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?]