I love my job… And a Slam Poem

I feel that I’m incredibly lucky to be able to say that I love my job.

I feel I’m working on problems that matter, I’m getting to dive deep into complexity, I work for an employer that won’t compromise on quality of impact to take the easy road, I get to work with Ghanaians who I know will be leaders in their country’s development…

Over the past week the one thing in particular that has stood out has been the amazing fellow EWB’ers that I’m fortunate to work alongside.

Last weekend we held our semi-annual West Africa Retreat. We spent three days learning from each other and reconnecting on personal and professional levels. Following that, on Monday and Tuesday, our Agricultural Value Chains team held our monthly team meeting and hammered through amazing discussions about our assumptions and hypotheses in our work, how we’re testing them, what is our vision for agriculture in Ghana and what does that mean for the initiatives we choose to drive forward, and where are the synergies across our areas of focus. The energy I get out of working and just spending time with these amazing individuals is beyond words.

Ok, I’m bragging a bit about my job. But hey, have you ever considered applying to work with EWB? 

The one thing I did want to share though, was my slam-poem from the WAR. (If you’re not familiar with “slam” or “spoken-word” poetry, check out my favorites Shane Koyczan or Sarah Kay.) We decided to open the space for some brave souls to try something new and push ourselves out of our comfort zones by hosting a slam poetry night to close off the WAR. Feeling inspired by my colleagues, I wrote the following poem to try to capture the strength I think EWB’ers have when they come together to make big change happen.

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I look up at the stars, inspired. Inspired by the immensity of a million shimmering lights and the simple, absolute beauty of this sight. Inspired by the notion that out there, there’s something more. There’s more than me, more than we, there’s more than I’ve ever dreamed could be. And then as much as the immensity inspires me, it intimidates me.

Because when compared to everything there is, everything I am is just one single star in this tapestry. And there’s strength and there’s beauty in my individuality but when you look up at the night sky, it seems that single stars become lost in the immensity.

But if I step back and really look, I see the true beauty of one single star comes from being part of something more. The beauty of the sky is in its constellations –each beam of light that transcends the distance that separates each part to create the most stunning work of art.

The strength of you and me is held only partly in our individuality but mostly in our ability to together bring to be the change we want to see. The change we can’t create alone. The change that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The change that comes only through the connection between our heads, our hands, our hearts.

When I think of myself as one and that’s all, my ability to make the change I want to see will always be too small.

But then I look around this room, and I’m inspired. Inspired by these people, who emanate light and the simple, absolute beauty of this sight. Inspired by the notion that here, there’s something more. There’s more than me, more than we, there’s more potential we’ve ever realized could be. And the immensity of this tapestry, inspires me.

 

 

Dorothy, Complexity and Change

If you’re not familiar with EWB, then you may not be familiar with Dorothy. But please, allow me to introduce you.

Dorothy is a farmer. She farms everything from maize to pineapple. Dorothy is my boss.

Ok, so technically I report to my EWB Team Lead and my counterpart Project Director, but Dorothy is EWB-speak for the African smallholder farmer. And I’m in Ghana with the purpose of creating sustainable change that will be beneficial for Dorothy.

Where things get a little complex is that EWB doesn’t always work directly with Dorothy. I work with a development project, that works with agribusinesses, that work with farmers. To benefit Dorothy, I try to create change in the project that will create change in the business that will create change for Dorothy.

Why don’t I work directly with Dorothy? Because the project is a scaling mechanism. Whatever change I can make can be scaled through the project’s $8M budget and their staff’s reach across all of Northern Ghana. So I need to try to understand what changes Dorothy wants to see, and how I can create those while working a few degrees removed.

My job specifically is to look at Nucleus Farming businesses. A Nucleus Farmer is a commercial farmer who works with “outgrowers” – smallholder farmers to whom he supplies inputs, equipment, training, etc. The Nucleus Farmer will supply these things to the outgrowers on credit throughout the farming season, then at harvest the outgrowers will repay in-kind. The Nucleus Farmer therefore connects his outgrowers to input and output markets, and as such, holds a lot of development potential. Projects like the one I’m working with, that focus on private-sector agriculture development, are jumping on the opportunity to work with Nucleus Farmers as a channel for reaching smallholders.

Everything sounds great, right? Projects have a strong mechanism to reach farmers, these businesses preexist the projects and will continue to exist after the projects end, and the farmers are getting access to greater marketing opportunities. But there’s danger in assuming that any positive change at the business level will result in a positive change at the farmer level. In this complex system, things aren’t so straightforward.

To me, it seems that whether outgrowing is good or bad for farmers is not a simple or clear-cut issue. From the Nucleus Farming business I’ve been working with, here’s what I’ve observed thus far.

A few points on the benefits side:

• Farmers are overcoming the barriers to entry to farming: the high costs of land preparation and inputs are deferred until harvest when farmers have the ability to pay. Farmers who might not have farmed at all are doing one or two acres, and farmers who might have farmed one or two acres are doing five or more.
• Farmers are receiving more useful training: farmers are receiving training on good agricultural practices that is related specifically to the inputs they’re using and the variety of soybean they’re growing.
• Farmers are getting an assured market: Whereas otherwise a farmer may have to transport his grains to the nearest market and sell to whomever will buy, in this arrangement the Nucleus Farmer agrees to buy the outgrowers’ surplus and will arrange the transportation to the farmers’ communities.

But there are definitely some red flags I’ve observed on the costs side. All interest rates in Ghana are high, but for outgrowers repaying Nucleus Farmers in-kind, interest rates can be even higher. The interest varies from business to business, as does the amount of power the power have to negotiate with the Nucleus Farmer. So while farmers are getting a new source of income, their profit margins on their outgrower fields can be significantly smaller than the margins they could be getting by farming independently.

So my question is, what’s the cost-benefit balance? Is it enough for farmers to farm for smaller margins if the alternative could be no farming at all?

Well, I have to say that a simple answer, “yes, it’s enough”, is not enough for me. (Nor is it enough for the project, hence why my job exists.)

So the question becomes what kind of change would make a clear tip on the scale. And the challenge becomes how to create a change that’s a win for the farmers, a win for the business, and a win for the project.

Because if I want to leverage the project’s scale and the business’ sustainability, I can’t look only at Dorothy but need to zoom out to all levels of the system. But, at the end of the day, Dorothy is my boss and the centre of any change I’m looking at.