Emmanuel Nehemiah

Emmanuel Nehemiah organizes rural communities in Nigeria into self-sustaining economic units with the knowledge and capacity to succeed in regional and international markets.

Emmanuel Nehemiah pioneers a model of development that puts rural communities in control of their economic success. He partners with existing community organizations such as cooperatives and farmers’ associations to create economic units that can efficiently translate local resources into wealth. These units raise funds from their members and start business endeavors, meeting community needs with no reliance on government or international donors.
Emmanuel helps farmers make the transition from subsistence agriculture to market-oriented farming, maximizing both their yield and their profit. To provide income during the off-season, he trains residents to make and market consumer goods like body creams, soap, and beverages. His trainees form groups, contribute seed money for their new businesses, and share the profits among themselves. Rather than giving his trainees grants or microcredits, Emmanuel helps participants find their own seed money, pushing them to develop the skills they need to continue as independent entrepreneurs.

In the 1970s, the Nigerian government cut off support almost entirely for agriculture and other productive industries, focusing its energies on the extraction of newly discovered crude oil. Without subsidies or low-interest loans to keep farms afloat, rural economies collapsed, driving families into poverty. Many of those who could afford to leave abandoned their villages and emigrated to urban centers. Although many rural areas of Nigeria are rich in natural resources, they remain rife with poverty and disease.
Attempts to address this situation have rarely built self-reliance among the rural poor. There are very few citizen sector organizations operating in the north of Nigeria, and the majority of these focus narrowly on reproductive health. A tradition of direct gifts to villagers, from private charities and the government alike, has sometimes averted starvation, but has failed to produce lasting economic progress. Government-run training programs prepare workers to take on a narrow range of professions whose job markets are already saturated, and provide no programs in enterprise development. Therefore, even when trainees qualify for loans to set up small enterprises, they seldom have the capacity to do so.
This problem is compounded by the indifference many development programs show to local resources, local needs, and local talents. Such programs cover generalized methods and skills without teaching rural communities to fully use the resources around them. The result is that the lion’s share of these communities utilize less than half of the resources available to them. Despite access to mineral deposits and fertile lands, rural communities in Nigeria continue to suffer extreme poverty.

Emmanuel Nehemiah works with rural communities to increase crop yields, launch business ventures, and connect to the outside world. Within each community, he begins by approaching political and religious leaders, asking their permission and support, tapping into existing social networks to gather a broad cross-section of participants for his projects. He then leads these participants through a training on the problems and potential of their communities, and helps them pinpoint the skills and knowledge they need to harness natural resources to provide for their village and their families.
With a core of early trainees providing impetus and energy, Emmanuel organizes community groups into economic units with common concerns and expertise. Each unit pools its funds and elects an executive who works with Emmanuel to increase productivity among its members and to start new businesses. Together, they reorganize farming and animal husbandry methods to prepare the unit for success in the market. They perform market surveys to determine the most profitable food and cash crops, and concentrate their production on one or two of these lucrative crops rather than splitting their efforts across dozens of traditional crops. He also teaches farmers to organize and use their own resources for building wells, bridges, roads and other capital improvements.
To help expose his partners to the world outside their communities, Emmanuel convenes classes on computers and the Internet. Through these classes and his other programs, he identifies exceptional individuals with the talent and interest to solve community problems on a broad scale. He includes these special few in a mentorship program, connecting them with government, religious, national and international agencies that can help them develop their ideas.
Nehemiah presently works in nineteen communities across three Nigerian states: two in the north, and one in the east. To spread his idea quickly, he targets “junction towns,” border communities that attract people from more than one region. With established bases in these towns, it becomes easy to make contact with—and spread programs to—neighboring communities and states. He will be starting work soon in the states of Plateau and Benue.

Nehemiah lost his father at a very young age, and quickly learned to fend for himself and his siblings. Lacking the funds to migrate to a city, he had to find—and often create—economic opportunity within his village. His successes on this small scale gave him an enduring faith in the potential of rural communities to prosper and to provide for themselves. He has bolstered this faith with education and practical experience, and put it to work organizing youth throughout Nigeria. His organizations, the Prime Age Club and Primers, help ambitious young people develop and implement plans to solve problems in their communities.