Going beyond the party line

This post was initiated by my Grandpa who expressed gratitude at me sharing my cultural experiences via blog post, but still wasn’t clear on the purpose of EWB overseas (or at least of my placement aside from an amazing cultural exchange). Caution – the following post contains more questions than answers, for those who enjoy in putting a box around the “final” answer do not continue reading; for the rest please enjoy some controversy and feel free to share your love or discontent with the ideas I share below. The “party line” for my placement is in the header of my blog: “I work for small-scale farmers in Northern Ghana through a partnership with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) in Ghana.”

Me working for a small-scale farmer by watering his tomato garden.

But what does this mean?

In order to try and figure this out I have embarked on a 2 month learning tour. I am learning how incredibly complex, diverse and locally specific the lives of small-scale farmers (and their families) is! It has been particularly challenging as white people typically get exposure to the best farmers (see all October posts for some examples of "best farmers").

I am starting to discover why some farmers adopt a business-like mentality towards their farm while the majority of farmers take low-risk decisions that keep them farming for subsistence. Is it really just a matter of the educated vs. the uneducated? The entrepreneurial vs. the common majority? What other common indicators set these farmers apart? Am I just doing the classic outsider thing of simplifying the situation too much? At some point simplification of this incredibly complex and dynamic situation is required to move forward, to communicate my ideas to others and to ultimately do something. How can I find that balance?

I am also learning about the ways that MoFA tries to help these small-scale farmers develop their livelihood to something more secure, more profitable and ultimately something that provides a better life for their children. The ideas and what actually happen on the ground are often quite different (micro-credit loans have a repayment rate of less than 40% and the productivity of farmer’s fields hasn’t increased in the last 5 years despite countless interactions between farmers and MoFA field workers)…Accountability for projects flows upwards to the donor instead of downwards to the beneficiaries…Grandioso development projects are planned nationally or internationally with great rhetoric but lack the understanding of the realities surrounding implementation and consequently expectations of field workers are sky-high while resources fall short. How can I, as an eager outsider make my mark in this mess of development?

I have been worrying about this through-out my 2 month learning tour – until last week when I visited a fellow EWB volunteer Sarah Lewis. She is also working with MoFA but in a different region and has got a 6 month head start on me. I believe she has started something very exciting, something that will hopefully transform the way MoFA works and has already touched the lives of 9 farmers.

Last Thursday I was privileged to accompany Sarah Lewis and her co-worker a MoFA field worker (Lawrence) on a trip to visit a beautiful vegetable garden and meet the people who were tending to it. Every year these farmers work together to grow vegetables during the dry season. It’s a risky undertaking because once the veges are ripe and ready to be sold they need to be sold asap and at whatever price the market is offering! Veges also seem to be more prone to pests and diseases than other crops. But if all goes well, vegetable gardening can pay off and can provide a supplementary income during the difficult dry season.

Lawarence, Sarah Lewis and a farmer inspect the onion crop.

The farmers Sarah and Lawrence were working with had doubled the area they planted, thanks to Sarah’s and Lawrence’s support of fertilizer and labour to dig the wells for irrigation. Initially I was shocked to learn that Sarah had provided inputs! EWB is supposed to be a capacity building organisation, not a donor organisation! But I’ve also seen that one place where development projects fail is they fail to consider to equal importance of financial and technical assistance. I’ve seen development projects whose solution to a lack of acceptable results is to crank up the resources, like the Ghanaian analogy of applying more fertilizer on a poorly planted crop it’s basically a waste of money! Others look to provide only training or capacity building, for example: informing resource-poor farmers about the negative impacts of poor natural resource management only means farmers get the free soft-drink and crackers provided during the training!)

So enough ranting, as this is just the extreme of two approaches. What’s exciting about Sarah Lewis’ approach is that she and Lawrence are finding local solutions to help these 9 farmers. Grand plans are confined to these 9 farmers. Everyone is learning as they go along, Sarah, EWB, Lawrence and these 9 farmers. I’m not sure how scalable or sustainable her approach is, or what the development industry would make of it, but I do know that already these 9 farmers stand a better chance of yielding at least twice as many vegetables as they did last year. I consider that one small victory for farmers, MoFA and EWB among this mess of development.

Beautiful onion crop