How pinapple business can lift up a whole region.

Africa is potentially one of the most promising market for the up-coming years. Swiss TV visited Swiss people working in Africa and benefiting from these emerging market. Find here the overview of the whole TV program.

One Swiss, lives in Ghana and produces pineapple. It shows the challenges of producing fruits for the international markets, but also how innovative creative ideas can be implemented. A biogas plant using the residue of the pineapples to get the energy for his drying plant.



Usually when investor come, local smallholders loose their market, and do not really benefit from the trade and export market. In Ghana this is different.  Maik Blaser, who operates the company contracts local farmers to produce for him : he gives out the pineapple plants and guarantees buying the produce for at a price that is fixed in advance (future contracts). In this way, smallholders can benefit the export market, make money and send their kids to school.

Finally, the plant is hiring many people offering decent wages outside of the primary sector...

Working in Africa is definitely not easy, but creative solution can really make a change... this is just another good example that no NGO is needed to support Africa...

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

Save the cock!

In the Western world, meat production has become a real industry. Particularly chocking is the chicken production : half of the chicks are males, they don't give eggs and don't grow fast enough to give meat. So comes that half of the chicks, namely the male one are killed on the first day of live. Somehow, this is just such a waste.

A new breed is now being tested in Switzerland, for which the female are kept for eggs and the male fatten fast enough to become meat. So no first day killing anymore. However, this breed is less productive than the today's one.

Have a look at the report from the Swiss TV report about this new breed.

Is it the end of the quail dream?

Some time ago I had reported from a friend of mine who is breeding quails in the suburbs of Nairobi. At that time it was a tremendously good business. At that time, she was breeding the birds for resale to farmers who wanted to have quails, an alternative to chicken farming with low barrier to entry and low risk for diseases. In the meantime, the market has saturated, quails eggs can be found in the majors supermarket in Nairobi, at a pretty high prices (around 4 dollar 12 eggs, while 6 chicken eggs are less than a dollar), and prices both of one day old chicks and eggs start decreasing.

Prices from the old time

Because she has discovered that many people just come to learn from her farm, and that this is taking a lot of time, she decided to charge for a visit. Also a way to diversify income.

Young quails waiting for a buyer

For the first time since she is raising quails, she has animals that she has not sold in advance, suggesting that market has reached its saturation, and she has to lower prices to get a market for her birds.

Now, it is about staying in market and to find the profitable value chains for quail products. But given that she has been one of the first to be in market, I am convinced she will make it.

An hommage to Marthijn Sonneveld

When you write a PhD in the Netherlands, you not only get a supervisor, a well known professor who mostly has not time for you, but also two or three daily supervisors, younger scientists who are assistant professors. The great thing of this approach is that you get to work closely with people who have time for you. It does not come as a surprise that these people really influence your vision of the world and science.

At my PhD defense : Marthijn, Jan Huigen (the farmer who initiated my research project), me and Roel

Marthijn Sonneveld was one of my daily supervisor, next to Jetse Stoorvogel and Roel Jongeneel. He was probably the most silent one of all the three, nonetheless his understanding of soils and how they influence the landscape dynamics had a deep impact on my PhD. Not only he had great knowledge about Dutch soils, it formation and use, but he was passionate about teaching. He was not afraid to stand in the field and dig deep wholes to show concretely what he is talking about. Like no one else he was capable of explaining relationships of soils with the landscape as a whole in a easily understandable and yet fascinating way. I guess Marthijn taught me to appreciate and feel home in the openness of Dutch landscapes.

During on of the excursion with students in Friesland

Also Marthijn had a great network of stakeholders through out the whole of the Netherlands. He was one of the few scientists in my surroundings, who truly tied contact with Dutch non scientific partners to make science work for people out there in the landscape. I got a lot from his vision about involving a broad number of stakeholders to answer societal questions, something I try to keep doing in my daily work at ILRI.

Marthijn passed away before the end of the year 2013 after a short fight against cancer, leaving behind a young family. It left me, like many of my colleague speechless in front of powerlessness that we faced and filled me with a deep sorrow. I am glad and privileged that i got the chance to work with him and learn from him. He might have left us, but his ideas and visions will remain and evolve through us, students and colleagues who had the chance to interact and learn from him.

May his family and close friends get a lot of strength to overcome this difficult time and may he rest in peace.

The openness of Dutch landscapes

Meat Atlas : the global dimension about those animals we eat

Especially in the Western world, meat is seen as a bad. Indeed, livestock production accounts for about 18% of the greenhouse production, it requires more land and water to feed one person than on vegetarian diet.With the increased globablisation, impact of livestock production can be exported to poorer countries. A well known example is the cut rainforest in Brazil to grow soya that feds cows in the Netherlands.

The emerging economies (such as China or Brazil) have a growing middle class that demands more animal protein, and the trend of increased globalized negative impact will pressure on the environment, especially in the poorest country where short term economic benefits is weighted more than the environment.

But livestock is not only a curse in developing countries, it is also an opportunity. Livestock play a key role in many smallholder systems : they create manure used to fertilized fields, they bring in the healthy animal protein into very unhealthy diets of the poor, they act as bank, they are mean of traction. The benefits of making livestock smallholder systems more productive definitely overweight the negative aspects of livestock production. The latter is often forgotten in the debates in the Western world, missing out on an opportunity to think about how to support smallholders to improve their livelihood and diets.

This week, I came across the Meat Atlas, a report from friend of earth Europe, that presents all these globalized aspect of meat production in an easy but nice spatial way. Their aims is to  present a global perspective on the impacts of industrial meat and dairy production, and illustrates its increasingly devastating impact on society and the environment. The way we produce and consume meat and dairy needs a radical rethink. The cover a broad range of livestock related topic, focusing mainly on the industrialized meat production but also cover discussion about some small scale production in Africa. It aims at polarizing, so pushing forward the negative aspect of livestock and missing out the discussion of the positive aspect of livestock in developing countries. Nonetheless it is a nice presentation of existing statistic, and an eye opener to the troubling facts about what we eat.

So get your own copy here!

Bringing order into chaos

The year 2014 arrived so fast, and i did not have the time to have my traditional reflection on the past year up until today. In many perspectives the year 2013 has been a year to bring order into chaos. I just had left Ethiopia and moved back to Switzerland, to take time to relax, but also get healthy again. It was a year, to reflect on the meanings of life, of the meaning of working in a developing country, of dedicating one's life to rural areas and its people. I traveled the world, namely Philippines, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Kenya for job interviews and consultancy work and to Ethiopia for inside travel, a social enterprise that uses tourism to bring new opportunities to rural communities off the classical tourism route.
My life in 2013 felt a bit like visiting big African city, such as Nairobi or Addis, trying to figure out where to go, and especially how. You know there are bus lines, but you don't know where they stop, where they go, nor where you need to switch. You end up walking around lost, talking to people, trying to figure out what's the best way to go further. So that's what i did, for almost 6 months, working as a consultant, checking my option and figure out where my life should lead me. By mid of the year, i had a clearer vision of where my life could go, with four job offers on the table. Suddenly, i had to choose. My health was good again, and my heart felt very strong about going back to Africa. My two years of Ethiopia, taught me that i will never save Africa, nor do these people need me. But Africa, especially Kenya, has a lot to offer, there is an emerging economy with a generation that has the chance to reinvent a modern Africa. It is a place to be part of what is yet to come. By end of 2013, my cargo was ready, and my new year day started with a one way flight to Nairobi, where i join ILRI as a GIS analyst.

So I start 2014, knowing which bus line my life is taking, i have a clue about which route it is driving, but not where it will ends ups. I guess in life one never knows. Funnily, at the same time, i found the matatu (bus) line maps for Nairobi, which helped me a lot to navigate through this crazy city during these first days. And it has worked, i got around in town smoothly.

So I wish you a very happy new year full of interesting paths, hoping that one of them will lead you to Nairobi to visit me. Hopefully the matatu maps will help you to reach my place :-).

And just in case you would need direction to other areas of the town

Find the map here . (jambo nairobi)

Embed your google earth map in your website

The Inside Travel team asked me whether it is possible to show the destination with picture and tourist offer on a map in our webpage. I had no clue about who to do this, but my intuition said, it should be possible, and indeed it is and it is quite simple : you just need to do the following steps :

1. In google earth, you can create you own layers, named kml files (native google earth geo-data format not to be confused with a famous airline name). In my particular case i added placemarks for the different destinations. You can even add pictures that are on the internet, and description (https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148142?hl=en)
2. save the kml file to the computer
3. load the kml file to a server (such as google drive or google sites) 
4. use the google reach out gadget found here 
5. indicate the link to the kml server file, and choose the setting
6. get the code and embed it into your website (with a html widget for wikispaces or blogpost)

Find here the google support concerning embedding a google earth project. 

Interesting in this procedure is that all the data need to be on the internet. Crucial is to find a stable location and not use links that depend on others (for example using a picture on Wikipedia) which could be removed.
One option is to put all the documents on google solution, namely using picasa for the picture and google drive for the klm file. But I just discovered another elegant solution is to use a google site (find google explanation here). Google sites allow to have webpages made in a very simple manner and has a feature called "file cabinet". A file cabinet is like an FTP server that is hosted by google and can easily be linked to any website or can be used in the Google gadget above. The advantage of the file cabinet is that all the documents needed to embed your map (pictures, text, kml) are stored in one location only.

Pretty cool, what google allows you to do with maps. This could be a smart way to present agricultural research results in a spatially explicit way and is definitely a feature you will find back on the new Inside Travel website. Until then, try it out yourself, it is less difficult than what you might think!

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 

Overcoming the middlemen : an example from Kenya

One reason why smallholders remain poor in Africa, is the lack of transparency about the market price of food. As smallholders do not know the market price, middle men have a lot of power and push the price down. Several options exist to overcome the middlemen's power. In Ethiopia for example, real time screens in major market towns show the current market price of most agricultural products. This week, i found another interesting option, that has been implemented by a young Kenyan smallholder : a website to share information but also create a virtual market place to connect smallholders directly to each other for agricultural input and to consumers for agricultural output. Like in Europe, some farmers decided to develop short supply chains to avoid the middle man. A great initiative, check it out yourself  : http://www.mkulimayoung.com/