In honour of its 20^th anniversary, OTTO Austria will be donating 0.50 euros for each item sold from its ECOREPUBLIC collection to the school project for a period of one and a half years. “We also want to excite our customers about this great project and promote the sale of sustainably produced textiles. We anticipate that more than 50,000 euros will go to the alphabetization program,” explained Harald Gutschi, spokesperson for OTTO Austria management. The program receives additional support from the Deutschen Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG) and Welthungerhilfe (WHH). Illiteracy has a considerable negative impact on the country’s socioeconomic development, and is a concrete place to start: by summer 2013 around 5,000 men and women will have learned to read and write in a course in the Bazega Region (central south). This program is OTTO Austria’s contribution to laying the groundwork for sustainable development for smallholder farmers and their families.