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.