Changing to (another) new blog

Hi,

Well, this blog, while only in operation for a few short months, is being wrapped up.

I've started a joint blog with Thulasy Balasubramaniam and Hans Hesse, two colleagues of mine from EWB, both of whom work in Lusaka, Zambia. We're using this new blog as an outlet for our work related ideas, though I'll still write a personal note from time to time. Together we're investigating future business plans here in Malawi and Zambia and have created this blog as a first step to networking ourselves and our ideas with others who are interested.

Check it out. It's called "The First Mile" and it's hosted here: http://atdaybreak.wordpress.com/

Graham

4 Ideas for agriculture sourcing systems

Note: this is still rough, but with limited internet access I decided to send it anyways. Apologies in advance for shoddy grammar, spelling, and the like

As an EWB overseas staff member I’ve been partnered with a private company, TreeCrops. My work is this: set up a system of depots along a strip of lakeshore from Mangochi to Monkey Bay that we be used by rural Malawians to process, store and bulk baobab fruit. TreeCrops buys this fruit and exports it to the EU.

This is my second week in the field. My first job was to clean up and outfit a depot in Maldeco, a small town north of Mangochi. Yesterday, the depot was full of Malawians industriously cracking, separating, and bagging thousands of kilograms of fruit, each in her or his own way. Charming, but troublesome when trying to have hygienic food-quality baobab pulp as our end product. 

So I chatted with each of the dozen folks at work, sat down and wore my hands a bit raw extracting baobab pulp and fibre, and observed how each person went about their work. I stayed until quitting time, then helped clean and close up shop.

There’s a lot of need for improvement to the workers’ processing methods. It’s clear, however, that to change workers’ from what they’re doing to what we’d like them to do is going to take more than lecturing and demonstrating repeatedly. Everyone processes his or her own way, and for a reason. I want to get behind their eyeballs and see their work as they see it so I can understand how they might want to change what they do.

Thinking of all of this reminded me of a cantankerous English development architect, Eric Dudley, and his principle of designing for “maximum tolerance to failure”. This Dudley principle urges me to think not of how fantastically efficient everything could be, but of how I could set things up so if everything that could go wrong goes wrong, I’ll still achieve my most basic goals for my work.

All of this thinking meshed well with my engineering background, particularly control systems courses. Here are four ideas of ideas that should be incorporated into designing workable systems for rural agriculture purchasing.

A useful metaphor to help explain things comes from a course project in which we had to design a control system for a ball on top a “balance beam” of two parallel stainless steel bars. A disturbance knocked the ball off centre and our system needed to tilt the parallel bars until the ball was again safely at rest. Here are some general principles.

1. Definition of failure

What do I actually consider a failure when it comes to processing baobab? Germs found in a sample? Foreign matter above a certain threshold? Different grades mixed together? Perfection may not be required (or much less be achievable). With the balance beam failure is easy to spot—the ball falls to the floor. With baobab processing, failure is a fuzzier notion. A first step for me will be to adequately describe what actually is processing failure before I can design to avoid such an outcome.

2. Response

When controlling a balance beam, if the corrective action is too slow the ball will fall before the system is able to respond. If the corrective action is too fast, the system produces all kinds of jerky over-reactions (called over- or under-shoot) that will never let the ball actually settle down. With baobab powder, how long can we have people using substandard processing methods before we “fail” and also, what are the dangers of trying to quickly swoop in and correct every minor infraction? There will also be lag-time for any corrective response, but finding lag-time that is neither too fast or too slow is tricky.

3. Convergence

I expect that workers will eventually find methods that work well for them, and get themselves into a groove; they won’t endlessly change how they processing the baobab fruit. I don’t expect everything to go right the first time, but I want their eventual methods to be sufficiently hygienic by TreeCrops’ standards. How do I get people to converge on these targets instead of diverging towards bad practices? With the balance beam, how does the system produce the right type of feedback (positive or negative) that will cajole the ball back to a standstill? For us, what type of feedback helps people track towards good practice, not away from it?

4. Variation

No dynamic system will be in one state 100% of the time. There’s always variation. Even with the best balance beam control the ball will still oscillate back and forth a bit without the system having to respond. So should it be with us. If we overreact at every minor infraction—someone forgetting to remove their shoes, a newcomer mis-sorting grades, an unswept floor—we’ll burn ourselves out while frustrating our workers and gaining very little. Every control system must accept some level of variation about its target.

Each of these four points is just an idea inside of a balance beam metaphor. I’ll have to get out there and see if they actually apply to what we’re trying to achieve. Luckily, my next objective is to set up three other depots. This reminds me of another principle: the lack of truth in small numbers. I shouldn’t be okay with drawing many conclusions from one depot, or one dozen people. I’ve got to get out and see much, much more.

There will be a herd of angry elephants

My new German manager, Chris Dohse, is—I’ll be the first to say—a bit of a nature nut. On my first field trip of my new job (I’m assisting his company to improve processing and harvesting of baobab fruit) we were hacking through vines and slashing our way through elephant grass in search of some rare medicinal plant to which Chris would only refer to by its traditional Latin name. Go figure.

This past week, he called to warn me (three weeks ahead of time) that Africa Parks will be rounding up a herd of fifty-or-so elephants west of the lakeshore (near our area of fieldwork) to relocated them to a national park down south. I half-expected Chris not to be warning me but to be looking for a way to get in on the action. Then something struck me: why on earth is Africa Parks relocating fifty-or-so elephants a hundred-or-so kilometers south?

I did some digging. Turns out that the government of Malawi has a relocation program where Malawians from the densely populated southern region of Chikwawa have been moved up into the Mangochi region (where we work). The newly relocated had a number of elephant complaints—absolutely shocking when considering they were relocated into the elephants’ backyard. Up until some of the relocated villagers had their houses trampled, nothing was done. Now, the Government of Malawi is organizing the elephants’ relocation.

It just seems to happen like that, doesn’t it? Humans make a mess of things (overpopulation), come up with a half-baked solution (relocation), which makes a brand new mess (elephant demolition), to which the answer is that Nature will now have to accommodate our inept new “solution”. The end product is that twenty years down the road the elephants’ original habit will be entirely destroyed by slash and burn farming and further overpopulation. Then it will be same old problem, but worse.

Chris foresees this all already, which explains his frequent exasperated “harrumphs” when discussion the subject. Whether the Malawian government sees the same thing or not, I’m not sure, but their course of action would either suggest they don’t, or that they’re caught between the rock and hard place of overpopulation and environmental degradation. 

(Maybe) why it’s hard to find a good mechanic in Malawi.

After my shock and horror of witnessing a Malawian “mechanic” use a stone and a chisel solution to what was my motorcycle’s 10-spanner problem, I stepped back and thought for a moment: why is it that a good Malawian mechanic is so hard to come by?

Truth is, most of the mechanic work I see here in Malawi reminds me of my own handiwork in junior high. If my bicycle chain was stuck, I took the garden trowel to it. If the bearings squeaked, I smeared grease indiscriminately until they didn’t. After finishing a particularly shoddy patch job on a blown tire, I tossed my dad’s tools into my mom’s flower bed. It seems these are also the methods of local mechanics.

This is my armchair answer for why my teenage ways are the modus operandi in Malawi: over the years Malawians were bestowed plenty of serviceable equipment, with none of the tools with which to service it.

The English were first. With independence in 1964, the colonial administration packed up for England leaving behind the electric transformers, the train tracks, and their one ferry in Lake Malawi, but took with them whatever wasn’t bolted down: the socket sets, spanners, welding torches and the like. This kicked off a generation of half-hearted repair jobs nation-wide. Following hot on English heels, NGOs arrived, put up plenty of infrastructure of their own, though never brought the tools or the parts for said infrastructure’s maintenance, and another round of in-a-pinch fixes were born.

Thus, today, while a boy who’d fathom using a set of vice-grips for pliers in places like Leduc, or Moose Jaw, or Brandon would earn a swift cuff upside the head from his father, this is simply standard practice in Malawi. 

Whirlwind trip to Zambia

Just got back from a whirlwind trip to Zambia.

It amazes me every time I travel to Zambia just how different it is from Malawi. There is big city life in Lusaka. There is huge mining activity in the Copperbelt region. The size of the farms in Southern Province dwarf the estates in Malawi. Victoria Falls—Mosi-o-Tunya, The Smoke that Thunders—is a sight so jaw-dropping it leaves me wondering if Malawi can ever wow me again.

Next door neighbours, yet just so different. Malawi, small land mass, scant urbanization, and high population density. Zambia, thousands of hectares of wilderness and 60% urban, 40% rural. I wryly joke to myself that if I ever want to find rapid development in Malawi all I have to do is drive West, straight into Zambia.

I am being a bit whiny, a bit over-the-top. Adventures always bring out wonder in me, though, and this recent adventure to Lusaka, Livingstone, and even to Mwinilunga near where Angola and the DRC meet, all have me hyped about the neighbour next door.

Luckily, this next week, I’m out adventuring in a region I’ve never been before: the south end of Lake Malawi. So expect my shine to be back on for Malawi. Just give me about a week.

A little homecookin'

My Japanese neighbour, Tomoko, and I hooked up to do a bit of home cookin’ this past Saturday. Pooling together her big salary (to by gross quantities of meat) and my little salary (to chip in for beer), we bbq-ed (or brai-ed, as it’s said in Malawi) and drank our way from mid-afternoon into the evening with the company of good friends and the luxury of Tomoko’s veranda. 

A highlight for me was seeing our landlord and landlady make it out to our little party. Mr. and Mrs. Kwanjani own my bachelor pad, and Tomoko’s house, along with a few other flats, and it’s to them that we pay our monthly rent. They’re both retired—and both sweethearts—so to see them stop in for a bit of chicken and some chickpea salad made our day.

Two days before our brai, Tomoko returned from a work trip out to Mchinji (on the Zambian border) with a live chicken. Giving a chicken to a visitor is standard practice in Malawi to a visitor of sufficient importance, but receiving a chicken isn’t quite so common for us non-Malawians. So, Tomoko stopped at the Kwanjani’s place and asked if they’d like to have the chicken for themselves. Being the kind folks they are (and realizing a non-Malawian was a bit out of her depth) Mrs. Kwanjani told us she’d keep the chicken inside tonight, and we’d all have chicken and nsima for dinner tomorrow.

Helping Mrs. Kwanjani with dinner preparations, I was quite sure I had never seen an animal go from “living” to “on-my-plate” quite so quickly. Can’t say that it diminished my appetite, though. Maybe it was how she cooked it, but that chicken was particularly tasty. (Here’s some pictures showing Mrs. Kwanjani doing her butcher work.) Though, at the end of it all, I was still glad we could just buy our chicken at the supermarket and skip the plucking and gutting.  

Less than a dollar a day

Enam and I spent our Easter weekend at the lakeshore: reading, relaxing, and eating pizza al forno. Seeing “Pizza Sundays!!” in bright, gaudy chalk letters on the specials board did make me look twice, but it really did exist, and it certainly was tasty. The cute English couple who manage the backpackers at which we stayed must have had a pizza hankering and a pizza business idea that coincided.

On Sunday afternoon, Enam bumped into a friend of his who offered us a ride in her truck back to Lilongwe on the next day. Nkhata Bay (where we were) is a good 400km north, which quickly turns into an 8-10 hour trip when you have to rely on minibuses and dumb luck. So, yeah, we accepted her offer.

My luck only improved that Monday morning when I climbed into the back seat and found a copy (albeit dated by a couple weeks) of the New York Times. Malawi is a bit starved for current events. Well, I suppose that’s not exactly true, there is, after all, two daily national newspapers. But while Malawians may love their Daily Times and The Nation, I don’t—too much poor grammar, too many mixed metaphors (though these sometime provoke fits of laughter) and too thin on international news of note. Thus, even a dated New York Times is kinda a big deal.

Flipping through the arts and culture section, something fell out of the sports section and landed on the floor of the truck. I leaned over to pick it up, and this is what it said:

LESS THAN $1 A DAY*

And with my brain being hardwired for these kind of things in Malawi, I thought, “Oh, another quaint tale about poverty in Malawi to solicit a donation.” Then I looked again and saw that it was an ad for a NY Times subscription.

Huh. The sale price of this newspaper, delivered daily, was more than what many Malawians live off of.

Don’t worry, I didn’t have a weepy-eyed reaction to reading this, and I didn’t fill up with anger either. For better or for worse, I’m way beyond that stuff. To me it was really the amazing quality of context that struck me. “Less than a dollar a day” could either be rolling off Rod Black’s lips, as he guilt trips you from a Sunday morning World Vision infomercial, or it could be the sales pitch of one the world’s premier newspaper dailies. I’ve gotta take note of this as a writer: the importance of context.

Ok, I’m not solely wrapped up in notions of how to improve my prose. It is pure global injustice that $1 is both a daily subscription price and a level of income that millions of people do not attain year in year out. But better to take something useful from it, though, instead of starting down a spiral of pity or shame. A pity party is the last thing that Malawians need. Being able to afford a daily newspaper would be a much better start.

Catching things up a bit

A few quick notes:

First, my boss, Mafayo Lungu, is back to being healthy. He called me this past week to check in, and he'll be in Lilongwe this week, so we'll meet up.

While I'll continue to call him "my boss", now that I've quit work at IITA I have to find a new working arrangement between Mafayo and me. I've put in a proposal to EWB to use some funds (less than $200) for travel and phone expenses to stay in touch with Mafayo and continue to nudge him towards sustainable success. He and I will work out the details this week, hopefully.

Second, I've found some very works interesting leads with Africa Invest, TreeCrops, and Fair Trade work in macadamia nuts in Malawi. All three of these companies are either designing or testing supply chain systems that involve small Malawian farmers. During this month of April I'm in discussions between companies and organizations such as these and my manager, Ka-hay Law. Between what our EWB team needs and what I'm interested in we'll have hopefully found a fit before the start of May.

Finally, in a week or so I'll be off the Zambia for a field trip and a visit or two. Jon Beale, a colleague of mine in Southern Province, Zambia, is helping host a large field day in conjunction with his sorghum project work which I want to attend. After that I'm hoping to make a bit of a trip of it and see Victoria Falls in Livingstone--this time of year, just after the rainy season, they're supposed to be quite a sight. 

It's been too long since I wrote and I hope this catches things up a bit.

Last day

Huh.

Today the acacia's are out in full bloom (regardless of the drizzling rain): bright yellow against dark green. The maize is tall and dry, almost ready for harvest. The weather has lost it's heat as we creep into the cool season. 

All just like a year ago.

One of the oddest things has been seeing Malawi one year on after my arrival. To spend an entire year and to see everything come around again: flowers, maize, weather. As soon as you see this repetition it's like an immediate jolt of perspective--you see things just a fraction more as Malawians see them: predictable, cyclical, with no defining end point.

This is it: last day at IITA. 

What comes next

IITA and I have now broken up.

It's official: I sent an email to the staff listserv today to let my colleagues know that I'll be leaving at the end of the month. All the details had been finalized with the Officer-in-Charge, Dr Hailu Tefera, and my department head, Pheneas Ntawuruhunga, weeks ago, but my public announcement was today.

I'm not much thrilled at good-byes, not these kind anyway. I suppose that up until Tuesday I'll be greeting a steady stream of bemused well-wishers at my office door armed with as many questions as 'thank-you's.

What's next in store for me and EWB in Malawi is to be decided. My manager, Ka-hay Law, and I have made plans for me to meet with all the organizations in Malawi involved in value-chains facilitation in the first two weeks of April to suss out their directions and capabilities. After that, the two of us will sit down and sift out the best options from this list possibilities. While half-baked projects and organizations abound, I'm still confident in our ability to uncover a good opportunity.

So we'll see what comes next for me in Malawi.

The Power Taboo

I think the work of EWB is much more about power than anyone has realized or has wanted to admit. 

It was funny: last week, the Southern Africa overseas team was busy preparing for a visit from Conservative MP, Deepak Obhrai, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The plan: to take him to rural sites where we work to explain the purpose and methods of our work.

Well, in the end, he didn't show. He called off scheduled field visits in Zambia, and cancelled plans for field visits in Malawi. Instead, he stopped into Malawi to seek support for Canada's bid to be a member of the UN Security Council, while meanwhile the Conservative government is in the process of closing Canada's office in Malawi because budget funds are being directed to Latin America.

All of this I'm not much upset about. It's simply politics. EWB hasn't rubbed up against politics much to date, at least not in the uncomfortable way of "we want something and they don't want to give it to us." Politics is easy when everyone wants the same thing: EWB's push for better aid was a lesson in that--who could say no, that worse aid was what they wanted? But when there is a desire (e.g. moving aid money to Latin America) that is opposed to another desire (e.g. EWB's for poverty reduction in Malawi, Zambia and Burkina Faso) then things get interesting and get difficult. And they usually get decided by those with power.

Power--it's a taboo word, for sure. All the way from the village chief, to the Parliamentary Secretary. But I believe it is fundamental differences in power that have us inside this global system of inequality. Which is why I want to get more power to small Malawian farmers, chiefly by economic-agriculture opportunities.

Related, but tangential: I read this article today, posted up on EWB's forum. It's scathing, but contains some truth to be sure. 

Link: We must all sneer and scoff at the corrupt jackasses of Africa

Author: Matthew Parris from The Times

Excerpt:

Heaven only knows what these well-paid and fashionably sunglassed recruits to "a career in Development" are in Africa for but it is not to bother the political elites. If you work in development in Africa and are not bothering a political elite you have some serious questions to answer about meaning and direction in your life.

Twitter

Twitter--what a damn neat idea.

Text messages from your phone get piped to your blog, making a quick update no more difficult than finding mobile phone coverage (which isn't too tough in Malawi; a benefit to post-colonial politics that carved out a narrow, land-locked North-South strip and said "Malawi!"). 

I've joined as of today for two reasons: one, phone coverage is a lot more readily available than internet access (especially when rural); and two, part of the fun of Malawi are the run-ins with the odd-reality of life much different from back home in Canada.

So, I'm going to aim for texting one message a day, to have my blog a bit more topical, a bit more tropical. Maybe I'm over-confident that one interesting thing happens to me each day. Or maybe Twitter was just too good an idea to pass up.

Fair Trade Thinking

I recently read an article on Fair Trade and its usefulness in development. A key point was (more or less) this:

Small farmers in developing nations have little market power. Fair Trade can be a private sector mechanism for increasing the power of these farmers to allow them to better shape their world in ways that suits them.

I liked it. In fact, I'm going to try to get into it. 

I think that, if really done well, Fair Trade local companies selling to international Fair Trade buyers could become the way economic growth could really connect with the rural African poor. If supporting a Fair Trade system that suitably gets rural farmers into the flow of international exporting could be the policy goal of Canada's foreign affairs/international relations (instead of haphazard projects littered across the African landscape) some change could really start to happen.

I'm looking to apply to a Canadian grant, the Gordon Global Fellowship, to learn more about the relevant policy challenges and try to connect the micro-level small farmers of Malawi with the macro-level flow of international trade.

Of course, this whole started grew out of a single well-written article--probably time to do more digging.

Update on Mafayo Lungu

My boss is sick with malaria and things don't look good. What was a common case of malaria for Mafayo Lungu has now become a prolonged, and seemingly futile, battle to become healthy.

I've been chafing all week at my need to be in the office. I had an important meeting between my managers from EWB and IITA today and had to stay in Chitedze to attend it. But all the while I know that Mafayo Lungu--my real boss in a way--is sick and worse up north in Kasungu.

I'm headed up to visit him on Monday morning. It makes me sick to fathom the possibility of him dying while I dither in Lilongwe. I don't know if I've ever felt so anxious about another person before--

Separated: urban from the rural

I’m angry at the sharp divide I see between rural and urban Malawians. What first seemed mild complacency by urbanites now looks to me more like the wishing away of a rural life altogether.

Putting on airs, dismissive tones, avoided glances, casual dismissals: I’ve seen all this in Canada before, but I was never suitable well-heeled to see all that much of it. In Malawi, however, I’m in with the thin strata of Malawians with NGO or government jobs and privy to seeing all of these social status trademarks on display, and more.

Especially on the commute to and from work. These days I’ve found a place in Lilongwe, a small one-room rental, and the work bus picks me up each morning and drops me off each evening. As we make the circuit to collect the IITA staff it feels that we’re a silent spaceship lifting a dozen or so choice Malawians from anonymous dusty streets into the tinted-window confines of status.

This status struck hard when, one morning on the way into work, the bus pulled to the roadside for staffers to by fresh peanuts from a vendor lugging a 50kg sack around on the back of his bicycle. The patronizing tones in haggling, the hard-bargain struck, the flaunting of a few small bills before handing them over in payment all made it abundantly clear to me: the Malawians I’m with see themselves as separate from the barefooted labourers tracing paths in and out of cornfields.

And as always, I may have the sentiment wrong; I may have misjudged, misread the signs. I might be conjuring sentiment where there is none—but the palpable claim to status that has long since settled into the upholstery of that work bus nudges me to believe otherwise.

Interesting article from Frank Rich

New York Times: The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, by Frank Rich

The article's dated by a month or more, but lately I've been thinking of similar issues though from the perspective or field-level Malawi.

What both Mr. Rich and I are wondering is why does it also have to be some internationally funded bi/multi-lateral organization--cumbersome at inception, more or less doomed from the get-go--that gets to try to improve the situation out here in Malawi? How about this instead: a company, delivering a product or service at a profit that creates a market to which small farmers can sell, using these profits to reinvest in the business to open up further opportunities for small farmers? Doesn't seem so bad, so whimsical, though the domain of small farmer economics seems forever dominated by non-governmental/non-profit organizations.

As Mr. Rich quotes Dan Pallotta in his article, "Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million helping cure kids of cancer? You're labeled a parasite."

Something to think about--maybe even a future possibility.

Starting a new blog

It's a new year; I need a new blog.

Sharing might not always be net-positive, but I'm fairly sure that I've over-erred on the cautious side: I've kept a lot bottled-up on my computer's disk space. 

New approach: the creative writing I've been doing, the thinking I've been scribbling down, the photos and videos I've sampled are all going to find an outlet here. My general philosophy on sharing ideas is that likely half the value is simply in the decision to share and in the intellectual honesty that is created. The other half is the benefits of new perspective, where less is less and more is really more. 

It's all going to be here, at this site. And all of it will be made better through reader feedback.