Media Mentions
Peace Dividend Trust's work has been featured a number of times in the international media. The links below provide a sample of recent coverage.
Ainsley Butler, an Ottawa-based projects director with Peace Dividend Trust who just returned from Afghanistan, said: "We can account for over $65 million in funds being invested in the Afghan economy through the purchasing of goods and services in-country." The products and services that can be purchased locally, she said, include furniture, fresh produce, dried fruit, nuts, cell phone service, printing services, Internet services, construction and cleaning services.
Jeff Davis
Embassy - Canada's Foreign Policy Newsweekly, April 16, 2008
An NGO based in Ottawa, Peace Dividend Trust, has launched a project that encourages international agencies and companies to "buy Afghan first." By linking international buyers with Afghan companies, the organization has facilitated about $46 million US in contracts with domestic businesses since September 2006, said Shirine Pont, Peace Dividend's Country Director in Afghanistan. The organization has also convinced the U.S. military and NATO to revise their procurement policies to emphasize buying local.
Andrew Mayeda and Mike Blanchfield
CanWest News Service, November 22, 2007
Major donor nations, including Canada, spent about $1.36 billion in official development assistance to Afghanistan over a one-year period ending March 2006. But only $424 million, or about 31 per cent, had a "local impact" according to a study released this spring. Peace Dividend Trust, an Ottawa non-profit agency, conducted the study for the Afghan Ministry of Finance. Local impact is defined as the proportion of aid money spent locally on goods and services.
Andrew Mayeda and Mike Blanchfield
CanWest News Service, November 22, 2007
What we do is that we look at their procurement needs and find matches for what they need within the Afghan economy. There is a surprising amount of possibility within the Afghan marketplace and we facilitate the linkages between Afghan entrepreneurs and international buyers.
Jonathan Spassov
Government of Canada, October 2007
In 2003, Gilmore and two partners founded Peace Dividend Trust (PDT), a non-profit intent on making humanitarian missions more effective and efficient.
Their process is remarkably simple. When they discovered the US army was spending $30 million a year on importing bottled water from Dubai, they arranged a meeting with three Afghan companies and now the US contracts locally. At the upscale Serena Hotel in Kabul, they introduced farmers from the Kandahar region to the hotel's staff. "Today, the people eating at that hotel are now eating Afghan produce," Gilmore says.
Chris Thatcher
Vanguard - Canadian Defense and Security Magazine, 2007
The 16-million-dollar Afghan Beverage Industry plant has been running for around three months and employs about 140 people with plans to expand to 240.
This seems tiny beside Afghanistan's unemployment rate of roughly 30 percent, but it is an example others can follow, said Hedvig Christine Boserup, project manager for the Peace Dividend Marketplace that links Afghan producers with suppliers, and brought the coalition and ABI together. "It sends a signal to people in general that local procurement is possible, that there are quality products to be bought in Afghanistan," she said.
This in turn could create jobs in the private sector as the public sector is trimmed back.
Agence France Press
October 2006
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