How bright is Africa's future?

This is the question that some young Kenyan people asked me lately at the side of one of my work events. I was surprised by the question but got exited about finally being asked a relevant question about the world I live in. It turned out that i was actually talking to two bright young Kenyans who have decided to interview people they meet to create a YouTube channel to inspire other young people and show them pathways to contribute to brighten Africa's future.

So find here the first part of the interview.

And don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel!

Be the change you want to see : or how to empower African businesses to succeed

Last week, the annual  African Enterprise Challenge Fund conference took place in Nairobi. It was an amazing conference bringing together social entrepreneurs from the whole continent to share their experiences and learn from each other.

Often those events have a huge registration fee, and i always wonder how social entrepreneurs who use all their small money to make the change they want to see happen spend 600 usd to attend a 2 day luxury event. So when you go to these events, you meet a lot of "wannabe save the world" people, who talk a lot but there is nothing behind.

AECF conference was different, not only i was allowed to participate for free, but even my parking fee was covered (the organizer were extremely generous as interested people could just register and join). People who joined the conference all where running businesses with their ups and downs or were investors in such ventures. For me, with my emerging poultry enterprise, it was mainly a space to learn, to understand new trends, and discover that my philosophy is part of a bigger movement. 

I learnt so many things, from contract framing, to poultry and investment strategy, which cannot fit in one blog post only. So let me start a new series under the label AECF on this blog, and take you through each of the lessons learned in small steps.

For today, the first lesson is about what AECF is. I discovered that this is a fund that allows start-up with disruptive ideas in agribusiness to get funded. It is a fund that does not help poor people with hand outs or any NGO, it just support enterprise who have the potential to bring a change to the poor in a business environment.
  
The ​​African ​​Enterprise ​​ Challenge ​​Fund ​​(AECF) ​​is ​​a ​​US$250m  ​​challenge ​​fund ​​for ​​agribusiness ​​in ​​Africa, ​​established ​​ in ​​2008. ​​AECF ​​provides ​​support ​​to ​​the ​​private ​​sector ​​for ​​new ​​and ​​ innovative ​​business ​​ideas ​​in ​​agribusiness, ​​rural ​​financial ​ ​services ​​and ​​renewable ​​energy/adaptation ​​to ​​climate ​​change  ​​that ​​will ​​benefit ​​Africa’s ​​small ​​farmers ​​and ​​rural ​​ households.
AECF is supported by ​some ​of ​the ​biggest ​names ​in ​development ​finance ​and ​hosted ​ by ​the ​Alliance ​for ​a ​Green ​Revolution ​in ​Africa ​(AGRA). The aim of AECF is ​to ​encourage ​private ​sector ​companies ​to ​compete ​for ​ investment ​support ​for ​their ​new ​and ​innovative ​business ​ ideas. AECF ​provides ​the ​minimum ​amount ​of ​concessionary ​finance  ​to ​make ​business ​ideas ​happen ​that ​otherwise ​would ​not. 
AECF funds ​innovative ​business ​ideas ​in ​agri-business, ​rural ​ financial ​services, ​renewable ​energy ​and ​technologies ​to ​assist ​ small ​farmers ​to ​adapt ​to ​climate ​change. (Taken from here)



It is a fund in which big donors make finances available for businesses, and it is managed by a committee chaired by Prof. Rudy Rabbinge, who I came already accross during my PhD time at Wageningen University, reminding me how small the world can be.

On Friday night I left the conference with the conviction that AECF is  one of these unique schemes that does things right : helping people to invest into their innovative ideas to lift smallholders out of poverty with their own means and let the market decide what works and what not. Isn't that how aid should be?

Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!

An inspiring talk to start this new week!

Wanna be a pioneer of a new more equal North-South relationship?

How many of us living in the Western world wake up every morning, are frustrated from seining an unequal world, a huge gap between the North and the global South. Yet, there is so little one can do. Traveling to developing countries often brings you in a badly organized and expensive tourist track, that enables a few to get rich and all other remain poor. You enter into a closed world, where you see lots of monuments, you hardly meet locals except for the kids who run behind you to beg you for money or a pen. The only local you meet is the tour guide, who is one of the winner of the system and just ensures that you only see what the country wants to show. You come home with the bitter feeling that you did not visit that country. Your second option is to volunteer, but face it you cannot change the world by visiting a country for 2-3 weeks, and even worse you might actually take away a local job. Do you really want to do this? The third option is to make donations, but by now we all know, most of the money stays in the developed world to pay wages and nice offices. Aid has made poverty a business like baking and selling bread. People have to remain poor so that the aid industry to which you donate money can persist. Do you really want to support this?

The community lodge

Powerlessness we all face is source of a lot of frustrations, and only few of us wake up one morning and say, yes we can contribute to a new way to look at North-South relationships and invent new approaches that are more respectful of local traditions, and consider each human to be equally important and capable of taking decision about one own life. You might think, this is too difficult for me, I am just too small to change anything. If you think like this you are simply wrong, there are today easy options to be part of a different world.

Inside travel has the right solution for you : book a social tourism trip to Ethiopia. You go on a semi-organized tour, which makes sure that you are going to meet local people on the street, you live a normal day with a middle class family, you visit and try out handcraft in local NGOs, and finally you spend some days with a rural community, who is going to introduce you in its daily activities. You can learn how women are organized to help each others, the fears and dreams of the local kids, and when you come home, you know how to wave an Ethiopian traditional basket and make traditional coffee.

Interact with local people

And now you think, why am i a pioneer if i just go on a fun holiday? Inside travel is run by volunteers who insure that the money you pay is spread in equitable way in Ethiopia, we pay local (low but market conform wages) to people involved with us, whereas the margin on our trips is spread in the communities with work with, making sure that not one person but a whole community can benefit from tourism. For example, farmers involved with tourists will get a local wage, the difference with the price that the tourist pays, goes to a communal bank account. The community has clear rule how to administer that money and they decide as a community how they want to invest it. In this way the community has the power and the ownership of their projects (no NGO with strange donation rule tells them what to do). Basically, by visiting this community, you offer them the opportunity to work and raise money in dignity, they don't beg, they don't feel indebted, they get paid for services.The particular community we work with has decided to fund their own clinic with the money from tourism.

discovering everyday life

So you still believe that a different world in unreachable? Could i convince you that it might be easier than what you think? Wanna be a pioneer of this new North-South relationship? Then join our Easter tip from 10th to 21st of April 2014 ! check it out on www.insidetravel.ch

Join us for your next adventure

Swiss development cooperation in the Horn of Africa : a move towards pastoral areas

On the 5^th of December 2013, the second Swiss Development cooperation day took place at the Hilton in Addis Ababa. The objective of the day is to bring together all people related to Switzerland and to some development cooperation in Ethiopia. By chance, I was in Addis and could join this event, and see the evolution since the last development day.

After a quick introduction round, in which I could present Inside Travel, we got some presentations about BurnaNest project (creating a new town near Tana Lake), about civil society (which I could unfortunately not attend) and one on the evolution of the Swiss involvement in the Horn of Africa, by Manuel Flury, the representative of SDC in Addis. 

From the last one, we could learn that the Swiss strategy has changed. Whereas in the past the Ethiopian Highlands and land and water management was the focus, also thanks to the Land and Water resource center, there is today a clear willingness derived from the Swiss development policy to address the challenges of the drier areas of the Horn. 

The “whole government approach” of the Swiss development strategy for the Horn of Africa foresees involvement in 4 sectors, namely i. food security and rural development ii. health sector iii. good governance, state and peace building, conflict transformation iv. migration.

For the first sector, food security and rural development, three goals have been set : 1. Increased adaptive capacities of dry land communities to cope with drought and other incidents that trigger food insecurity (including food assistance as a coping mechanism in case of acute and chronic food insecurity) 2. Good practices of natural resources management (NRM), including water, are increasingly integrated to local, national and regional policies and institutions. 3. Improved need-based services for livestock production, dry land agricultural and local value chains, with focus on vulnerable persons, including women.

As the Swiss Embassy and the Swiss Development cooperation have relatively little experiences in these areas, they will work with a whole range of partners. In this perspective, a strategic partnership with IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) is in the process of being established (a memorandum of understanding is about to be signed). IGAD is composed of all the countries of the Greater Horn of Africa, is supported by several big donors and has the role of addressing divergent political interests among its members. Though its today still weak implementation capacities, IGAD is expected to increase its importance in the region also thanks to its close collaboration with the African Union.  

Research has always been an important component of Swiss involvement in the Horn of Africa. Is there scope for livestock and value chain research? What could the role of ILRI be? 

If you want to brainstorm these questions with Manuel, feel free to contact me.

find the official communication about the meeting here 

Why investing in smallholders? a review of FAO recent report by the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition

It was just a very decent and modest facebook post by FAO that triggered my interest : it was announcing an other report on smallholder agriculture. I clicked the link and discovered one of these reports that proofs that the world has changed. I just had a breathtaking read of what at first sight might look like a boring report.


download your own copy from this FAO website.


We know a lot about why smallholders are poor, why they are important, why they don't have access to markets and so on... we know all the pieces of the puzzle. But this FAO report, is the first of his kind that put all these puzzle pieces  together to form an image. It puts all the elements we know about smallholders in perspective, offering an integral overview and finally a good base to build upon.

The first thing that stroke me, who worked on farm diversification in the Netherlands and rainwater management of smallholders in Ethiopia, is that this report finally aknowledges that smallholders can be everywhere, not just in developing countries and that farm diverstification or pluriactivity is an option for smallholders around the world as it allows to spread risk and increase resilience of the livelihood. (for examples see my phd for the Netherlands or this post for an example in Ethiopia).

The second thing that makes me extremly happy, it that finally we have the recognition from the highest level that the time for context specific solutions has come. The report emphases that smallholders are around the world are very different, facing different challenges and therefore needing different support to implement context-specific solutions.
This idea, that  was not yet so widely spread when i started my post doc some two years ago, now has made its way, as the following movie with Carlos Sere (my former big big big boss today at IFAD) suggests.



As Carlos says in the movie, time a come not for ONE green revolution in Africa, but for a mosaic of green revolutions. The FAO reports brings the necessary building blocks for this mosaic together into one document allowing finally to see the full image.

To conclude, the report is a real call to invest in smallholders. It confirms that we have sufficient knowlegde about many technologies, however our understanding on where to promote them so that they fit the context is still lacking. Time has come to focus on multi-stakeholder processes and communication tools (see an example of this here) for which scientific (and often top-down) knowledge and local bottom up knowledge have equal importance and where the space is created to negociate solutions that match the needs and the context of the smallholders, whereever they are.



I hope that i will have the time in the up-coming weeks, to discuss in more detail specific aspects  of this FAO report. You will find those under the label FAO smallholder report.

Tourism for rural development, also an option for developing countries ?

Farm diversification into touristic activities, such as for example agro-tourism, has been recognized as an opportunity to diversify their income in Europe. Why could this concept not work in developing countries and lift rural poor out of poverty?

This week end, i joined a group of young and motivated people that took up the challenge to make tourism work for development in a small gurage village in Ethiopia.Two trips have already taking place.

Flyer for the next trip

The idea is to offer the tourist an opportunity to immerse into Ethiopian rural life, participating in every day rural life. Tourists pay these services, giving the opportunity for the locals to diversify their income and therefore increase their resilience.

Today, the group is not only preparing the 3rd trip but also starting to think about how to make sure that the value added of tourism is spread into the whole community. In other term, how can we make tourism work to become a sustainable, market based tool to promote bottom up rural development?  This is crucial to insure that tourism does not only benefits the few who provide services to the tourist but to the whole community and avoid that disparities in the community increases, making the poor poorer.

It is pretty challenging to find an efficient way to share benefits of tourism to the whole community. Maybe in the Ethiopian case one might make use of existing informal institutions. It is definitely an amazing challenging and interesting topic from which you are likely to hear more about on this blog.

Have a look at the website of the inside travel for more information about next trip.

Value chains in Ethiopia : Bill Gates' vision

Here is a movies from Bill Gates about agriculture and health in Ethiopia. It give a great overview of the current situation in Ethiopia.

This movie shows the importance of creating market access for smallholders. Market access does not mean to just be able to sell a product. It implies looking at the whole production chain, making sure that the farmers can access seeds and sell their product later on. The movie shows what it means to develop a value chain and points out some success stories in Ethiopia.




Also see the photo gallery from Bill Gate
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Topics/Development/Photo-Gallery-Agriculture-in-Ethiopia 

Rethink again, again : looking back on one year of Ethiopia

For those of you, who have followed my blog weekly, you will have noticed the longer Christmas break. It was time to stop, and take time for looking back on the last year, on one year of Ethiopia.
It has been an incredibly rich year. I talked to many farmers, youth, political leaders, poor and rich. When crossing developing countries, you can see many small battles that have been won : communities that have developed their own irrigation schemes, a hybrid potatoes that enable parents to pay the school fee of their kids or young people that successfully managed to start their own business. But there are also these frustrating moments when you realize that believes hamper innovation, when people are caught in a poverty trap when inflation hurts every one around you.
All the success and frustrating stories are the fuel to rethink again and again. After one year, the only thing that i have truly understood is that there is no silver bullet or an all-in-one solution, everything is so context specific. There are so many entry points to try to lift people out of poverty, but the right one has to be found in each specific solution and we still face many puzzles that we simply cannot understand.




On my flight back to Addis, I  read the book "poor-economics : a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty" by Banerjee and Duflo. (have a look at the book's website : http://www.pooreconomics.com/about-book). It is an amazing book, also resolving some of the big puzzles of development. As the poor usually have very little resources, economics has tended to ignore them. This books rewrites micro-economics, from the perspective of the poor, these "barefoot hedge fund managers", that in fact make much more rational choice that our usual average consumer. Because Banerjee and Duflo manage to undermine the macro dynamics of development with micro-economics of the poor, they manage to address some of the puzzles such as why despite of the high enrollment rate, so many kids are still illiterate or why heath care system for the poor do not work or why micro-credits is not always the miracle solutions.
Whereas like me the come to the conclusion that there is no silver bullet and we still ignore a lot, in their "in place of a sweeping conclusion" they come up with 5 things we do know about poverty and development.

1. the poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. Bringing simple pieces of information can make a big change in behavior.
2. the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are the more the "right" decisions are made for you. Many decisions poor are making aim at addressing the incredible amount of risk that they are facing. 
3. there are good reason why some markets are missing for the poor or that the poor face unfavorable prices in them. Technology and institutional innovations can be the key to address certain of the issues.
4. poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor. Many failures have less to do with some grand conspiracy of the elites to maintains their hold on the economy and more to do with some avoidable flaw in detailed design of policies, and the ubiquitous three Is : ignorance, ideology and inertia.
5. expectations about what people are able or unable to do all too often end up turning into self-fulfilling prophecies.Changing expectation is not easy but not impossible. 

"Despite these 5 lessons, we are very far from knowing everything we can and need to know. This book is, in a sense, just an invitation to look more closely. If we resit the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choice; if we accept the possibility of error and subject to every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox to effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do. Armed with this patient understanding, we can identify the poverty traps where they really are and know which tools we need to give to the poor to help them get out of them". 

This book is a must for all these who have given up believing that development is possible, and for all those who are working in development and need food for thoughts to understand the puzzles they face a little bit better.

What's the role of Switzerland in Ethiopia? report from the first Swiss Development Day

The Swiss Ambassador to Ethiopia, Dominik Langenbacher, invited all the Swiss development players to the first Swiss Development day, offering a a great opportunity to network, look for synergies and increase cooperation.
Many NGO involved in education and children were present, but also many NGOs invovled with natural resource management. Also representative from the National Centre of Competence in Research : North-South  http://www.north-south.unibe.ch/content.php/page/id/265 and University of Bern were present.

Thanks to the Ambassador and probably many other people, and maybe also thanks to the drought and the media sharing terrible images from this part of the world, the Horn of Africa is getting on the top of the Swiss political agenda. Next to the emergency humanitarian support from Switzerland to the region, a proposal to the Swiss parliament to be voted in August 2012 is in preparation. This proposal foresees to make the Horn of Africa a program area. This implies that the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), would be running significant projects in this area.

The major focus proposed for the area is agriculture and livelihoods, followed by health and governance. Also two "multilateral topics" for which Switzerland would like to contribute to are : a water initiative and food security. This sounds very promising as good natural resource management and agriculture are nowadays seen as the most contributing to better livelihoods in Ethiopia.

Even if Horn of Africa would not become a program area there is scope for better cooperation between the players, also between the scientific players. The Embassy already announced a meeting with all the scientific players! I hope that this day was the beginning of a better cooperation of the CGIAR (ILRI/IWMI and others) with the Swiss Research and Swiss Development cooperation.