Meet our moringa farmers: Madam Lalan

We proudly tell our customers and partners that we work with women moringa farmers in Ghana, Haiti and Nicaragua. We’re proud of these partnerships and we’re proud of our women. That’s why we love to go to the smallholder farms to meet them. Today we’d love to introduce to you one of these amazing women: Madam Lalan. 

We met Madam Lalan when we were in Haiti last April to meet the farmers and to celebrate our successes with them. Her real name is Marie Dorcelus and she’s not only a smallholder farmer, but also the leader of a 900-member rural women’s association that goes by the acronym AFASDASH and is based near the community of Désarmes in the Artibonite area of Haiti.

Under Madame Lalan’s guidance, the association has become involved in various micro-enterprises including a nursery that supplies a wide range of mostly fruit trees to farmers in the area. They began to experiment with growing and processing the leaves of the moringa tree about four years ago, and then in early 2015 began working closely with the Clinton Foundation-supported Smallholder Farmers Alliance to increase the total number of moringa trees, and to both upgrade and expand the moringa leaf processing operation. That led to supplying moringa leaf powder for Kuli Kuli’s Moringa Green Energy shots.

“AFASDAH was operating well before we started with moringa,” said Madame Lalan, “but it has expanded to represent over half of our total activities now. And moringa has helped raise the income of our women members as well.”

“There are two other very important things that have come as a result of AFASDAH’s increased activities to process moringa,” she said. “When we started, people did not take so seriously a group of women doing business together. But now AFASDAH is very respected for our leadership in the community. And the second thing is that moringa has brought hope to all the farmers in the area because it gives them extra income on a regular basis.”

Madame Lalan is a respected leader of the AFASDAH. Next to that, she’s a 47-year-old single parent with three children aged 10, 24 and 26.