Baytskhandai, A Charitable And Environmental-Friendly Woman

(Translated by Ariungerel)

Occasionally, I have met with Baytskhandai who is the head of “Mongolian Women Farmers’ Association” in the Bayankhoshuu of Songino khairkhan district, by middle of the autumn. She is a middle-aged woman with quick movement who graduated from University of Agriculture, in 1990. In that period of time, her started to work as an instructor in the University. Then, she set up the NGO “Mongloian Women Farmers’ Association” due to market demands in 1999, in order to help increase income of poor and unemployed people that live in her district. Her assistance reaches to each of the poor people in her district.

As an energetic woman who build her NGO and is skilled at planting vegetables, trees and orchard, she gives trainings to 5000 people of Ulaanbaatar. I am proud of her experience and skill based activities.People who are trained to know these skills are planting vegetables and fruits in the garden to increase their income.

All her activities are focused on mitigate desertification, reduce poverty, and protect soil erosion. She implemented projects with 2-20 million togrugs of Donor organizations. And she has won a prize of “World Women Summit Foundation” in 2003. This foundation selects only 10 women of worldwide every year for their contribution on reducing poverty, particularly rural women’s poverty. And she showed her certificate which said that she is one of the nominated 1000 women for Nobel Peace Prize as well.

She has good skills and experiences on how to monitor and implement projects, how to make people work and promote voluntarism. In most of our household, there’s a fence and one ger inside, or one building with a broken car laid down in one corner. Our readers should be able to imagine that inside a household’s fence, the space left unused is naked bare soil, solid with no vegetation cover. A tiny naked area can influence the view of our city and this unsuitable condition can change kids’ behaviors. Dried and naked soil make people feel bad. The environment of households’ fence can influence people’s mind and greening in the households fences can change human moral.

Baytskhandai did useful activities to increase income of households while create a nice environment. Therefore, her approaches of doing activities has influenced how people cope with desertification and protect our nature. Consequently, her trainees who became good grower as her start to train others as well. Most of her trainees are housewomen and poor and disabled people. Although disabled people do not work as like as normal people, but after Baytskhandai’s lessons, they learned to become farmers and eat organic foods.

And I’ve met with one of her trainee who is working as trainer now. His name is Naymsuren. He is glad to identify with her and has been given a good life. Ten years ago, he had an accident when he was working, and after that, he lost his capacity working as an electrician.  Since then, his wife became the only one who earned the household’s livelihood.  His life changed dramatically after he became a farmer. He earned three million tugrogs from harvest in 0.02 ha, so now he can pay his kid’s tuitions and eat organic foods everyday. We could not find a better example anywhere in Mongolia.

Furthermore, “Mongolian Women Farmer’s Association” is initiating many activities which aims to strengthen capacity of groups and to cooperate with them and to get donations from donors. I would like to talk only one example: Baytskhandai is working with volunteers from VSO to assist her work and to learn from her experience. She does not use donation for her own propose and it would be expended for other’s assistance that was very interesting.

It seems like she is changing the picture along wih her project implementation in the ground. Actually, she is working with the assistance from many other people. If you can help her improve her activities, please connect by emailing the following email address arvingerel@yahoo.com. If you need an advice, a trainer, or volunteers whoever would be helpful to you, just email.