Marli Kasdan

Location / Country: Kigali, Rwanda
Organization: Hands of Mothers

Kasdan: "Overall, my internship experience with Hands of Mothers (HOM) was extremely rewarding for me. I learned a lot about development at the local level though the lenses of women’s empowerment in business, capacity building, and project sustainability. In addition, I feel that my work with HOM centered on deliverables and impact to our program participants. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the three cooperatives that HOM supports: Twiyubake, Baho, and Ejo Hazaza. I appreciate and recognize the many challenges they face, and I think that the HOM summer team was able to lay the groundwork for a sustained upward trajectory for each cooperative. My hope is that our team’s focus on capacity building through a series of trainings and workshops and our emphasis on promoting sustainable income generation has put in place the foundation for each cooperative to become independent from HOM and sustainable in the long run.”

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Hands of Mothers

“HOM worked with three women’s cooperatives in Kigali, Rwanda:

• Baho: raises kuroiler hens and sells eggs

• Twiyubake: makes hand-crafted leather sandals

• Ejo Hazaza: makes hand-crafted jewelry; applied for a grant to start a project to grow and sell oyster mushrooms”

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Deliverables and Impact to Program Participants

“During the internship, my deliverables and impact on program participants mainly focused on my work with the women in the cooperatives that HOM supports. Throughout the summer I ran a series of trainings and workshops along with my team members in order to help the women in the cooperatives improve their record keeping skills, sales skills, cooperative management and organization, and cooperative accountability structure. “

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Conclusion

“I thoroughly enjoyed my internship experience with Hands of Mothers in Kigali this summer, and I hope that I had a positive impact on the women we worked with and HOM. I gained valuable field work experience this summer, and I want to extend my most sincere thank you to Jerry and Yunie Blakeley for the fellowship.”

Ankit Grover

Location / Country: Zimbabwe
Organization: TechnoServe

GROVER: "It is often said, “You can have it all. Just not all at once.”

My summer experience as a Blakeley Fellow working with TechnoServe and the African Agriculture Fund (AAF) was nothing less than a “have-it-all-at-once” opportunity. In my ten weeks in Zimbabwe, I was afforded the chance to delve deep into each of my interest areas – small and medium enterprise development, private equity, business strategy and impact investing. ”

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About TechnoServe and TAF

“TechnoServe, whose mission is to find business solutions to poverty by connecting farmers to financial markets, recruits Fellows (or Volunteer Consultants) to work on short-term assignments in developing countries with high impact opportunities. As a Fellow, I was drafted to work with AAF’s Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) (managed by TechnoServe) in preparing a business plan, market strategy and financial projections for a Zimbabwean agribusiness company in the sesame crop value chain. TAF supports AAF’s portfolio companies in improving linkages between smallholder farmers (SHFs) and the companies, to increase local household incomes and enhance food security in communities where the Fund invests. This lays the foundation for sustainable long-term growth and developmental impact for both the portfolio partner and the community it benefits. “

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The Experience:

“It is one thing to study value chains and another to actually start from the base of the pyramid and follow the trail of the grain. A thorough analysis of the sesame business required engagement with SHFs on the ground, away from the hustle and bustle of Harare. In late July, I had the opportunity to travel to one of the remotest and most water-stressed villages in Zimbabwe, some hundred miles from the capital. I had the chance to study first- hand the various predicaments from the farmers, as well as brainstorm some quick-fix solutions for their problems. My education in agronomy came full circle when I could finally validate and tie the smallholders’ income statements to the financial model I was preparing.“

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Conclusion

“My biggest takeaway from my fellowship is to never discount the power of the value chain. It is what drives synergies in achieving developmental impact, and without it, no business can remain sustainable in the long term. I'm grateful to the Blakeley Foundation for affording me this opportunity and look forward to helping the Foundation accomplish its objectives in the future.”

Sydney-Johanna Stevns

Country: Chile
Organization: La Fundación para la Innovación Agraría (FIA) Santiago, Chile

SYDNEY-JOHANNA: "I worked with an organization called La Fundación para la Innovación Agraría (FIA) (or in English, the Foundation for the Innovation of Agriculture) in Santiago, Chile. The mission of FIA is to support a culture of innovation in agriculture that improves the competitiveness of sustainable and inclusive farming. They do this by conducting research on new technologies, providing trainings, and providing funding and assistance to programs that are locally run. Ensuring that farmers in Chile can successfully adapt to climate change is key to ensuring their continued livelihoods and economic growth potential. The project I worked on was helping FIA understand how their adaptation strategies could be improved, specifically by examining how they compared to American and international standards.

I worked closely with staff to understand the projects and visited several farms throughout Chile to better understand how the technologies they promoted functioned and how their programs were operating. My final deliverable was the recommendation that they should improve their programming on the management of natural resources and sustainable development (specifically for infrastructure). This recommendation has formed the basis for a grant application they are submitting to the World Bank to further expand their programs and research efforts in these areas.

When I began my internship I was at a very minimal level of Spanish. After working and living in Chile for two months my Spanish improved significantly, however, my vocabulary now mostly consists of very technical terms about agriculture and development. Because of the initial language barrier it took a while to understand the structure of the organization. My understanding is that FIA does very little of their own program implementation. Instead, they focus on local community empowerment. They recruit and identify small- to medium-sized projects throughout the country that align with their mission and then support them with information, connections, or finances. This is an interesting model because although they have the resources to leverage significant control over projects, they do relatively little of this.

My impression is that this way of supporting projects means that local communities are much more invested in the outcome. Not only does it require less operational work on FIA's end, but it simultaneously helps them achieve one of their goals to spread awareness and knowledge on these issues and tools. I also imagine that this model is much more effective, because if projects are self-initiated by local groups or individuals then they are able to more accurately address their local area's needs as opposed to a large national organization coming in to potentially address an insignificant problem. I find this model very fascinating, both because it makes a lot of sense and because it makes me wonder why this isn't the standard in development initiatives across the world."

Nashwa Khali

Organization: Vodafone Farmers Club / Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSMA)
Country: Ghana

NASHWA: GSMA1, working with a wide range of mobile network operators and civil society organisations, is launching a series of nutrition-focused m-health and m-agriculture initiatives in South Asia and sub- Saharan Africa, called mNutrition. The objective of mNutrition in mAgri is to create and scale commercially sustainable mobile services enabling smallholder farmers to improve their nutrition, yields and incomes. The product to be delivered and evaluated is the Vodafone Farmers’ Club. The service is a bundled solution offering agricultural information in addition to voice and SMS services. In order to measure the causal impact of the Farmers’ Club product, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will conduct an external impact evaluation of the mAgri programme in Ghana in November 2016. A randomized encouragement design will be implemented. Specifically, some communities will be randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some communities will not be assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.

Rationale for Intervention

The rapid expansion of mobile phone access to populations at the base of the income pyramid presents an unprecedented opportunity to expand coverage of nutrition and agriculture services to this previously overlooked segment of the mobile market. Mobile phones and computer centers are the most targeted channels to provide not only technical and scientific information on crop production and nutrition, but also to support the marketing of products that can help level the playing field between small producers and traders. Agricultural extension services delivered via mobile phones can in theory promote ‘nutrition-sensitive’ interventions by creating competent and efficient farmers who are able to increase productivity by making effective use of knowledge and information which is delivered to them.

Broadly speaking, nutrition-sensitive agriculture is aimed at improving the nutritional status of a population by maximizing the impact of food and of agricultural systems, while minimizing the potential for negative externalities regarding the sector’s economic and production-driven goals. In the last few years there has been a visible trend in agricultural policies and programs to become ‘nutrition-sensitive’ by leveraging agriculture to maximize nutrition impact. Yet there is an identified need to better understand the linkages between agriculture and nutrition, and to decipher the ways in which agriculture can contribute to improved nutrition. Despite the potential of mobile services coupled with agricultural change to improve nutrition and diet quality, very few studies exist that critically assess the application of mobile phone technology for nutrition in resource-poor settings.

Farmers’ Club

Farmers’ Club is a bundled solution offering farmers agricultural and nutrition information in addition to voice and SMS services. The target market Vodafone expects to attract is about 450,000 Farmer Club users by 2016/17 across 8 regions in Ghana: Eastern Region, Western Region, Ashanti Region, Central Region, Northern Region, Volta, Brong-Ahafo, and Greater Accra. Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are conducting a rigorous mixed-methods evaluation to estimate the impact of mNutrition and to understand how the context and the components of the mNutrition intervention shape its impact. To estimate the casual impacts of the product on farmer’s behavior, knowledge, nutrition, yields and income, a randomized encouragement design is being implemented where some communities are randomly assigned to receive additional marketing and promotion of the Farmers’ Club product and some are not assigned to the additional marketing and promotion. The additional marketing and promotion will consist of price discounts, advertisement scripts, and gender targeting.

The goal of the impact evaluation is to measure the causal impact of Farmers’ club on behaviors and outcomes linked to nutrition and agriculture. But before a full scale impact evaluation is rolled out; which is resource and time intensive IFPRI decided to do a pilot, which is the leg of the project that I was brought on to do. Essentially the purpose of the pilot was to test the assumptions of the evaluation and related encouragements before they are rolled out for the study and to test willingness to pay for the Farmer club product. As soon as I landed in Ghana I had three priority areas to work on:

1. Build relationships with potential implementing partners and all the involved stakeholders; including Vodafone, The University of Ghana, and ESOKO2

2. Collaborate with Vodafone to do user feedback surveys for existing Farmers’ Club customers. This would help the research team at IFPRI understand the rates of take-up of the service as well as the perceived benefits of subscribing.

3. Set up the IRB3 protocol, as well as pilot evaluation that would allow us to answer the following research questions:

   •   How effective is the Farmer Club at increasing the knowledge and changing the behavior of farmers?

   •   What are the impacts and cost-effectiveness of the Farmer Club product on household’s dietary diversity, agricultural income, and production?

   •   Does targeting women increase impacts over and beyond the impacts of a non-targeted Farmer Club product?

  What is farmer’s willingness to pay for Farmer’s club?

The preliminary data gathered while I was in Ghana evidenced that Farmers’ Club positively enhanced the livelihoods and quality of life of smallholder farmers by improving access to information, financial services and supply chain solutions, delivered via mobile phone. Furthermore the mNutrition component of the intervention promoted behaviour change around key farming decisions and practices via mobile nutrition content.