Over the past few days I’ve been wrapping up at work, and now I’m off for a little vacation time, before heading back to Malawi, and then home. Crazy!

I don’t really know what to say. My experiences over the past few months have made me think a lot more critically about how the private, public, and development sectors can meet on the issues of food security and agriculture as a business—what roles each can play, and what roles they can’t. I wish I could package these thoughts cleanly for you, but I’m not sure I can right now. If you’re interested though, I’m sure the thirty-something hour journey back to Canada will provide ample opportunity for me to at least start sorting out my feelings, and I’d be happy to talk back in Toronto.

I guess you could say that my head and my heart are kind of a mess right now. I’m excited to go home. I’m excited to see the people that make home, home.

Other things I am looking forward to an almost embarrassing amount:

1. Not having to iron my shirts every day. (Zambians like to look sharp. I get flak for not ironing my jeans and t-shirts sometimes.)

2. (Hot) Showers!

3. Sangria and summer patios.

But it’s also hard to leave Choma when it’s just starting to feel familiar—when I’ve finally figured out where to get the good fritters, and how to navigate the scintillating waters of small-town gossip.

Here are some things I will miss:

1. Head-sized avocados, and infant-sized papayas!

2. Tiny, adorable lizards that dot the walls everywhere.

And most of all,

3. My Zam Fam and Friends.

I don’t think I’ve really posted on this topic before, but here are a few of the people that have made my time in Choma pretty grand.

Enock and Ernest, my counterparts from PROFIT and Pannar Seed respectively. I’ve logged a lot of road time with these two, and gone on a lot of adventures—like, that time Enock and I lost each other in a Namibian border town, and he spent three hours asking every person he saw if they had seen a Chinese girl. (Fortunately they had. Unfortunately that Chinese girl was not me. But hey, we found each other eventually!) I don’t know how to quantify how much I’ve learned from these guys, or how much fun I’ve had with them.

Kind of an awkwardly posed photo of me and my Zam Fam (Crysta Belle, Ernest, Sambo, Solii, Me, Monde, Sara, [Big] Martha, [Small] Martha). These are the people who’ve taken care of me, kept me safe, kept me happy, and helped me gain probably 15 pounds (yikes). And, just as it is with my family back home, too often do I let the immense gratitude and affection I feel for them go unsaid.

These fierce ladies are my friends Prudence, Lungowe, and Bina choolwe. They like to get into trouble, and take me along sometimes.

In Tonga, when someone leaves, you say “Muende kabotu!” It means, go well. The response is “Muchale kabotu,” or, stay well. So muchale kabotu Choma! I hope to see you again soon.

Before I came to Zambia, a friend of mine, who had spent some time here last year, remarked “If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Zambia’s national colours were sea foam green, pink, and yellow.”

He was referring to the fact that as you cruise down the main road of any town, or even village for that matter, you’ll invariably find buildings painted these colours with the words “A Wonderful World,” and “Everywhere You Go.” These are the slogans and colours of Zambia’s two major telecommunications companies, Zain and MTN.

It’s hard to overemphasize the presence these two companies have in Zambia (and, I get the impression, in a lot of other countries on the continent). Their vendors line the streets, they sponsor all the major sporting and cultural events, and they’ll paint your building for free—as long as you let them paint it their colours. The cell phone industry here is massive.

It’s not so strange that Zambia leapfrogged over landlines and straight to mobile service, given the challenges that building physical infrastructure present. Phone lines and cable lines just aren’t feasible for large swaths of the country. Even internet access, for many people (including me), occurs through cell phones or modems that run over GPRS or 3G networks.

Using a cell phone here isn’t quite the same as using one in Canada. There’s no such thing as a contract—all mobile phones operate on a pay-as-you-go system. Once you purchase and activate your SIM card, you just buy airtime scratch cards as you see fit. You scratch the card, enter the PIN, and then talk or text away. Without contracts the system sounds awfully blithe and carefree, but I should probably add that airtime is really quite expensive, and calling someone just to chat extensively doesn’t really happen. Luckily there’s a whole lot more you can do with your cell phone than talking, like transfer money or airtime, and do your banking. Cell phones have even changed the way rural farmers conduct agriculture as a business; for instance, farmers can now access real-time market information for commodities via SMS, allowing them to make better informed marketing decisions.

Probably one of the neatest applications of cell phones I’ve seen so far though, has come from a Zambian company called Mobile Transactions. The company develops systems for mobile financial services, trying to make payments, money transfers, and loan distributions more flexible, efficient, and accessible to Zambians, especially those in rural communities. Recently, they’ve been working with the World Food Programme and the Conservation Farming Unit—the technical wing of the Zambia National Farmers’ Union—to pilot an electronic voucher system, using mobile phones to streamline the distribution of food relief and subsidized farming inputs.

Food aid and other subsidies used to work on a paper-based voucher system: organizations would distribute paper vouchers to beneficiaries, who would then wait for the arrival of a truck of goods (and subsequently, in line at the distribution point—often for an uncomfortably long time). It was a lengthy and expensive process, not to mention that tracking and monitoring was nightmarish, and fraud a very real possibility. With the electronic voucher system, organizations distribute voucher scratch cards to their beneficiaries, which can be redeemed at local vendors in their community at their will. The vendors are trained as mobile transactions agents, using a phone as the “point of sale device.” Agents enter the PIN from the scratch card in their phones along with an identifying number for the beneficiary. The Mobile Transactions system then confirms that the recipient is indeed an intended beneficiary, and then credits the agent’s account, at which point the goods are handed over. What’s key with the e-voucher system is that aid no longer bypasses, but supports, the local private sector. Local businesses are now responsible for acquiring stock, but they also have a guaranteed market, and immediate payment. Beneficiaries benefit through reduced wait times, as well as increased choice in when they want to redeem their voucher, and where.

On paper, the system sounds great, and the WFP and CFU are looking at scaling-up the program. Of course though, there are always challenges with the nitty-gritty of implementation—in this case, agent selection, training, and support. Nevertheless, working through these issues seems worthwhile, as the e-voucher system could be an exciting example of how aid can be more efficient and effective. Some people have been asking whether the same system could be applied to the government Fertilizer Input Support Program, which is notorious for poor distribution practices (I may have mentioned this in an earlier post).  

The work that Mobile Transactions is doing has made me conscious of how the way I frame the purpose and functionality of a piece of technology—like a cell phone—is coloured by my personal context. I think it’s important to recognize that what a cell phone means in a Canadian context can be very different from what it means in a Zambian context, and that development can be pluralistic. Neat stuff indeed!

My loving village Zam Fam, and some neighbours. 

My village home! The compound to the left is where most of the cooking, and living actually happens. The structures to the right are for food storage—maize granaries and groundnuts. I was standing in front of the buildings where the family slept when I took the photo though, so they aren’t shown. 

What an attractive cob! Admire it’s size, and the flintiness of its grains! It’ll make really white mealy-meal, perfect for high quality nshima! (These are all things I have learned to appreciate—mealy-meal is a type of maize flour, and nshima is Zambia’s staple food.)

Lunch: boiled eggs, pumpkin leaves stewed in groundnuts, and nshima, of course!

Oh the things you can do with maize. Joe, is hand shelling cobs. Cindy, in the back, is using a manual grinder to process the maize grains into smaller pieces, to make chibwantu (or mukoyo), a traditional village drink made with fermented maize and special roots. Zambians say it’s a drink that chases hunger (tanda nzala)—kind of chewy, and really delicious. Our neighbour (whose name I unfortunately never got the hang of) is pounding maize grains to remove their skins. Once the skins are removed, the grains can be cooked in water so they puff up, kind of like wet popcorn.

A group of women I met harvesting groundnuts. It’s tough work, especially because the market for groundnuts isn’t very good right now. Despite the poor prices they’re getting though, the women continue to plant groundnuts to supplement their income because you can recycle the seed. Mr. Lwiindi, the agent I was staying with, has been trying to convince some of the more entrepreneurial individuals to invest in buying onion or tomato seeds, as these crops have really high returns, especially in their community.

It takes a village to fix a bike. My kind of hilariously named “Glory bike” was consistently inglorious, and failed after a few days of alternately rocky and sandy terrain. 

This picture is definitely not from the village. Some unsafe firework launching in Malawi. The flames to the right are from our ignited makeshift mortar, constructed from flipchart paper. The name on the firework package was “Orchids in Snow.”

I spent last week staying in and around Lwiindi Village, deep in the heart of Monze district. While I spend most of my time working with my counterparts within rural communities, at night I go home to Choma Town, so it was really important for me to spend some time actually living in one of the rural villages we’re working in. I stayed with Mr. Sandquest Lwiindi, one of the most active rural agents in Pannar Seed, and probably one of the most jovial people I’ve ever met. He embodies the phrase “hearty laughter.”

There was no phone network coverage in the area, except in two spots in the village (and I literally mean spots—if you shuffled your feet an inch you would lose signal). You knew where they were because the grass was all worn away. I found the existence of these random spots kind of curious and hilarious though, and I got used to doing a human statue routine whenever I wanted to check my text messages from the rest of the world.

It’s incredible how different the pace of life is. With little phone service and poor road infrastructure, schedules are loose if they exist at all. And it just takes so much time to do things when everything is people-powered—fetching water from the stream, pounding groundnuts, shelling maize by hand, even getting to the next household. It’s certainly not unexpected if you arrive 3 or 4 hours late for an appointment. During the rainy season, it actually becomes impossible to get some places, as rivers and streams become dangerously swollen, and roads get completely flooded. Unfortunately this also means going to school during the rainy season is too daunting a challenge for many children.

And women—they work hard. This seems to be true whether I’m in Choma, or the village. Everywhere, I wake up to the sound of women sweeping. Running a household is tough work. (Man, the muscles you need to stir a family-sized cauldron of shima! The women make it look so easy, but seriously, the speed of their stirring is deceptive.)

I spent most of my time interviewing farmers in the region, and afterwards I started to feel kind of frustrated by how so many of the constraints they’re facing seem to be caused by macro-level issues. Working with farmers at a micro, field level is really important, but it also leaves you feeling kind of impotent when some of the biggest problems seem to be at the policy level.

For farming to be a business for a small-scale farmer, and not just a means of subsistence, timing is really critical. To get the yields necessary to make a profit, you have to be pretty organized with planting times, weeding times, and fertilizer application times. Late planting is one of the biggest challenges, because if you plant late, your yields are much worse. With poorer yields, farmers have to hold on to their harvest until late in the season, when maize prices are higher, to cover their costs, which also makes it less likely that they’re able to buy their inputs on time for the next season. Farmers can get caught in a negative cycle.

Why do farmers plant late when basically everything suggests that it’s a disastrous course of action? Government fertilizer and seed support programs, which provide these inputs and subsidized costs, don’t do their allocation until late October or November, which is essentially when the first rains come, and when you should be planting. To know what variety of seed you should be buying, you need to know how much fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide you have available. If you have enough of these inputs, it might be wise to invest in the varieties that need more intense management, but much better yields. If not, then being conservative and choosing a more stable, less input-intensive variety is wiser. So because of the late distribution of subsidized inputs, many farmers have to wait to do their purchasing.

Also, like I mentioned before, many farmers hold on to their harvest until November, when the prices are highest. Right after harvest the market is saturated and the prices are low, so the longer you hold on, the better the price you’ll get. But the way the government does purchasing through the Food Reserve Agency, and how they facilitate export markets aren’t incredibly conducive to viable prices for farmers. There are definitely some political issues around exporting maize though which make it an issue the government doesn’t really want to touch. In general, I feel like I know way too little about this topic, and wish I had some background knowledge on trade and how governments are involved in price control of staple foods. (Anyone know how the Wheat Board functions in Canada?)

Despite these challenges, I take some solace in a conversation I had recently with my EWB supervisor/coach, who has also worked with PROFIT. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that PROFIT also does a lot of work in the livestock sector. For a long time, it was incredibly frustrating work, because it seems that if there’s any sector that’s plagued by both macro and micro level malfunctions in Zambia, it’s livestock. The distinction in responsibilities between the public and private service providers is poorly defined. Bureaucracy and bribery are rampant. The amount of paperwork you need to move a single head of cattle is kind of ridiculous. Disease control is poor, standards aren’t clear, and despite a wealth of good cattle in the country, export markets are almost non-existent, which puts a pretty low ceiling on the price of meat, which isn’t the best incentive for producing better quality.

Recently though, out of the blue, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries split into two. Formerly, livestock issues were overshadowed by agriculture, and weren’t really being acted on, so with the formation of a distinct Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, big changes were happening on the policy side. Because of the credibility and insight PROFIT had gained from working in the field, the project was invited to be part of the dialogue on the new directions for the ministry. Apparently it’s been a really great opportunity to advocate for small-scale farmers, and to connect voices from the rural communities to people at the highest level of government.

I think this idea of using field level knowledge to inform macro-level decisions is actually kind of part of EWB’s sector strategy for Agricultural Value Chains, which is kind of neat! So even if things are frustrating, I’m optimistic that change on the micro and macro level is possible—some patience, however maddening, may be required though.

So I’m sorry for this lengthy and maybe technical post! If you’ve managed to stick with it, um here are some hopefully more exciting pictures from the past week!

(Okay you will probably notice that there are no pictures below. That’s because my internet connection is seriously failing and I am unfortunately late. So they’ll be in my next post, with pictures from retreat too, I promise!)

Helping the “poorest of the poor” is an attractive concept. After all, that’s what development is supposed to be about isn’t it. A question that I’ve noticed come up though when people discuss the private sector approach to poverty alleviation is whether targeting interventions at the poorest of the poor is the most feasible means of improving their livelihoods—in short, should these private sector development projects be reaching out to the vulnerable or the viable?

I think a lot of projects choose to focus on the latter. The idea is that by investing in enterprising individuals who have already had a degree of success, you’re more effectively able to provide opportunities to the vulnerable. An example is training agrodealers (someone who buys agricultural inputs wholesale and sells them within a community). By training individuals who already have an understanding of business concepts, and the associated literacy, accounting, and record keeping skills, success is much more likely, which ultimately means better service provision to farmers in need.

I think that it can be a difficult concept to market to donors though, who, understandably, are eager to know that their dollars are reaching those that need them the most. When you invest in improving water access, education systems, or transportation infrastructure, there’s a feeling that the benefits will reach everyone. The hope is though, that stimulating the private sector will also be a means of providing opportunity on a wide-scale, and in a sustainable manner.

Um any thoughts or opinions?  

I guess last time I rather haphazardly laid down my thoughts about some challenges in the agriculture sector without really explaining how my placement fits into it. I’m partnered with both a private sector seed firm and the PROFIT project. Over the past five years, PROFIT has worked with firms in the input sector, promoting a rural agent system—formerly, farmers had to travel long distances to town to purchase inputs, resulting in a significant mark up from transportation costs. The difficult and costly journey also contributed to late planting, which often leads to poorer yields, making it even harder for a small-scale farmer to get the inputs for the next planting season. In the agent system, input firms select entrepreneurial farmers within remote communities to act as franchise representatives. They’re responsible for organizing customers in the region to bulk orders, as well as providing education and extension services. Farmers are then able to get the products and information they need within their communities. By reaching out to small-scale farmers, and not only commercial, through agents, input firms have been able to considerably expand their markets. In turn, farmers receive inputs at lower costs, and agents earn a healthy commission.

The good news is that the agent network system has really taken off. Particularly interesting is the amount of collaboration between businesses linked horizontally in the value chain (for instance, seed companies and herbicide companies). Many are leveraging each other’s networks to provide bundled services to farmers at lower cost. However, as the networks grow in size, agent management, monitoring, and evaluation are becoming a bigger challenge. While the networks began with personal relationships and informal agreements, as the networks get more complicated some more standardization may be required. How is data recorded? Can it be organized and displayed in a way that is helpful to the firm? Are learning and innovation being captured and rewarded? Are there opportunities that are being missed for better market forecasting, and service provision to ultimately benefit rural farmers? Part of my placement is working with input firms to explore these questions and develop data management, and monitoring and evaluation systems.

Unfortunately, my internet access is kind of sporadic, as we spend most of our time in the field (I’ve started to think of “the office” as my counterpart’s pickup truck). I’m going to take advantage of the good internet connection right now though and share some highlights from our adventures on the road (where road is kind of a euphemism for bumpy, bumpy dirt paths).

On our way to a community meeting in Bungashiya, a village in Choma district. Hours of bad roads, and occasional stops for cattle and goat crossings. (Goats are adorable, but sound kind of awful, as noted by my fellow EWB volunteer Amir in Ghana.)

Farmers gather at the meeting to find out more about advantages and disadvantages of new seed cultivars.

Proud local farmers share their experiences with different maize varieties and show off their harvest. The device in the front is a boom sprayer, for safely applying herbicide.

My counterpart, Ernest, standing in front of a field of seed maize, ready for harvest. Due to the high degree of quality control, hybrid seed can only be economically produced by commercial farmers. We were out to inspect the 44 hectares of seed maize on this farm. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the seed was ruined by cob rot.

A “combination pack” which includes seed as well as herbicides required for good yield. By bundling the products, farmers pay less.

The overflowing granary of a successful maize farmer. 

I arrived in Choma (not Monze it turns out) a couple of days ago and have been settling into my new work and home life. I’ll admit that it’s been a little overwhelming—from living in close quarters with another 11 Canadians to feeling out new surroundings by myself has been kind of an adjustment. But Zambia is beautiful, and people are incredibly kind! The family I’m staying with has been going to great lengths to make me feel at home, though there have definitely been some hilarious misunderstandings (washing and bathing confusions, expressing my religious convictions). I’ve been feeling a little goofy at times, but I guess that’s all part of the process.

I’m pretty excited by work though! Over the past few days, I’ve been getting a better idea of what PROFIT, a USAID project does. The PROFIT project focuses on reducing poverty by supporting private sector development in agriculture and livestock. It fosters value chains that include small scale farmers and micro and small enterprise. The part of PROFIT I’m working with focuses specifically on improving the input supply sector (in my case, hybrid seed firms) to better serve rural farmers.

One of the challenges for small-scale farmers and the businesses/industries which service them is the seasonality of income from agriculture. Farmers have the most cash on hand at the end of the harvest season (for maize, starting in May through June), at which point they need to address all the financial concerns for the coming year—living expenses, school fees, transportation, and the inputs (fertilizer, seeds, herbicides, and pesticides) for the next planting season. For farmers, a large injection of income that comes once a year can make budgeting difficult, and also means that agrobusinesses need to develop credit systems, and alternative financing options to engage with these farmers.

The first PROFIT meeting I attended was actually about livestock and the development of private sector veterinary services. I should probably make a note here that I know absolutely nothing about livestock or being a vet, but the impression I got was that as the Zambian government is redefining the responsibilities of public vets, there’s a growing niche for private players. A problem they face though, being relatively small scale and with limited available capital, is getting adequate stock of high-turnover, but high-price items, like certain antibiotics. Even though there’s a high demand for these medicines from the livestock farmers, vets only have the capital available to keep a small stock, which means that they miss out on valuable sales, and that farmers can’t receive timely treatment for their animals. This is where development organizations/projects like PROFIT can act as market facilitators, working as high level advocates, negotiating credit systems with big supply companies.

Anyway, I’m excited to learn more—I’m spending most of this week in the field, and am going to be watching some community meetings, and field demonstration days in the nearby villages! I’ll try to include some pictures next time.

[Kind of related: check out this interesting article about a development economist, Esther Dufflo. She works at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, and is a proponent of applying randomized control trials (similar to what’s used in drug testing) to social policy hypothesis testing. She’s done some interesting studies about how to incentivize early input purchasing for small-holder farmers in Kenya. There’s a big behaviour change component to helping farmers become better business managers, for instance, encouraging purchasing earlier in the season. Thoughts?]