A Volunteer Visit and a Stakeholder's Meeting
I’m sitting by the pool at the Golf, the local overpriced tourist hotel in Kakamega. Notebook computer in my lap and a beer on the table, I’m just trying to relax and gather my thoughts a bit. This last week has been busy. Between my poultry project, the wheelchair fundraiser, and working with the farmer’s network it’s been pretty much nonstop lately.
First some good news: My bike is back! Things are so much easier now that I am peddling myself around. The bike mechanic at Peace Corps overhauled everything and replaced almost every part, so I’m hoping it will get me by for awhile without any serious problems.
Last weekend I visited my Peace Corps friend Maria. She lives outside Kericho, the tea-producing capital of Kenya. She lives the quintessential Peace Corps experience. The trek to her house involves a 40-minute matatu ride from the nearest town followed by an hour-long walk on an eroded path into a valley. The path is so bad that even bicycles can’t use it, and during the rainy season it is almost impossible to use even by foot. It’s all downhill to her house, and her rustic wooden cabin is nestled at the base of an amazing green valley filled with colorful birds. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve been in Kenya, and there’s really not much I can put in words to describe it. I’ll post some pics soon although they won’t do the view much justice either. She lives without electricity or water, and gets most of her food from her garden or from the cows and chickens that are being raised by her neighbors. Maria lives in balance with her surroundings and I felt at peace with myself while I was there. It seems to me that often times the materialism and wastefulness in Western culture does more to complicate people’s lives then to make things easier. I sometimes fear that the culture shock of going back to the states will be far greater than the struggles I faced adapting to life in Kenya.
Because Maria lives so far from other volunteers and it’s so difficult to take the path back to the main road, she’s become a part of her community in ways most volunteers have not. Her closest friends are Kenyan, she’s been invited to nearly every house in the valley for chai (tea), and she speaks the best Swahili of anyone in our group. While many of the volunteers are unhappy and meet every weekend to drink heavily, gossip, and complain, Maria is truly content.
The last week was productive. I have the proposal drafted for the Wheelchair fundraiser and hope to drop it off at the Nairobi office on my way to Thanksgiving dinner with an embassy family next week. I also had a chance to schedule some big meetings and make connections that I hope will really help Kenyan farmers. One of these is with the president of the Kenyan Agricultural Commodities Exchange. His organization is supposed to be linking farmers to markets, but despite all the international funding they are receiving to achieve this they have done nothing, as far as I can see, but acquire a list of small-scale producers wanting to sell their crops. I want to sit down with the guy, discuss what KACE is actually doing to help farmers, and see if there is any reason to continue paying an annual subscription fee for their services. KACE also provides daily price updates on what different crops are selling for at various markets throughout Kenya. The prices are high, but the problem is that these are the prices that brochures and traders (e.g. middlemen) are getting. The farmers continue to be paid bottom-dollar.
We had the first annual UN FAO FFS stakeholders meeting in Kakamga last week. Representatives from Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya were in attendance, as well as several of the big fish from the UN FAO headquarters office in Rome. I had a chance to talk with some of them, including a Danish marketing consultant named Esban. I spoke to Esban about some of the struggles we are facing with marketing in the network, and he agreed that a big problem is that so many NGO’s try to assist farmers but do not really understand the market. I told him about my experiences with the sweet potato and we came up with the concept of “NGO-promoted Production Driven Marketing”, meaning that organizations are telling farmers what to grow without actually bothering to see if the prices they have been quoted or the market is realistic. I see this time and time again. There is a historical trend of farmers being promised the world, investing in a certain crop, then finding the market has bottomed out, leaving them worse off then when they started.
Esban and I spoke for awhile and he wants me to act as an in-country marketing researcher to better understand profit margins for various players throughout the supply chain. He wants me to go to open air markets, talk with brokers and traders, and basically try to learn what they are paying, their selling price, what their expenses are, and how many channels the produce goes through from the farmer to the end user. It’s surprising this has not been done before, but middlemen and market brokers often act like a cartel, in that they lock down prices and keep outsiders from getting into their business. I think this is also why KACE has been failing in assisting farmers. If a farmer were to take his produce to an open-air market himself he could very well find he would be unable to sell his crop without first going through one of these brokers. This leads me to think: Why can't the Network itself function as a broker to the farmers, thus giving them better prices? I have been told I will meet some resistance in trying to get pricing information, but since I’m a mzungu I doubt I will be perceived to be as much of a threat. Esban is also willing to give me an expense account for paying people off for information, traveling to the markets, etc. He even wanted to pay me a bit, and I haven’t decided whether to take him up on that since technically I’m a volunteer and Peace Corps would throw me out if they found out. So basically, I get to be a spy, which is pretty exciting. I think my alias will be that of a research student trying to gain information on Kenyan markets for my graduate thesis, while secretly working to overcome a sinister cartel. Very James Bond like.
Another big fish I met is the FAO representative for Kenya. Our farmers have been well trained in Sweet Potato value addition and between the 10,000+ farmers in Western Kenya there is the potential to produce literally tons of nutritious, vitamin A rich flour every month. The problem is there is really no market for it. Meanwhile, the World Food Program, another division of the UN, is sending massive amounts of relief food to refugee camps and starving people throughout Northern Kenya and neighboring Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Wouldn’t it make sense and be a win-win situation for everyone if this food was purchased from local farmers? Since, in theory anyway, the intention of these UN programs is to pull people out of poverty and improve their lives, it seems reasonable. However, this is not the case. The food comes from the United States. Is it also heavily subsidized, to the point that is more cost- effective for the UN to purchase a shipment of maize or grain from the other side of the world, then ship it across the ocean, then to buy locally. How is the US helping the world with this approach? Or maybe that’s not their intention at all. It seems that buying produce in-country would be a good starting point for a self-sustainable infrastructure that the local government could eventually take control of.
Anyway, I was able to convince the FAO representative that perhaps a small portion of the multi-billion budget of the World Food Program could go to local farmers, and he agreed. Although a date is not confirmed, he has committed to go with me to a meeting with the Kenyan head of the World Food Program and try to make a case. I hope for the best.
So that’s about the latest. Oh, I also finished putting all the network crop information into a database so now I have an idea of what farmers are growing and when it will be ready. I hope to use that to make a case for assistance when I meet the KACE president next week. All in all things are going well, but just as I was thinking I was finishing up on so much I’ve stumbled across these huge new projects. At least keeps things interesting. By the way, I’ll be home in just a month now!
First some good news: My bike is back! Things are so much easier now that I am peddling myself around. The bike mechanic at Peace Corps overhauled everything and replaced almost every part, so I’m hoping it will get me by for awhile without any serious problems.
Last weekend I visited my Peace Corps friend Maria. She lives outside Kericho, the tea-producing capital of Kenya. She lives the quintessential Peace Corps experience. The trek to her house involves a 40-minute matatu ride from the nearest town followed by an hour-long walk on an eroded path into a valley. The path is so bad that even bicycles can’t use it, and during the rainy season it is almost impossible to use even by foot. It’s all downhill to her house, and her rustic wooden cabin is nestled at the base of an amazing green valley filled with colorful birds. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve been in Kenya, and there’s really not much I can put in words to describe it. I’ll post some pics soon although they won’t do the view much justice either. She lives without electricity or water, and gets most of her food from her garden or from the cows and chickens that are being raised by her neighbors. Maria lives in balance with her surroundings and I felt at peace with myself while I was there. It seems to me that often times the materialism and wastefulness in Western culture does more to complicate people’s lives then to make things easier. I sometimes fear that the culture shock of going back to the states will be far greater than the struggles I faced adapting to life in Kenya.
Because Maria lives so far from other volunteers and it’s so difficult to take the path back to the main road, she’s become a part of her community in ways most volunteers have not. Her closest friends are Kenyan, she’s been invited to nearly every house in the valley for chai (tea), and she speaks the best Swahili of anyone in our group. While many of the volunteers are unhappy and meet every weekend to drink heavily, gossip, and complain, Maria is truly content.
The last week was productive. I have the proposal drafted for the Wheelchair fundraiser and hope to drop it off at the Nairobi office on my way to Thanksgiving dinner with an embassy family next week. I also had a chance to schedule some big meetings and make connections that I hope will really help Kenyan farmers. One of these is with the president of the Kenyan Agricultural Commodities Exchange. His organization is supposed to be linking farmers to markets, but despite all the international funding they are receiving to achieve this they have done nothing, as far as I can see, but acquire a list of small-scale producers wanting to sell their crops. I want to sit down with the guy, discuss what KACE is actually doing to help farmers, and see if there is any reason to continue paying an annual subscription fee for their services. KACE also provides daily price updates on what different crops are selling for at various markets throughout Kenya. The prices are high, but the problem is that these are the prices that brochures and traders (e.g. middlemen) are getting. The farmers continue to be paid bottom-dollar.
We had the first annual UN FAO FFS stakeholders meeting in Kakamga last week. Representatives from Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya were in attendance, as well as several of the big fish from the UN FAO headquarters office in Rome. I had a chance to talk with some of them, including a Danish marketing consultant named Esban. I spoke to Esban about some of the struggles we are facing with marketing in the network, and he agreed that a big problem is that so many NGO’s try to assist farmers but do not really understand the market. I told him about my experiences with the sweet potato and we came up with the concept of “NGO-promoted Production Driven Marketing”, meaning that organizations are telling farmers what to grow without actually bothering to see if the prices they have been quoted or the market is realistic. I see this time and time again. There is a historical trend of farmers being promised the world, investing in a certain crop, then finding the market has bottomed out, leaving them worse off then when they started.
Esban and I spoke for awhile and he wants me to act as an in-country marketing researcher to better understand profit margins for various players throughout the supply chain. He wants me to go to open air markets, talk with brokers and traders, and basically try to learn what they are paying, their selling price, what their expenses are, and how many channels the produce goes through from the farmer to the end user. It’s surprising this has not been done before, but middlemen and market brokers often act like a cartel, in that they lock down prices and keep outsiders from getting into their business. I think this is also why KACE has been failing in assisting farmers. If a farmer were to take his produce to an open-air market himself he could very well find he would be unable to sell his crop without first going through one of these brokers. This leads me to think: Why can't the Network itself function as a broker to the farmers, thus giving them better prices? I have been told I will meet some resistance in trying to get pricing information, but since I’m a mzungu I doubt I will be perceived to be as much of a threat. Esban is also willing to give me an expense account for paying people off for information, traveling to the markets, etc. He even wanted to pay me a bit, and I haven’t decided whether to take him up on that since technically I’m a volunteer and Peace Corps would throw me out if they found out. So basically, I get to be a spy, which is pretty exciting. I think my alias will be that of a research student trying to gain information on Kenyan markets for my graduate thesis, while secretly working to overcome a sinister cartel. Very James Bond like.
Another big fish I met is the FAO representative for Kenya. Our farmers have been well trained in Sweet Potato value addition and between the 10,000+ farmers in Western Kenya there is the potential to produce literally tons of nutritious, vitamin A rich flour every month. The problem is there is really no market for it. Meanwhile, the World Food Program, another division of the UN, is sending massive amounts of relief food to refugee camps and starving people throughout Northern Kenya and neighboring Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Wouldn’t it make sense and be a win-win situation for everyone if this food was purchased from local farmers? Since, in theory anyway, the intention of these UN programs is to pull people out of poverty and improve their lives, it seems reasonable. However, this is not the case. The food comes from the United States. Is it also heavily subsidized, to the point that is more cost- effective for the UN to purchase a shipment of maize or grain from the other side of the world, then ship it across the ocean, then to buy locally. How is the US helping the world with this approach? Or maybe that’s not their intention at all. It seems that buying produce in-country would be a good starting point for a self-sustainable infrastructure that the local government could eventually take control of.
Anyway, I was able to convince the FAO representative that perhaps a small portion of the multi-billion budget of the World Food Program could go to local farmers, and he agreed. Although a date is not confirmed, he has committed to go with me to a meeting with the Kenyan head of the World Food Program and try to make a case. I hope for the best.
So that’s about the latest. Oh, I also finished putting all the network crop information into a database so now I have an idea of what farmers are growing and when it will be ready. I hope to use that to make a case for assistance when I meet the KACE president next week. All in all things are going well, but just as I was thinking I was finishing up on so much I’ve stumbled across these huge new projects. At least keeps things interesting. By the way, I’ll be home in just a month now!
posted by KenyaJoe at 2:48 AM
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