Margaret (Meg) Harris will join The BOMA Project in mid-August as executive director.
BOMA is a Vermont-based nonprofit that helps the pastoral nomads of northern Kenya to establish small businesses in their communities. Since December 2008, BOMA has established 520 sustainable enterprises—impacting the lives of 2,100 residents and an estimated 10,400 dependent children—in a region marked by extreme poverty, hunger and recurring drought.
“I am delighted to be joining the BOMA team,” says Harris. “I look forward to working closely with the BOMA staff, in both the United States and Kenya, to help these communities to develop long-terms solutions to the challenges they face.”
Harris has 20 years of experience in project management, fundraising and evaluation for international organizations. She most recently served as director of philanthropic partnerships at the Salzburg Global Seminar, where she was responsible for donor cultivation, researching new revenue streams, and developing proposals and reports for foundation, government and corporate support. Before joining the Seminar in 1999, Harris worked with Associates in Rural Development (ARD), Partners for International Education and Training (PIET), and the Overseas Development Network. She spent her formative years in Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya and earned a B.A. from Carleton University and a M.A. in Adult Education from the University of Toronto, Canada. She lives with her family in Cornwall, Vermont.
Through its Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP), BOMA provides a small start-up grant of $150, business-skills training, and two years of mentoring to business groups of three participants. Eighty-five percent of REAP participants are women, who are using the income to feed their families and pay for school fees and medical care. The businesses include village kiosks that sell food and basic household supplies, as well as bakeries, butcheries, and purveyors in beads, skins and hides, petroleum, construction supplies, and dried and fresh fish.
BOMA was founded in 2005 by Dorset resident Kathleen Colson, who will remain with the organization as CEO. “BOMA has a rare track record of success in one of the poorest places on the planet,” says Colson. “Meg will be an outstanding asset in managing the day-to-day operations in Kenya and the U.S. as we continue to attract funding and bring our economic empowerment program to the arid lands of Africa.”
