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Thoughts On Development: A Five-Part Post

I’ve spent almost an entire year in Ghana and with my date of departure back to Canada fast approaching I’ve been doing some serious reflecting on the development industry and the many challenges it faces.

I’ve brought together my observations and learnings from the past year into the following 5 posts.

With any luck I’m hoping these stories get us all thinking more critically about agricultural development and how we need improve this industry make sure our efforts are having the most benefit possible for the rural farmers we’re trying to support.

Happy Reading!

1. Strong Groups = Strong Projects

Quality farmer group capacity building is a corner stone to development project sustainability and efficacy. But why then, are the time and resources required to effectively strengthen and develop groups routinely underestimated?

A typical approach for a project is to ask the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to find them groups to work with. The sentence “I need 20 groups who are willing to farm cashew with 25-30 members each and there should be a gender balance” is one example and “We want to work with only extremely hard working poorest-of-the-poor farmers” somehow, is not seen as an unreasonable request.

These requests neglect the needs and circumstances of the actual farmers, and instead put the needs of the donor and the project first under their mandate to execute a particular task.

But with the promise of a bonus from the project, the Extension Agents go out and often have to throw together farmer groups for the project because none of their existing groups fit the project’s specifications. Then project staff show up and expect the groups to be fully functional and ready to receive both complex technical training and a huge loan.

From what I can tell there are two basic reasons why projects insist on working with groups and not individuals. In the eyes of the project staff, if they give a loan to a group, repayment will be better; if one farmer defaults, the other group members can be forced to pick up the slack. In a newly formed group, this means each member is liable for the mistakes of the others whom she may or may not trust.

In addition to the “better” loan repayment rates, development projects are always going to want to work with groups because it is simply too time-intensive to work with each person individually. If we accept this, then we must look at how we can make groups more functional.

First we must recognize that groups are always in flux: They are constantly being formed in response to donor project demand; members are added or drop out for countless reasons; and they often change crops, processing activities, and other farming activities based on fluctuations in the markets (which is a good thing!).

To make the best use of development projects and to be prepared for them when they come, the best thing an Extension Agent can do is consistently work at strengthening the groups she/he has. And the best thing a project can do is allocate enough time and resources in their planning and budget to allow the Extension Agents to do this job effectively.

Proactively working with the members of farmer groups ensures the groups have high trust, good decision-making processes, business skills, and a solid relationship with the Extension Agent who will inevitably be implementing many of the project activities.

Project success (i.e. improvements to farmer livelihoods) relies on initial group strengthening and skills building that can help the group decide if they even want what the project has to offer and make the most of the project support when it comes.

2. The Numbers Game

Project documentation has a funny habit of over-estimating the number of households the project will be able to reach. When questioned on the achievability of the 372 000 households one project was expected to reach, an employee of the donor agency responded “Oh, that’s just a number that was estimated as the project was being designed. Don’t worry about that.”

But I do worry.

To give you an idea of how outrageous this number is, here’s a little math:

One Agricultural Extension Agent (AEA) using EWB’s Agriculture as a Business program can do a good job of effectively strengthening about one farmer group every two months while still carrying out their regular work. If we estimate that there are 250 active AEAs in Ghana’s northern region, and 10 households represented in each group on average, it would take 24.8 years to reach 372 000 households assuming every AEA worked constantly until the job was done.

Obviously, taking the EWB approach is not going to fit the requirements of most projects. Instead, to reach all these households, I’ve seen most projects adopt the Training-of-Trainer approach to outreach.

What this looks like on the ground is that the project hires an agency, who recruits multiple local NGOs in all the project’s operational areas. Then the agency trains the local NGO employees to train MoFA staff to train farmer groups.

After this training of trainers, the local NGOs go into the districts and train the MoFA staff to strengthen farmer groups. Then the MoFA staff head to the field to meet with and train the farmers.

Each step in that long chain takes a chunk of the project’s budget thus diverting donor funds away from the intended beneficiaries. In the end, the result is:

§ Very little money is left to pay MoFA and the AEAs to get to go the field and actually train the farmer groups;

§ Training techniques and topics that are mandated by the project are diluted at each level as the skill and understanding of the facilitator decreases; and

§ The training farmer groups receive is time-limited due to the emphasis on quantity over quality.

So what’s the answer to all this? Simply put, projects need to do a better job of setting goals that are in line with the time, people and resources available to them instead of trying to make the project sound better than is realistically possible.

For example, this could mean limiting the geographical area covered by the project to maximize field time and make sure it’s spent with intended beneficiaries instead of on the road.

Additionally, projects need to have stronger ties to the ground to ensure quality. One way is to hire enough field staff to work directly with the intended beneficiaries and/or management could make it their core responsibility to understand what’s happening on the ground and push for constant improvements and changes in implementation based on what is learned in the field. To impact a household, field staff need to have a connection and understand the beneficiaries. Their strengths and weaknesses should be well known and accounted for and the overall strength of this connection needs to be valued by management.

Related to the above, there needs to be more emphasis on knowledge management and upward feedback. No, this doesn’t mean more forms and reports for field staff to fill out but rather management needs to push their staff to share what they are learning and ensure they fully understand what is working and what isn’t, make informed decisions based on this information, and remain flexible to changes as implementation realities at the field level are better understood.

“If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.” – This is the attitude we need to adopt. So let’s forget about trying to impact hundreds of thousands of people and doing it poorly and instead focus on doing a great job of supporting a few.

3. Treating the Symptoms

The small holder farmers of northern Ghana are not known for their diligent dedication to recording their farm incomes, expenses and related activities. But it is easy to see how keeping records could really help farmers plan their farming activities to maximize their profits, especially with regards to calculating profits from costs and incomes and using this information to make decisions on investments which continuously improve profits.

To address this gap in record keeping, one project created a workbook to be distributed to farmers throughout northern Ghana that would act as a template for documenting this important information.

I have no doubt that this book will be put to some kind of use. Indeed, even my empty floss container was picked out of my garbage and put to use by the neighbour’s children. But let’s take a moment to consider the core issues affecting farmer record keeping and I think it will become obvious that the efforts behind the farmer workbook treat the symptom but not the cause.

From my field experience, literacy and education level are the biggest hindrances to farmer record keeping. The majority of farmers didn’t regularly attend school so the instinct to record things is completely foreign and takes time to build. But the farmers also need to know how to keep such records and see the benefits of doing it. Once all that is in place, then there will be a need and a use for a workbook and perhaps a pen. But if all that was in place, the farmer would already know the value of keeping records and simply go to a stationary store and buy the pen and paper.

To its credit, the development industry does invest heavily in education and huge improvements in literacy can be seen across northern Ghana. However, there’s still room for projects to encourage record keeping by taking the time needed (i.e. multiple meetings throughout the year) with farmer groups to demonstrate practical tracking of expenses and incomes for profitability analyses and why such records are useful for decision making.

But I don’t just mean explaining how to draw tables and subtract expenses from income; I’m talking about using beans in a jar, marks on a wall, knots in a rope, or any number of other creative ways the farmers I have worked with envisioned to overcome their illiteracy and keep business records for their farms.

We can’t just distribute a workbook, hope the farmers see its function and have a literate neighbour nice enough to fill it out for them. After all, the point of keeping records is for farmers to refer to the records they took in the past and use them to make decisions to improve their farming business. Indecipherable script will not help a farmer remember her past farming activities.

Instead we need to think about the root causes behind the challenges faced by rural farmers that development is trying to address. The example above shows how the inappropriateness of paper and pen documentation, and especially the need to understand the benefits, prevents farmers from keeping records more so than the lack of paper. If we dig below the surface and try to understand and define the core issues, then development projects can begin to address real challenges and make development sector interventions as useful as possible to the farmers.

4. Paper Tigers

As a general rule, the development industry has figured out how to prepare exceptional project planning documentation. It is detailed, compelling and after a critical read through, the reader is convinced success is inevitable.

However, after working closely with one such project for four months I see the reality of paper-based development: these documents can create inflexible and impractical structures and expectations that prevent projects from identifying and adapting to emerging opportunities or necessary changes to field implementation.

We know - everyone knows - that development is complex and entails a lot of failure and iteration. It is impossible to predict what these failures will be and what will be learned until projects are implemented. Yet project plans rarely allow for recognition of, and adaptation to, failures or new knowledge. The result is that project interventions are confined to activities and expectations that frequently prove to be impractical or unconstructive, regardless of what might be learned along the way. Allow me to provide a couple of examples:

Like almost every other project, the one I’m working with wants to engage and strengthen the capacity of farmer groups. The project plan calls for a needs assessment of a sample of farmer groups. This looks great on paper and gets approved with the thought that the project will use the results of this needs assessment to base the training on what farmers really need.

But, in reality, the needs assessment is resource and time-intensive. When it is finally performed it is surface-level and unrepresentative of real farmer challenges, which should come as no surprise. After all, how can an outsider come in to one village for half a day and determine precisely what knowledge, skills and attitudes all the farmers in the entire district need to succeed?

As an anecdote to prove my point, a JICA-sponsored yam project came to visit one of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) district offices. It was the start of the rainy season so the MoFA staff were very busy but, unwilling to disappoint the visitors, they took them around the district to perform a needs assessments of rural yam farmers. The JICA staff categorised all the different yam farming activities, found who did them, how they did them and made suggestions on what was needed to improve that specific task, promising that more thorough training was to come.

At the end of the day, when the JICA trainers had gone home, the disgruntled MoFA employees complained about what a waste of time the needs assessment and training had been. The farmers (and MoFA staff) already knew everything that had been taught and, for various reasons of their own, had made the choice not to perform the task in the prescribed way.

It was very evident, to both MoFA and the farmers, that the visitors only scratched the surface of what was actually needed by the yam farmers. The needs assessment wasn’t able to determine what was needed in this complex situation faced by people they had never met and whose livelihoods they didn’t fully understand.

The fact is that it’s virtually impossible to know what the real issues are when you plan a needs assessment or plan the resulting training; they simply can’t be figured out from an afternoon sitting with a group of farmers. The issues are complex and reveal themselves slowly through trusting relationships and genuine desire to understand rural livelihoods. It follows that project activities should be open to changing as understanding of the issues evolves throughout implementation.

As another example, the project I’m working for calls for the establishment of Inter-Professional Bodies (IPBs) which is a fancy term for associations comprised of different stakeholders affiliated with the same commodity (e.g. input dealers, farmers, traders, processors, exporters, etc.). The project supports these IPBs by funding the meetings and workshops that bring all the actors together.

Again, as the plans are written, this seems like a winning approach. An efficient and functioning commodity chain depends on long-standing and trusting trade relationships. It seems an IPB would give all the actors a forum to build these relationships and work out common challenges.

But long-standing and trusting trade relationships are built from a history of mutually beneficial transactions not by sitting in the same room at a meeting. You can’t force actors in a commodity chain to collaborate and talk about their challenges openly. And you certainly can’t expect competitors to give up whatever advantages they have in the market to make it more fair and equal for all.

So how does the development sector go about sculpting a more efficient and functioning commodity chain for the benefit of all? Well, because constraints and opportunities differ for each commodity in each location the answer is case-specific but here I’ve listed just a few (extremely simplified) examples of interventions that have been tried and tested. While not perfect, they can at least illustrate what is possible:

• Help the producers improve the quality and/or packaging of their product to appeal to higher end consumers thus attracting more up-scale buyers and expanding the market
• Support an input supplier to manage their inventory better so that they can profitably operate stores in more rural locations (improves farmer access to inputs)
• Link farmer groups to a buying company that needs a specific quality of product and is willing to provide the training and the market for it
• Initially buy-down the risk to rural banks (with cash or, better yet, with activities such as building trusting relationships with the farmers and/or supporting extension staff to provide quality collection services) so they become more willing to lend to farmers at reasonable interest rates
• Provide tools or methods to help farmers practice good money management and investment of their own funds where applicable to reduce the interest payments from loans which cut into their profits
• Expand the market for locally grown produce or products by helping a company develop an informative radio advertisement campaign
• Expand the market and promote proper use of fertilizers and pesticides by cost-sharing an educational promotional event for an input supplier
• Support a private company to supply reasonably-priced veterinary services where government support is inadequate or unreliable

The point is, you can’t know that these opportunities exist when the project is being planned. These are market opportunities that appear during project implementation and require projects to be adaptable to take advantage of them.

So, if any of the well-intentioned folks who make their living writing project planning documents happen to be reading this, I would love to know if it’s possible to hold a project accountable to it’s flexibility and responsiveness to market opportunities instead of basing the evaluation of project success on how many needs-based trainings and IPB meetings it holds.

In conclusion, let’s avoid implementing the ‘Paper Tigers’ that get approved solely on the merits of their written participatory and sustainable approaches. Practicality and flexibility, especially with regards to recognizing and responding to failures, learning and opportunities, are just as vital components to a good project plan.

5. We’re in Business

Despite the rhetoric and philanthropic characterization of international development, the development industry is just like any other. While they may never admit it, every NGO, donor and government program is a business in the business of staying in business.

And like every other business, development organizations need a steady inflow of money to remain operational. Competition for this income amongst development ‘businesses’ is just as fierce as the battle for customers between warring fast food giants. However, for development, this money doesn’t come from customers but rather is supplied by donors – those good people, companies and agencies dedicated to distributing the world’s foreign aid.

But here is where we find a problem. You see, in a normal business, companies will do whatever it takes to better serve their customers because it will improve their profits. But in development, the customers (i.e. intended beneficiaries) don’t supply the organization’s income so there are no pecuniary incentives to serve them better.

Projects habitually do a better job of serving donors than their intended beneficiaries. I don’t suggest that development is bad because it has capitalist values but I do think it is important to recognize when those profit-driven values are hindering the industry’s ability to help its intended beneficiaries.

As a means of illustrating my point, let me describe a meeting I had just a few weeks ago with another NGO (which I still like and respect and so have omitted their name) who was hired by the same agricultural project (the Project) as Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB).

The NGO had already been working for the Project for two years before EWB came on the scene. However, EWB had done some cutting-edge work on value-chains and farmer group development and could bring innovation and fresh ideas.

Seeing a perfect opportunity for collaboration I set up a meeting to talk about the work the NGO had already done, what they were hoping to achieve, and the potential for us to work together to make sure our organizations were learning as much as possible from each other’s strengths and past mistakes.

During the otherwise amicable meeting, the NGO politely and diplomatically declined the request for information because:

• They had been involved in the Project for many years so they didn’t need anyone else’s ideas;
• They were competitors with EWB because EWB was awarded responsibility for a large portion of the project that should have been theirs; and
• If they were going to collaborate with EWB, they would need a very clear Terms of Reference formulated to spell out the responsibilities of each organization in the collaboration.

I was a bit confused and told them, honestly, I just wanted to learn more about the NGO’s work to see where I should start from; I really had no interest in competing with them. I believed by sharing our respective strengths we could make sure both organizations did the best possible job at improving the livelihood of the small-holder farmers the Project was targeting to support.

The NGO employees were quick to point out they were not against collaboration, they just required formality around their contributions and this is when it became clear what the problem was. You see, the NGO wanted to make the collaboration with EWB formal and documented so that it could obtain funding from the Project for the “support” it would give to EWB.

Really, it was doomed from the start. A formal Terms of Reference for collaboration would take months to finalize and I wasn’t prepared to sit idle and wait that long to start my work. Besides, how could I concede to such a time-intensive process that would take away from the honest efforts of both our organizations to actually help the small-holder farmers we were targeting?

Overall, the situation was incredibly disappointing. Not specifically because of the NGO’s reaction but with the system of development that makes something easy and sensible, such as teamwork and friendly cooperation, logistically impossible.

Ultimately, what this experience has shown me is the majority of development workers genuinely want to help improve peoples’ livelihoods but they also work within this industry and so face the two conflicting motivations of wanting to help people while, at the same time, wanting to keep money coming into their organization to keep themselves in a job. So now it’s up to us to switch the trend of giving precedence to the latter over the former. Let’s take a lesson from the private sector and put our customers first!