Dr. Daniel Salcedo, Founder of PEOPLink

In the late 1970's, Daniel Salcedo and Marijke Velzeboer -- a young Colombian/American and Dutch couple -- were living in Guatemala and working for the United Nations Institute for Nutrition for Central America and Panama.  They puzzled at how such hard working people with such productive creativity as expressed by their crafts could suffer such high levels of malnutrition.  They concluded that this intolerable deprivation was the result of generations of international trade, devoting the best lands in these "banana republics" toward meeting the consumptive whims of the U.S. breakfast tables (bananas, coffee, sugar), at the expense of the basic needs of the local population (corn and beans).  They realized, however, that the culprit was the undemocratic access to the land rather than trade itself.

In response to this realization, Salcedo and Velzeboer founded the non-profit, Pueblo to People, in 1979, with the purpose of using international trade to benefit the poor majorities of people in Central America, while educating the U.S. public on the realities of life for the poor. The mission included educating the consumers of the now all too familiar folly of attempting to justify a destructive war on these poor people, based on an implied threat to our homeland. 

With a handful of dedicated, like-minded colleagues, Dan and Marijke threw themselves into working with talented artisan groups first in Central America and later in all of Latin America.  Pueblo to People quickly became a well-known beacon of success with its attractive and informative mail order catalogue, with peak annual sales of $3.5 million on a circulation of a million. This endeavour gave them a deep insight into the potential for SMEs in emerging economies to reach export markets.

In the years that followed, Salcedo's and Velzeboer's careers would include several other development ventures, including Dan's serving as Peace Corps Country Director in the Dominican Republic and Marijke's managing the Women's Program for the Western Hemisphere of the World Health Organization and then becoming Coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). 

In the early 90s, Dan was managing projects on exhumations of mass graves in Haiti (see image at left) and Guatemala as well as statistical analyses of genocide at the Washington DC headquarters of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest scientific organization in the world.  His friends and co-workers at the AAAS were at the forefront of analyzing the far reaching implications of this new phenomenon call "the Internet".  With his technical background (Ph.D. in Operations Research at 22) and experience helping crafts SMEs export, Dan immediately grasped the huge development potential for what only later would be called "e-commerce".   While application of science for human rights was compelling, Dan felt it was "looking back at what went wrong".  E-commerce for SMEs is "looking forward at what needs to be".

The culmination of those formative years and research experience led to the founding of PEOPLink in 1995 as an on-line version of Pueblo to People.  Its key goal was to help bring the benefits of e-commerce to 85% of the planet's six billion people that live outside First World countries.