men can earn 30 RMB per day); however, the work is very dangerous, and we have heard of many people injured or killed from construction work.

The second way to earn money is to dig caterpillar fungus. The people mostly go to Golok Prefecture, which is approximately 200 kilometers from Tagrig Village. On average one person can earn 3,000 RMB from digging caterpillar fungus. In 2007, the government established a new policy, which does not allow people to dig caterpillar fungus anymore. The policy is aimed at protecting the environment, and anyone who breaks this rule is strictly punished by the government. Since the new rule was implemented, people prefer to work near the city and no longer go Golok.

Herding Tagrig Village is a farming village; most of villagers own a few livestock. An average, each household owns one cow, one pig, and one sheep. These animals are used for milking and meat. Agriculture Tagrig Village is the biggest village in Guide County, and villagers do not have enough fields. Many of the fields are arid farmland, so people do not have extra wheat to sell to others. In addition, there is not much grass on the mountains due to the lack of rainfall.Project goals The immediate goal of this project is to buy one reaping machine for 160 households in Tagrig Village, and alleviate their burden.The overarching goal of this project is to improve all the villagers’ living conditions, and alleviate villagers’ work and financial burden.Problems• No income: Ninety-six percent of Tagrig families are total farmers, and majority of them can‘t earn any money from livestock. As a result, most of the Tagrig villagers depend on their land to subsist. However, the village is located in a place where the rainfall is very low. Therefore, villagers often don’t have enough water for irrigation, making it hard for them to farm the land. Also, since the villagers need to spend lots of time on harvesting, they can’t go out to earn extra money. In addition, they have to wait for the village’s public threshing machine to thresh their crops after they reap all the crops by hand. Because there are only three threshing machines for 160 households in Tagrig Village, all the villagers have to wait their turn. This process is very long, and the villagers need to spend 25 days threshing their crops. The villagers would like to hire a reaping machine to reap and thresh their crops at the same time, then use the extra time to go to an urban area to earn money. But the problem is they can’t get the reaping machine during the harvest time. Finally, all of the family members have to work together on their field by hand, which takes around two months. If they had a reaping machine, then it could reap and thresh at the same time and they wouldn’t need to do extra work.

• Time consuming: During the harvest time, people often spend more than two and half months reaping and threshing crops. In Tagrig Village, each subgroup only has one threshing machine to thresh all the crops, and often the village has electricity outages caused by the poor quality of the electrical lines, which can mean many hours of delay for the villagers. Sometimes there are sudden storms that soak and sometimes even destroy all the crops. Then the villagers have to wait three or four days to dry the crops, and if it takes too long then there is the danger that the crops will go bad, decreasing the village’s agricultural productivity and putting the villagers in a difficult situation.

• Heavy labor: Harvesting is a very big workload for the villagers, but especially for the women, as this village’s custom is for the women to do all the reaping. Frequently they get up around 6 a.m. and spend 14 hours a day harvesting. During the day, the weather is very hot and many of women are exhausted from their day’s work, but they still have to do the housework, such as cooking, taking care of children, etc. In addition, after they collect their crops in their yards, both men and women need to work in thick dust to thresh the crops. The women have to carry grass to the caves for storage and also throw crops in the air in order to clean or separate the grain. Then they have to dry it on the ground by carrying the crops on their backs, and then again they have to collect crops at sunset. They do all of this work by hand.

• Health problems: As mentioned before, villagers need to spend a large amount of time harvesting, and women need to work whole days from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the field during the harvest period because of the shortage of workers. Because of the hot weather, they need to drink cold water a lot despite the fact that a local doctor suggested local women not drink cold water. So local women have health problems, such as stomachaches, backaches, headaches, and sore limbs from bending in the fields for so long every day in the heat.

• Limiting educational opportunities: During harvest time, many households want help from their children who are attending schools. So they often take their children out of school, which makes students more stressed and causes them to get lower scores. As a result, their chance of getting into middle school is lower, because the middle school teachers select students depending on their study scores in primary school.

Benefits

1. Help villagers to earn income:

If Tagrig villagers get a reaping machine, they will be able to spend less time on the reaping and threshing. In that way, villagers would have more time to spend seeking work in urban areas to earn income for the families, thus improving their families’ conditions.

2. Reduce time: Tagrig villagers could save time by using this machine, because this machine would reduce the time that they have spent reaping and threshing in the past. Also, if they are able to do the reaping and threshing quickly, then they won’t need to worry about crops getting wet or being destroyed by a storm.

3. Alleviate heavy labor: If Tagrig villagers had this machine, then they wouldn’t need to reap and thresh the crops by hand, which would not only can reduce the heavy labor in the fields, but also save the women lots of time for finishing the housework earlier and having some leisure time.

4. Improve health: If they had this machine, it would help local women to improve their health, because it would reduce the amount of time women spend in the hot weather. Also, since they wouldn’t need to work whole days in the field, they would not need to drink as much cold water, which could be an important factor in improving their health.

5. Education: If the villagers had this machine, parents wouldn’t need to interrupt their children’s studies. So children could improve their scores by using their time to study, eventually increasing their chances to go to a better middle school.

Beneficiaries

This reaping machine would mainly help 160 households in Tagrig Village. On average each family has five people, and the total population is 868.

Gender equality

During harvest time, all the village women are responsible for reaping their fields in the hot weather. According to the village’s custom, men do not join in this kind of activity; they are only responsible for collecting the barley and wheat from their fields with a handcart. But women and girls need to reap, collect wheat and barley, and dry rapeseed. These days it is a common for some female middle school students and college students to return late to their schools during harvest time, because there is so much work to do. It takes approximately two months to reap and thresh their crops. If the harvest was completed in less time, then female students could go to school on time; and it would also alleviate the labor burden on the local villagers, especially women.

Government approval

Every year the local government gives some almsgiving to Tagrig villagers, such as barley, but it cannot solve their financial problems and also it cannot reduce their heavy workload. If we can secure funding, the government fully supports the implementation of this project. The project manager asked permission from Shar long township government leader Huakejia to implement the project and he supports this project wholeheartedly because they really want this project to happen and hope all the poor families become rich.

The steps of project:

1. Ask villagers about the problems they face by meeting with locals and the leaders. (Done)

2. Collect data from Tagrig Village for this proposal. (Done)

3. Find out the price of the machine. (Done. The machine costs 75,000 RMB)

4. Take pictures and write proposal.

6. Receive funds.

7. Purchase machine from an agricultural machine factory in the city of Danyang in the Jiangsu Province with the village leaders.

8. Distribute the machine to the villagers and give them instructions for using it correctly.

9. Have a meeting with the village leaders about the sustainability of the project.

10. Take photos and interview the villagers about the impact of the project.11. Submit final report.Time FrameThis project will take 11 days to complete.

Four days: Purchase machine from the city of Danyang in the Jiangsu Province and transport it to the Tagrig Village.

Six days: Tell the villager leader and subgroup leaders about the sustainability of each machine and how to use them. Take photos and let them write a letter of thanks to the donor. Hold a meeting for all the villagers and let them know that every year I will visit Tagrig and interview them about how the harvest is going.

One day: Interview the beneficiaries of the project.

Project Finance

Item	Price forper item in RMB	Quantity	Donor Contribu tion in RMB	Local Contribu tion in RMB	Shem Contribu tion in RMB	Total Cost in RMB
Reaping machine	75,000	1	51,000	24,000	0	75,0000
Transportationfee			500	0	0	500
Project expenses (phone calls,bus fares and photocopies)			125	0	0	125
Project management payment			0	0	500	500
Total			51,625	24,000	500	76,125

Total donor contribution is 51,625 RMBLocal contribution: Each household contributes 150 RMB to this project; the total in RMB is (160 households) × (150 RMB) = 24,000 RMB

Project sustainability

This machine will have positive impacts on both women and men. It also can be a long-term alternative for all the Tagrig villagers to improve their living conditions year by year. Moreover, this project is supported by both villagers and the village leader. They see this as a beneficial project that will reduce their burden. In addition, they will not sell the machine, because the machine will be kept by Khajee Gyal and the village leader, and we will keep the machine in Tagrig Village’s public house. We have already chosen a good quality reaping machine in a Xining agricultural factory, and the factory boss told us he guarantees repairs on the machine for at least 10 years, so during that period we won’t need to pay money for repairing the machine. In order to make sure he keeps his word, we will sign a contract when we buy the machine. Every year Khajee Gyal, the project manger, will interview the villagers about the impact of the project, and report the project outcome to Shem Women’s Group.

Map of the project location

Photos

This is a deaf man called Lhaqianjia who is from Tagrig Village. There are only three people in his family: his sister, brother and himself. Because of their poverty, none of them are married now. When he was 15 years old, he got a disease that caused him to become deaf. At that time there were medicines to treat his illness, but because of their poverty, they couldn’t afford the treatments.

This is an aged blind women called Laguoji from Tagrig Village. She has a daughter, but no husband; because of their poverty, her daughter herded livestock for another family in order to fill their stomachs. In 1998, she left her family and went to urban area, and her mother Laguoji still doesn’t know where she has gone. However, some kindhearted villagers help her to do her work, such as reaping the field, threshing crops, drying wheat, and so on.

This is a 70-year-old woman from Tagrig Village. She has a son and daughter-in-low in her family; all of her other daughters and sons are married and they have their own families. Her granddaughter is a primary school student, and her son is still not married. There is no cash income to augment their family’s living condition, and now her daughter-in-law may not be able to continue her studies.