Use what you have to secure what you have not

This will be my last post under this thread. The conference ended Friday evening with a bunch of my new friends and I heading to a progressive restaurant in downtown Halifax. In just 3 short days I had made numerous friends, one who took me into her home that night (the hostels were all full because Paul McCartney was playing) and the other who spent the Saturday showing me the province's beautiful country-side. This experience could have come from the EWB conference. But instead it came from a gathering of other social entrepreneurs from around the world through the Coady Institute. For me personally, this conference has been an interesting experience of exposure to a network that is not so unlike EWB's. It is a testament to the Coady Institute that they were able to bring 100 intelligent, thoughtful and passionate individuals. I think we, in EWB, could benefit from staying connected to this network.

At the end of the conference I was part of a small-group that discussed how we could better engage youth in the ABCD concept. This was in part because the average age of attendees was around 45.

From the network who was gathered, EWB is one of the leading organisations in Canada that is engaging youth in social justice. We are doing it through an asset-based approach. We start by recognizing the talents in everyone - from a chapter level where individual members are encouraged to find their place in EWB, to EWB's role in development which is built on the analytical skills of engineers but humbly recognizes the limitations that an engineering approach brings to development.

We are also big advocates of the strength and talents of individuals and communities in developing countries. We specifically talk about these people by their abilities to combat the relentless propagation that people in developing countries have tons of NEEDS and that we can help. One participant at the meeting, a baptist minister told a story of getting the people receiving the food to go behind the counter and go the giving. People grow more when they are on the giving side. So if we want individuals in Africa to grow, why to we keep on giving? Does that only help our growth? What I love about our overseas program is that it provides people in Ghana an opportunity to give. We send volunteers to live with families. I often hear volunteers say 'I feel I took more than I received'. This is great! We are swimming up-current when the majority of the development industry encourages people to 'communicate what you don't have - your needs, problems and deficiencies - to secure help from the outside.'

For the second half of ABCD, the citizen-led development, I think EWB understands this. With our new distributed model of an organisation, we strive to embody pushing as much power as possible down. Or rather, not taking the power away from those who are closest to the ground. This concept comes through Robert Chamber's books quite strongly - Who's Reality Counts, Putting the Last First, Putting the First Last.

Around the 'CD' there seems to be two definitions. One: citizen-led development, the other community development. I do think that EWB differs from the latter in that we don't see communities as homogeneous entities. We see them as having power disparities. We see that jealousy can sometimes prevent a community from cooperating.

My biggest recommendation for us within EWB, is to look at our work with a stronger asset-based lens. For example, with new members, we need to leverage their strengths better. With our work in Africa, we need to learn how to encourage our partners and us to start with what communities are able to do and move from there. This is a shift that I'm increasingly seeing is important to make with MoFA. One of the MoFA volunteers, Suzanne Fish, worked with 20 field staff in Upper West Region of Ghana to develop new ways of working with field staff that recognize that technologies don't need to come from research institutions but that farmers are able to innovate.

A life lesson I took away from this conference: label people more by what they are able to do than what they are disabled to do and they'll accomplish a lot more.

From clients to citizens - a paradigm shift

From Clients to Citizens
Day two of the workshop. I’m starting to gain a better appreciation for what ABCD means. It’s yet another approach with another set of terminologies and paradigm shifts. The subtle differences between asset based citizen-led development and participatory approaches (PRA) and appreciative inquire (AI) have yet to really hit me. The most significant difference seems to be the network which gathers around these various acronyms.
All of them emphasize the difference between solving problems and appreciating the positive. The positive (asset based) approach has been practiced in communities for hundreds of years – it can be seen in First Nation Reserves, it can be seen in villages in Northern Ghana. Unfortunately these communities have developed a dependency towards outsider support due to years of outsiders coming to them and asking ‘what are your challenges?’ ‘what do you need?’. We’re lucky that in society we are treated as the haves, people see us as able, not dis-abled, gifted, not poor, this view can have a lot of impact on how a person sees themselves and acts in the world.
If asset-based and community driven development is a good thing, then what is the role of the outsider?
A couple of lively conversations ensured today around the role of a field worker, a non-government organisation, the government. The discussion began with a reflection around the term outsider. Some figured the term visitor is more appropriate to the role. Implying that being invited into a community is key. Others figured the role is non-outsider, facilitating between the community and other institutions. The role brings with it inherent challenges and opportunities but in the end we agreed that it’s necessary to be honest about the value one brings as an outsider and to be clear about that to the community. In doing this, you remove the outsider/insider dichotomy and become a contributor.
A major benefit to being an outsider is that critical perspective you bring. Sometimes it can be under the guise of ignorance that allows you to ask the ‘unaskable question’ such as: why are only some members of the community at this meeting? This role is important and should not be discounted for the sake of chasing after a romantic idea that an outsider does not intervene in community activities. In some ways I have been an outsider during this conference, not really feeling like I’m part of the ABCD community I’ve asked some risky and controversial questions. I don’t often end up mustering up the courage to ask my question.
A couple of good readings that I’ve been skimming between breaks at this conference:
http://www.coady.stfx.ca/forum/abcd/Lucie%20Goulet.pdf
http://www.coady.stfx.ca/forum/abcd/saleela%20patkar.pdf

What's in a name

For a change, this post comes from Canada. I am writing from Antigonish, a town 180 km north of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The air is a bit cold here for mid-summer but the environment is warm. I’m standing in the corner of a beautiful room that is full of people dressed in vibrantly colourful outfits and lively conversation. We’re having our coffee break and I’m standing like a wallflower taking some time away to share this experience.
I’m celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Coady Institute. Coady Institute is part of the St. Francis Xavier University. It’s an internationally renowned development institute.
I am privileged to be here on behalf of Engineers Without Borders. Due to a generous grant I am eating, sleeping and travelling to this prestigious event. Because of this privilege I feel compelled to share what is happening so that the benefits can be shared.
This event is quite unique. I expected the typical workshop, a gathering of the minds where people have the opportunity to network and listen to speeches. However, the event is much more ambitious and creative, we as participants are expected to create something. We are expected to create ideas around a concept called Asset Based Citizen-Led Development, or ABCD.
Coming into this workshop I have very little idea about ABCD, and I still do. However after only 4 hours of sessions I am beginning to understand that ABCD is not an exclusive concept that has been branded by the development community and sold as the latest thing to learn in a workshop or in a book. It is a concept which we are able to explore, debate and attach numerous terminologies and language to. For those of you who are newer to the development industry, branding concepts and training people on them is an incredibly common activity. For those of you who are not new to the development industry, in a group of intelligent people you can understand how words are chosen very carefully.
These first 4 hours have brought up the question: How much value can be placed on a name?
A story related to this, I have met numerous people at this conference and had to explain over and over why engineers are not doing engineering work in development. Our name doesn’t actually explain much. However, it allows engineers within Canada to engage in EWB. It allows us to stimulate a community of engineers who are more globally conscious. It also misleads people as to what we are doing overseas. Below is a video which speaks more accurately about the work EWB is doing overseas!


As part of the creation of ideas, below is a poem written by Mam Adisa who works for the Africa 2000 Network, an NGO which EWB has worked with.

A dream come true Moses Coady
Yes that dream you dreamt
You dreamt when walking almost
Not noticing little details of
A normal walk
Because you were always deep
In thoughts for ‘how’ of
Better life for all
A life of the individual
In their own hands.

Yes a dream come true
Others after you with like minds
Are on your dream of ‘how’ for all
Communities over all parts of
The world are dreaming your dream
The dream you started.

Yes a dream come true.
Governments are changing all
Over the world for the
Dream of ‘how’ by all
‘How by all’ the dream of Moses Coady
A dream come true Moses Coady

We are here for the 50th year
Of your dream baby
Baby of ideas of ‘how’
The how school of development
By all
Moses Coady, Moses Coady, I saw Moses Coady your dream come true.

**Video** Accountability and Staying Longer in Ghana

Check out the video above. It's a small story of some vegetable farmers I started working with a year ago. Their attitude towards farming and hard work continues to impress me!

The video was put together for a gala that the EWB chapters in Saskatoon are putting on tonight.

Enjoy!

Observation in the dry season

The dry season brings with it spectacular views.

Look closely and you will understand what these people are all about. Observation is key.

It’s the dry season right now. The break between the last two rains was about 100 days. This is not unusual. Just the seasonality of the weather. And with the changing of the seasons comes a change in what people in Ghana do. The rainy season was an intense period where people worked long hours often sleeping on their farmland. It seemed there was nothing else on people’s minds except ploughing – planting – weeding – harvesting (a lucky few who have the resources and good access also thought of fertilizing and applying pesticides). During the dry season everything changes. People resort to other sources of income.

Making thatch is a popular past time for men.

What do they do? Answer: Anything they can. Some are more remote so their options are limited. The most common activity is collecting wood and making charcoal. This is evident from the dozens of bags that are stacked along the roadsides waiting to be purchased. The women in my household are a bit luckier – they live next to an urban centre so their options are more varied.

Preparing massive pots of food for one of the many celebrations which are had during the dry season. This takes advantage of the surge of income people have post-harvest and a bit more time.

The celebration: The head of my household becomes the 'chief of the young men' for Kanvilli community.
Memunatu and I pose during the chieftancy celebration.

This is why every week I’m surprised by what the women in my household are up to! There doesn’t seem to be an end to the small businesses they run. First it was selling boiled sweet potato at the school near my house, then it was processing a local seed into a paste that women use for soup (dawadawa), next processing peanuts to separate the oil. Both the oil and the by product are sold. Last week I joined in on processing shea nuts into butter. The process is long and complicated. I’m privileged to join in as the trade is mostly passed on from mother to daughter. I stepped in and joined the other young apprentices at the most enjoyable part – when water and air are added to the butter and it is stirred vigorously until a white creamy butter seemingly emerges from the brown fudge like substance I’d been stirring for the past half hour. My master took her job seriously and made sure I learned the proper stirring technique, even it meant embarrassingly highlighting my poor technique in front of the group.

The shea butter packaging centre located near my house.

Profile of another women during the dry season. Her name is Victoria Anamo. She is a widowed mother of 7. Four of the children are not hers but are from her late husband’s first wife. Victoria spends the dry season building her home. This season she is adding a wall – total cost $300 or one month’s salary. As the head of the household and single income earner the responsibilities to provide for the children all rest on her. Yet Vic doesn’t give up. She’s a strong and intelligent women who has even become a leader and role model in her community. Other women come to her for advice and help in times of need. And Vic’s generous nature provides.

Vic prepares a meal for myself and Shea Loewen, the volunteer who stays with Vic.

I got to know Vic because she is a MoFA field staff. Although she’s not trained in agriculture technologies, her natural ability to guide people and facilitate discussions makes her a talented field staff. She, like the women of my household are hosting a Canadian. It is because of this that I am able to understand Vic as a human being.

Vic and Shea hanging out at Vic's palace.

Spreading the message well

Exciting news! Eating local is in. Especially when it comes to Ghana Rice. EWB and the Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture are running a marketing campaign that promotes Ghana rice.
It’s taken just over a year but the message has spread! Just over a year ago I made a pledge, to only eat rice grown in Ghana. I’ve kept to this pledge out of commitment to the farmers I work with and to make a humble statement about the injustice of the situation of rice in Ghana – highly subsidized rice is imported and has been marketed to an extent that Ghanaians have shifted their preferences towards the whiter and less nutritious imported grains. This has been tough – rice is good! And at restaurants it’s rare to find local rice on the menu.
Some rice farmers enjoying Ghana Rice during a meeting! This was the first time EVER that the Ministry served Ghana rice at a meeting. Before then, it was always imported rice.
I am working on a marketing campaign that will help spread these messages. It’s an exciting initiative that tries to even the score for rice farmers in Ghana. They want everyone to know that their rice is more nutritious (it’s processed in a way that keeps the outer skin on which contains most of the nutrients). They want people to recall that it’s fresh (imported rice often sits in warehouses before being shipped overseas to be sold). Too bad we aren’t marketing to Western consumers. Nutritious and fresh food is what we Canadians are demanding these days!
But we are marketing to urban Ghanaians. The ones who eat rice more often are from middle-upper class families. So this is our target audience. Ghanaians do care about nutritious food, they value strength and in turn food that will make them strong. So that’s our pitch – nutritious rice.

Meymuna and Hawabu proudly marketing their quality rice.

The people who buy rice are often cooking it because they don’t have time to cook traditional meals. So rice that’s easy to cook is good. Unfortunately a lot of Ghana rice has a lot of stones in it. The stones come from when the rice is threshed and dried on unclean surfaces. The stones need to be removed manually before cooking which takes a lot of time thus defeating the purpose of cooking rice! Not all rice is dirty! The rice we’re marketing is so clean! That’s our second pitch – clean rice.

Drying rice on a clean surface.

Check out the jingle to hear for yourself! This jingle is being broadcasted across Northern Ghana. Listen to it three times and you’ll catch yourself singing this catchy tune about quality Ghana rice! Some of my friends love it so much they’ve put it as their ringtone!

Click here to go to the Ghana Rice jingle!

The campaign has been delayed by about 5 months due to the need to keep so many people informed. This has been frustrating but it’s ensured that any assumptions I make are questioned! The main one came when I was deciding what advertising medium to use.
Initially when I was designing the campaign strategy I hardly considered the radio. I figured the power of advertising would come from a really big signboard on the main road. But as the campaign went on I received some critical input that the message will be more strongly spread through the radio than visually. I made a classic mistake. I, and you, come from a world where visuals are important – who doesn’t own a TV? Who doesn’t know how to read? In Ghana, the radio is an essential element in most households. What’s spoken on the radio is taken as ‘the word’. I wonder how many outsiders make the same mistake as me, design their program making assumptions about the context and misunderstand the way people learn and what they need.

The visual - a big signboard will still be posted along the main road in Tamale.
My guess is too many! I tons of development projects that chart their course for failure from the beginning when they fail to understand ground realities. A crucial yet often underestimated element when a project is being designed from the ivory towers of Rome/Washington/Accra. This is where EWB comes in. We move from the ground to the towers using our credibility and mobility to communicate realities. We don’t normally design and implement development projects – that’s left to Ghanaians, this case is an exception that I’ve indulged in! We’ve found a niche in communicating ground realities to help ensure development decisions are well-informed. This is my mission for the next couple of years. It’s a new sort of job for me but one that I look forward to! A new medium for messages!

The Two Myths of Africa

I was initially inspired to write this year’s theme for ‘Blog Action Day’ is poverty. I’m a day late in posting (Blog Action Day was October 15th). The purpose of the blog action day is to create a discussion. I thought it would be interesting to discuss the two big myths of Africa. Read on…

Check out the picture below, what words come to mind?

A journalist friend of mine from Ghana recently asked me why the media in Canada only talks of the bad things in Africa? My response: “Bad news sells.” But it’s unfortunate that it also paints an inaccurate picture. I hope this post puts a splash of colour over the black streak that “Africa” has been smothered with.

To start with, the photo above is of Suli. Myth #1: Africans are poor. This myth could easily be propagated by the photo of Suli – a starving child in Africa that for only $1/day can be saved. But Suli’s just a boy who lives near my house and comes to visit his grandmother. He doesn’t like to wear pants and has those large imploring eyes that melt your heart. Suli certainly has enough to eat, bathes twice a day and is surrounded by mothers, sisters and a grandmother who loves him dearly. He will attend school when he’s old enough as his elder siblings have.

Contrary to the first myth, I look around me in Ghana and see wealth. It’s a wealth that is not commonly talked about in Canada. It’s the wealth of entrepreneurial spirit exemplified when Suli drags around a toy truck he’s made from used tin cans. It’s the richness of social support that exists between my family and in communities.

Years of the media marketing Africans as poor has created this perception in our mind (and inevitably in many Africans minds as well!)

Tofik - he lives at my house and is too young to think that 'Africans are poor'. He's just interested in wearing some cool shades.

Aside from living in a very cozy house, I’ve been working in Ghana with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture on a program called “Agriculture as Business”. The name is often interpreted to mean that we’re getting farmers to take agriculture as a business. But what does this really mean? Farmers, by default are operating a business. There’s no way you can farm and use some of your harvest to buy things like soap, cloth or school fees. Farmers are interested in turning a profit just like any other business-man. I asked my host father what he wants to do with his profits, he said he first wants to afford to feed his family, then send his kids to school and ideally put some money into home renovations and maybe get a motorcycle to help him get to his farm. He may not keep business records the way a Western business-man would but he’s certainly adapt at managing his business in this highly uncertain environment.

So that leads us to Myth #2: Poor people aren’t rational. This myth isn’t spread as explicitly as the first. It’s spread by development organizations though as they communicate their work to donors and the public at large. The message spread, especially with agriculture is that a certain technology or idea is needed to be imparted to people so that they can improve their lives. I didn’t understand why farmers didn’t plant their rice in rows, MoFA had been telling me that row planting is ‘the right thing to do’. They said they have problems getting farmers to ‘do the right thing’. In June I spent a day doing planting rice in rows with a farmer that MoFA had asked to arrange to demonstrate this technology to other farmers. I got a speckle bit of appreciation for the ‘right thing to do’ when at the end of the day we had 1 acre of rice planted in rows with precisely 20 cm by 20 cm spacing. It had taken us over 6 hours and roughly 20 people.

'Dibbling' or making holes in which to put the rice seeds.

The Crew

So was it worth it? Honestly, I can’t find the numbers to tell you. But farmers certainly experiment with these types of activities on their own and given the information they have at hand, their ability to take risk, social pressure and countless other factors they settle on what makes the most sense based on this complex reality.

So, just because farmers don’t adopt the technologies that are promoted by organisations doesn’t mean that they aren’t rational. Poverty certainly affects people’s priorities, their decisions and ultimately is reflected in their behaviours.

"Traditionally, farmers have either been too poor or too afraid to take a chance on these new varieties, even though they can triple their yields," – Expert in agronomics in East Africa

I think that this statement, are still too general to really understand the determinants of decision making and so the myth is propagated.

Check out the table below that analyzes the returns from fertilizer use from an experiment conducted in Kenya. Using the fertilizer amount recommended by the Ministry of Agriculture can increase yields by 90%, however, rate at a loss of 40%. While using smaller amounts of fertilizer (Panel B ½ tsp.) is more optimal for profitability! Yield and profitability are only two factors although they are the most scientific.

I have tried to understand the other less tangible factors. I have tried to place myself in the shoes of a farmer, removing the biases that the farmer is poor and irrational has been helpful but I still don’t understand the entire spectrum of factors influencing farmer’s decisions on their farm. It seems that neither does MoFA or the countless donors that fund development projects that try to influence farmer’s behaviours in certain directions.

What our Agriculture as a Business Program is actually about, is getting MoFA field staff and farmers to discuss these factors. To start by analyzing the profitability of crops, of using fertilizer of whatever agriculture activity the farmers are engaged in. To look at market opportunities. To talk about the risks. And ultimately see if this increase in analysis and thoughtful planning can help farmers make more from their business.

Sitting with farmers

Today is World Food Day (October 16th). Some people are fasting to remember the millions who lack access to proper nutrition. Some are discussing the political and economic situation around food. Some are discussing the challenges of climate change and bioenergy. For me I choose to think about farmers and remind myself to respect their business that brings us all food.

Tarsi - The grandmother of my house and a farmer I greatly respect.