Bates seniors Sam Nagourney, at left, and Jacob Nudel have received a Davis Projects for Peace grant.

Two Bates seniors have received a 2009 Davis Projects for Peace award for their plan to create an economic stimulus project in an African village.

Sam Nagourney of New York and Jacob Nudel of Woodbridge, Conn., will use the $10,000 grant to create an educational animal husbandry program and microcredit operation in Shimbwe, a village in the Mount Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania.

The Shimbwe project is one of more than 100 initiatives to receive funding in the Projects for Peace program, founded in 2007 by philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis on the occasion of her 100th birthday. Now 102, Davis funds the program to encourage college students to undertake innovative, meaningful projects that promote peace in the world.

Bates students have won a Project for Peace award every year, for a program in Rwanda and two in Tanzania, including Nudel and Nagourney's.

Nudel and Nagourney's project is designed to help people living in poverty in Shimbwe. Many families, the pair explains, are so poor that the costs of education are beyond reach. As Nudel explains, "There's always this tension: 'How am I going to send my kids to school?' "

Working with a local school and a nongovernmental organization, the pair will start a small-scale cattle breeding operation that will serve a number of ends: teaching animal husbandry practices, improving the students' diets and creating jobs.

The microcredit component, meanwhile, taps an old local tradition. The project will "rent" cows to households through two gestation periods. The renters get to keep one calf and the milk from the cow, while the Project for Peace program receives the other calf as rent.

In a gorgeous setting blanketed with trees and carved by deep gorges, Shimbwe is about seven miles outside of the regional capital, Moshi. Nudel and Nagourney will work with the Minjeni Women Group Trust, a local NGO that has supported children and families with educational, health and other needs.

They will locate the project at a school. The grant will pay for two pregnant cows and a bull, the construction of shelters for the animals, feed and veterinary care. The project will also include a blog that, Nagourney says, will allow the pair to share what they learn as they go along.

Nudel and Nagourney's initiative is based on their prior research in Africa. Nudel, an anthropology major, is writing a yearlong honors thesis on commodity exchange, development and local impacts of globalization in Tanzania. He spent summer 2008 in Shimbwe.

"I met people in the village and talked with them about development, problems they have and ideas they have for fixing them," he says. The experience benefitted him in many ways, informing his thesis and giving him a good grounding in the Swahili language.

"So I see this project as, maybe, a repayment for everything they've given to me."

Nudel is president of the Immigrant Rights Advocacy Group at Bates.

A politics major, Nagourney spent part of 2008 studying development in Uganda, where he held focus groups with microcredit organizations, farmers' associations and women's associations analyzing development strategies. He wrote his senior politics thesis on the public sector's role in development in Africa, comparing the effectiveness of government development strategies in Zambia and Botswana.

Nagourney is an editor-in-chief of The Bates Student, the campus newspaper.

A challenge for the pair, says Nudel, is that outsiders' ideas for local development in Africa are sometimes regarded -- not always without reason -- as exploitative or inequitable. "We want this to be an inclusive thing," he says, "and so our task is to be really politically savvy about what's going on as we offer to inject this capital, and to make sure that we put it in the right hands."