Date of Graduation

5-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Business Administration

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Accounting

Advisor/Mentor

Farmer, Amy

Committee Member/Reader

Sadeghi-Jourabchi Ali

Abstract

In the summer of 2019, I, along with 8 other students from the University of Arkansas departed the United States for the Central American country of Belize. Despite our limited knowledge of what Belize held in store for us, we were enthusiastic about the coming months. While we had different projects, we all set out with the same universal question in mind. How can we use the knowledge we have gained through education to make a positive impact on the lives of people living in an impoverished town? Some of the members of our team worked alongside local businesses to develop business plans to increase profitability and efficiency and others worked with the local tourism office to bring in more visitors, and therefore revenue, into the town. I worked toward establishing a stable source of nutrition for the most underprivileged in the community. Specifically, our group set out to solve two problems that we observed in the community. The first being “Can small-scale agriculture and poultry initiatives improve the lives of people living under the poverty line?” The second being “Can we implement a project that also empowers the local women to take a more active role in providing for their families in a highly patriarchal society?” After much planning and research into the nature of these projects, we devised a way to encourage the expansion of our project by working with established organizations and illustrating the benefits of the project. This thesis paper describes how we set about solving these problems while explaining the important factors that we took into account and how we framed our project be successful in practice.

Keywords

poultry; food insecurity; poverty; women; service learning

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