Shrimp Fishing Builds an Economy
Resilient circular economies start with connecting productive capacity to local resources.
Local fishermen pay for their children’s school fees by selling their shrimp to a cooperative with a freezer for storage. Women buy the shrimp from the cooperative to feed their families and to sell to local schools for lunch.
What if this flow of resources didn't depend on access to scares Kenyan Shillings? What if people could establish a mutual credit that would continue to stay in the community even in the worst market conditions, political crisis, natural disasters?
Communities in rural areas near Mombasa are doing just that. They join a network of local businesses and receive a free credit of 400 Tokens (soft-peg to National currency). Once various loops of trade (like above fishing->storage->cooking->school fees->fishing) are decoupled from scare or volatile Kenyan Shillings we are seeing a lot more is possible in developing local resilient economies. The ability for community members to support one another in times of need begins to grow - reaching back to a time before the introduction National Currencies when community members would take turns working on each others fields and fixing each others houses.
What is perhaps most exciting right now is the usage of Community Currencies in Savings and Lending groups ... coming soon.
