Teaching shoe-making in El Salvador

Whitney Eulich has an interesting story on Sam Hawkins and his wife's efforts to help give former convicts a new start in El Salvador. Sam and his wife traveled to El Salvador in 1986. Upon arrival, they established a non-profit organization, Love Link, that tended to the needs of malnourished babies. 

Twenty years later Sam traveled to the Apanteos prison in Santa Ana. It was during this prison visit that Sam connected with gang members. It was this encounter that led him to open a shoe factory that would help provide former prisoners with a trade and an opportunity to escape gang life. They chose this business because "because it was practical.:

"With these skills, [the workers] are going somewhere," Hawkins says. "Everyone is proud of our work. We have zero defects." One of the largest shoe companies in Central America, ADOC, purchases and sells some of their products now, he notes.

It's a great story but also demonstrates the limits of prisoner rehabilitation in El Salvador. Sam can employ a few dozen workers at one time. He hopes that with time and adequate resources that he can employ nearly two hundred workers. That would be an impressive operation and much better than the bakery operations that employ gang members. But it is a far cry from the tens of thousands, really hundreds of thousands, of quality jobs that El Salvador needs.

The government doesn't have the money to employ that many people and the private sector does not appear that interested in investing in the country. Increasing the attractiveness of El Salvador as a destination for foreign direct investment is a goal of the Millennium Challenge Corporation Compacts I and II, the Partnership for Growth, and other projects but the country does not yet possess the socioeconomic conditions to attract that much foreign investment.