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1,000 Words About Rwanda

Crossposted from BorderJumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

We’ve taken some long bus rides in Africa. We spent eight bumpy hours on a bus from Nairobi to Arusha and another eight from Arusha to Dar Es Salaam.

The longest so far, though, has been between Kigali, Rwanda and Kampala, Uganda. As usual, we were looking out the window, admiring the crops growing by the side of the road, desperately trying not to think about how we had to pee, and trying not to panic about how fast our bus driver was maneuvering between other buses, cattle, and street vendors hawking roasted corn, bananas, and pineapples on the side of the road.

Turning the School Yard into a Classroom

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

In Rwanda, more than 85 percent of the population’s livelihood depends on small-scale agriculture. And the majority of primary school students-roughly 60 percent- will return to rural areas to make their living in ways, instead of going on to secondary or vocational schooling or university.

With that in mind, in 2007, the organization CARE designed the Farmers of the Future Initiative (FOFI) , a three year project that integrates modern and environmentally sustainable agriculture training into primary school curriculum in Rwanda-making traditional schooling more relevant to the average Rwandan student.

The project started with 27 pilot schools in nine districts: Nyamagabe and Nyaruguru Districts in the Southern Province, Gatsibo and Nyagatare Districts in the Eastern Province, and Karongi, Rutsiro, Rubavu, Nyabihu and Ngororero Districts in the Western Province. Each pilot school received funding from CARE to invest in a school garden or farm. After one year, profits from the garden went back into the school’s agriculture program while the other half was used to help another school, called a satellite school, start its own garden. By the end of the project there were 28 satellite schools, each with its own garden started with the help of another school.

While maintaining the school gardens, students experimented and were trained in farming techniques that emphasize the preservation of natural resources as much as they do crop production, such as agroforestry, intercropping, mulching and compost, and non-chemical methods of pest and disease control.

According to Josephine Tuyishimire, a FOFI project coordinator, the school gardens also benefit students’ parents and their local community. As parents learn new farming techniques from their children, their neighbors also learned from them. “The population surrounding FOFI schools copied [the farming techniques] and replicated them at home.”

One boy, an orphan from Cyanika primary school in Nyamagabe District, who is living on his own, used irrigation and intercropping techniques he learned at school to start his own small garden. With the help of a teacher at the school he gained access to a local market to sell his vegetables and eventually earned enough money to purchase his own land. With the additional security that comes with land ownership, he continues to generate more income by selling his produce.

Helping students to be self-sufficient is especially beneficial for young women who are often kept out of school, but who can be “empowered in this project,” said Tuyishimire. “In the future they become self-reliant and less dependent on their male counterparts as breadwinners.” And women share their knowledge with their children, “passing these skills to future generations” to create future farmers who are educated in a way that allows them to self-sufficient and well-fed.

To read more about integrating agriculture into primary school education see: School Feeding Programs Improve Livelihoods, Diets, and Local Economies, and How to Keep Kids Down on the Farm.

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FANRPAN: Working to connect farmers, researchers, and policy makers in Africa

This is the first in a three-part series about the Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network. Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

The Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) lives up to its name by linking farmers, businesses, academia, researchers, donors, and national and regional governments. “One thing that we {Africa} fail to do is form coalitions for a common cause,” says Dr. Lindiwe Sibanda, the CEO of FANRPAN. But by connecting rural farmers directly to the private sector, to policy-makers, and to the agricultural research community, they’re trying to build a food secure Africa.

FANRPAN’s has national nodes in thirteen countries that help bring its members together, with a national secretariat hosted by an existing national institution in each country that has a mandate for increasing agricultural research and advocacy.

Another problem that plagues Africa, according to Dr. Sibanda, is that “we don’t know how to learn from the local.” But she says “farmers know what to do” when it comes to dealing with climate change and other issues that impact agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, FANRPAN works to create dialogue and allow exchange of ideas directly between farmers in the field, researchers in laboratories, and policy makers in conference rooms and parliaments throughout Africa.

FANRPAN’s projects include everything from helping improve access to markets for women farmers through its Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project to helping develop and strengthen the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Regional Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Compact (See In Eastern and Southern Africa, Improving Trade and Identifying Investment Opportunities and Creating Game Plans for Investment and Policy to Improve Food Security.) They also recently completed the Africa-Wide Civil Society Climate Change Initiative for Policy Dialogues that brought together African NGOs and farmers groups at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change last December. And the Strategies for Adapting to Climate Change in Rural sub-Saharan Africa, to help the most vulnerable populations deal with climate change.

And while Dr. Sibanda says investment in research is important, “it’s not the panacea. For me, it’s about people driving investments.”

Stay tuned for more about FANRPAN’s projects later this week.

Zambia Leads Way in Empowering Farmers with Markets

Check out Danielle Nierenberg’s Op-Ed, based on research for the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project, featured on the front page of the Zambia Daily Mail. Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

In the United States, it seems like we only hear about what’s going wrong in Africa. We see and read stories about famine, HIV/AIDS, disease, or conflict.

In fact, few Americans will ever step foot in countries like Malawi or Zambia, largely because our media often scares people away.

As I travel across Africa, working as a senior researcher for the Worldwatch Institute as co-project director of Nourishing the Planet, I am hoping to show a different side of the continent.

Instead of stories of despair, we are looking at and sharing stories of success and hope, highlighting African-led innovations that are helping to alleviate hunger and poverty in an environmentally sustainable way.

After spending time in Lusaka meeting with non-governmental organisations, non-profits and projects on the ground, I discovered that this country is filled with incredible individuals and organisations – making my job very easy, and in many ways serving as a model for the rest of the continent.

Here are some examples:

COMACO, an organisation founded over 30 years ago to conserve local wildlife, helps farmers improve their agricultural practices in ways that can protect the environment – such as through conservation farming – while also creating a reliable market for farm products.

It organises the farmers into producer groups, encouraging them to diversify their skills by raising livestock and bees, growing organic rice, using improved irrigation and fisheries management and other practices so that they don’t have to resort to poaching elephants or other wildlife.

The United Nations World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress (P4P) programme, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the Belgian government, is working with the private sector, governments and NGOs to provide an incentive for farmers to improve their crop management skills and produce high-quality food, create a market for surplus crops from small and low-income farmers and promote local processing and packaging of products.

Mobile Transactions, a financial services company for the ‘unbanked’ in Zambia, allows customers to use their phones like an ATM card. Over the last decade, cell-phone use in Africa has increased fivefold and farmers are using their phones to gain information about everything from markets to weather.

By using Mobile Transactions, farmers are not only able to make purchases and receive payment electronically; they are also building a credit history which can make getting loans easier.

And Mobile Transactions also works with USAID’s PROFIT programme to help agribusiness agents make orders for inputs, manage stock flows and communicate more easily with agribusiness companies and farmers.

Perhaps most importantly, the partnership helps agents better understand the farmers they are working with so that they can provide the tools, inputs and education each farmer and community needs.

Care International’s work in Zambia has two main goals: increase the production of staple crops and improve farmers’ access to agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilisers. But instead of giving away bags of seed and fertilisers to farmers, Care is “creating input access through a business approach”, not a subsidy approach, according to Steve Power, assistant country director for Zambia.

One way they’re doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbours as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilisers and other inputs. At the same time, “we are mindful” of the benefits of local varieties of seeds.

Jan Nijhoff of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and Michigan State University, who is also an advisor on Worldwatch’s Nourishing the Planet project, says COMESA’s mission is to promote regional economic integration through increased co-operation and integration of trade, customs, transport, communication, technology, energy, and gender, as well as agriculture, environment and natural resources.

Throughout most of my meetings, a theme I hadn’t heard as much in other African countries continued to surface – linking farmers to markets.

While at times I was sceptical about this focus on the private sector, the more I talked to farmers, NGOs, development workers and policy-makers, the more convinced I became that farmers need not just inputs to grow their crops, but a profitable – and sustainable – market to sell those crops.

In developing this model, it’s clear that Zambia is leading the way and creating examples that could work and be scaled up in other countries across the continent. – www.nourishingtheplanet.org

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Giving Farm Workers a Voice

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Gertrude Hambira doesn’t look like someone who gets arrested regularly. Nor do the other women and men in suits who work with her at the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), formed in the mid-1980s to protect farm laborers. But arrest, harassment and even torture have been regular occupational hazards for Gertrude-the General Secretary of GAPWUZ-and her staff for many years.

Unfortunately, things have not gotten much better since the 2008 elections when President Mugabe refused to cede power to the democratically elected Morgan Tsvangirai, a former union leader himself. The resulting power-sharing agreement has left the two sides battling for control as the nation plummets deeper into unemployment and poverty. At least 90 percent of the populati0n is not part of formal workforce.

Meanwhile, land reform policies have left many farm workers (about 1.5 million) without a source of income as farms are divided up-with many tracts given to Mugabe supporters. While Zimbabwe’s land reform was initially intended to decrease the number of white-owned farms in the country and provide land to the landless, it’s done little to help the poor in rural areas. “Land was taken from the rich and given to the rich,” says General Secretary Hambira. The rich farmers are, however, not utilizing the land, she notes, leading to lower agricultural productivity, higher prices for food, and widespread hunger.

Hambira says that as rural areas become a target for government reforms, “farm workers have become voiceless.” But giving them back their voice is what GAPWUZ is trying to do by helping reduce child labor, by educating members about their rights in the fields and on the farm, by educating workers about HIV/AIDS , and by helping women workers gain a voice in decision-making. And, unfortunately, that’s why General Secretary and her staff often get arrested. Shortly after I met with her, the GAPWUZ office was raided by government police and she was forced to go in hiding to South Africa for several weeks.

But GAPWUZ isn’t just working to protect the rights of farm workers in Zimbabwe, says Hambira. By “looking at the plight of farm workers,” the union is helping to build productivity on the farm and to build a strong agricultural sector-one that will be needed more than ever as Zimbabwe struggles to rebuild and restore democracy.

Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute: High Time We Follow Talk With Action

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

In this regular series, we profile advisors to the Nourishing the Planet project. This week, we feature Hans Herren, President of the Millennium Institute.

Name: Hans Herren

Affiliation: The Millennium Institute

Location: Arlington, VA, United States

Bio: Hans Herren is President of the Millennium Institute (MI). Prior to joining MI, he was Director-General of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. He also served as director of the Africa Biological Control Center of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in Benin. At ICIPE, Hans developed and implemented programs in the area of human, animal, plant, and environmental health (the 4-H paradigm) as they relate to insect issues. At IITA, he conceived and implemented the highly successful biological control program that saved the African cassava crop, and averted Africa’s worst-ever food crisis. Hans also was a chair of the International Assessment for Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a four-year long assessment of world agriculture. Over the years, Hans has moved his interests toward the policy aspects of integrated sustainable development, in particular, linking environmental, plant, animal, and human health issues.

On Nourishing the Planet: There has been much talk about local empowerment in making development policy decisions from the international donor community. It is now high time to follow the talk with action, to strongly support capacity and institutional development in integrated and systemic planning in developing countries.

What do you see as the relationship between agriculture and the environment? Sustainable agriculture depends fully on its environment, into which it has to be “organically and harmoniously” integrated. In the medium and long term, agriculture will be more dependent on the biodiversity it has been destroying, the water it has been overusing, and the people it should have trained to nourish a growing and more demanding population. A change in paradigm, as recommended by the IAASTD report, is no longer an option; it’s a prerequisite to the future of humanity.

What role can agriculture can play in alleviating poverty and hunger worldwide? Agriculture is multifunctional; it services the many different needs of humanity, including the provision of jobs, which will help on both counts, hunger and poverty. Agriculture is at the basis of any development agenda and needs to be given the appropriate importance by investments in the many facets of this key economic sector.

What sort of policies and projects would you like to see implemented immediately to address issues of global hunger and poverty? Major investments must be made in sustainable agricultural research and development, in particular agronomy and soil sciences. No matter what crop varieties with high-yield potential exist, the number one issue is soil fertility. Soil restoration and permanent rebuilding are essential to produce food where it is demanded, and by the people who need both the food and job opportunity.

What could be done to encourage greater agricultural investment to help alleviate poverty and hunger? Make it clear to policymakers at the international and national levels that hunger and poverty will only be overcome by a sustainable agriculture, supported by knowledge, science, and innovations.

Why should food consumers in the United States care about the state of agriculture in other countries? The consumption pattern in the U.S. is not sustainable in the short and long term. The Earth is one, and what happens in one part of it inevitably affects others. From many different angles, from climate change to world peace, there is a need to assure food security and sovereignty in developing countries, while also assuring sustainable agriculture in industrialized nations.

“Re-Greening” the Sahel Through Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

For centuries, farmers in the Sahel-a band of land that crosses Africa at the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert-used rotational tree farming to provide year-round harvests and a consistent source of food, fuel, and fertilizer. But severe droughts and rapid population growth in the 1970s and 80s significantly degraded the Sahel’s farmland, leading to the loss of many indigenous tree species and leaving the soil barren and eroded. With the loss of the trees went the knowledge, traditions, and practices that had kept the region fertile for hundreds of years.

To save the land as well as local livelihoods, many traditional management practices are now being revived. One inexpensive method of farming that helps to restore the Sahel’s degraded land is so-called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) (see also Millions Fed: “Re-Greening the Sahel: Farmer-led Innovation in Burkina Faso and Niger”). By pruning shoots that periodically and naturally sprout from below-ground root webs, farmers can promote forest growth and take advantage of a naturally occurring source of fuel, food, or animal fodder.

The trees produce fruit rich in nutrients and help to restore the soil by releasing nitrogen and protecting the ground from erosion by wind and rain. The cultivated but naturally occurring forest also creates a local source of firewood and mulch, reducing the time spent in gathering fuel for cooking meals and cleaning households (see Reducing the Things They Carry). The practice also cuts down on deforestation as the trees that are used for fuel are replaced with seedlings and tended by farmers.

“Farmer-managed natural regeneration is a fairly simple technique, but it produces multiple benefits,” explained Chris Reij, a natural resources management specialist with the Center for International Cooperation (and advisor to the Nourishing the Planet Project), at an Oxfam-hosted panel on locally driven agriculture innovations in Washington, D.C., last October. “Sometimes planting trees make sense, but in terms of costs and long-time success, in many cases it makes more sense to use natural regeneration.”

As important as the technique itself is, even more important is making sure that farmers in the Sahel know about it. When farmers learn how they can benefit from the practice, they are quick to adopt it, improving their own livelihoods and food security while regenerating local forests. Reij attributes the overwhelming success of FMNR in Niger-where many villages have 10-20 times more trees than 20 years ago-to the reduced central-government presence in rural areas. With the government distracted by political conflict, forest management now belongs almost completely to the local farmers who benefit from FMNR the most. (See also Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel.)

To ensure that even more farmers know about FMNR and its benefits, the Web Alliance for the Re-Greening in Africa (W4RA), a joint project between African Re-Greening Initiatives (ARI), the Web Foundation, and VU Amsterdam, is helping to create web-based information exchanges between farmers. Meanwhile, the organization SahelEco has initiated two projects, Trees Outside the Forest and the Re-Greening the Sahel Initiative, to encourage policymakers, farmers’ organizations, and government leaders throughout the region to provide the support and legislation needed to put the responsibility of managing trees on agricultural land into the hands of farmers.

To read more about agroforestry and other ways that agriculture can restore degraded land, see: An Evergreen Revolution? Using Trees to Nourish the Planet, It’s About More Than Trees at the World Agroforestry Centre, Trees as Crops in Africa, and Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use.

Reducing Food Waste in the Event of An Erupting Volcano and Other Farming Hazards

Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

As Iceland’s erupting volcano strands thousands of air travelers across Europe and worldwide, a less publicized but arguably more costly catastrophe is mounting 15,000 miles away: piles of gourmet produce and cut flowers, some of Kenya’s chief exports, are rotting in limbo. Meant to be shipped to upscale grocery stores throughout Europe, lilies, roses, carnations, carrots, onions, baby sweet corn, and sugar snap peas are going bad in heaps, on the vine, and in the ground because airport warehouses are already full and there’s no local market for the expensive produce in a country where half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

As food prices continue to rise worldwide, reducing food waste will be a critical element in alleviating hunger and poverty worldwide. Already, Nourishing the Planet has highlighted the many ways that growing indigenous vegetables for local markets and improving storage techniques can help to both reduce food waste and improve access to food, in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

To read more about food waste and ways it can be prevented, see: Reducing Food Waste, Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera, Farming on the Urban Fringe, and Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa. Also, stay tuned for an entire chapter on the subject, written by Tristram Stuart, in State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

Hundreds of Promising Little Projects Bring Hope to Africa

Originally featured in the Montreal Gazette. Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

I grew up in Westmount as an only child with a relatively privileged middle-class life. I attended Selwyn House elementary, and we had season tickets to the Canadiens at the old Forum.

My upbringing seems a long way from the sidewalks of Antanarivo, Kampala, Lusaka, or the cities of any of the dozen or so African countries where I’ve been travelling the last six months.

It’s a little embarrassing, but these are the only images of Africa I had as a child:

When I turned up my nose at broccoli at the dinner table, my mom would guilt me into eating everything on the plate, “because people were starving in Ethiopia.”

While watching The Wonder Years, I saw commercials of B-list celebrities pleading for people to send money to feed emaciated children in Africa.

As I grew older, my view of Africa didn’t really change. It seemed that no good news came out of the continent. Everything I read and saw was about conflict, famine, HIV/AIDS, or disease. And for many of us, that’s all we know about Africa.

I felt, as most people do, powerless about the problems there. Most of us think of Africa as a lost cause.

It wasn’t until my partner, Danielle Nierenberg, received a grant through the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet (www.nourishingtheplanet.com) to travel across the continent visiting innovations that offered sustainable ways of reducing hunger and poverty, that everything I thought I knew about the continent began to change. The grant culminates next year with the release of State of the World 2011, Worldwatch’s flagship publication, which will serve as a road map for the funding and donor community on projects working on the ground. I decided to take a leave of absence from my job to travel with her and learn as much as I could.

We started in Ethiopia in October 2009, and after six months visiting 120 projects, I quickly began to realize how much these individuals and organizations were doing with minimal resources. And that the news media seem to miss the real story: underneath the very real problems they were covering were hundreds of exciting innovations that were protecting the environment and improving people’s lives.

So let me share some examples of “good news” taking place across the continent – people and places that Danielle and I saw firsthand that gave us hope.

In Ethiopia, we met Kes Malede Abreha, a farmer-priest living near Aksum who, as part of a farmers’ group supported by the non-government organization Prolinnova is now a leading agricultural innovator in his neighbourhood.

In Kenya, we visited Kibera – one of the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, home to almost a million people. There, travelling with Urban Harvest, we met members of a women’s co-operative who are raising vegetables on “vertical farms” by poking holes in sacks, filling them with soil, and planting seeds.

In Tanzania, we visited the World Vegetable Centre in Arusha, where researchers and farmers are working together to improve diets and livelihoods.

In Uganda, we met with an organization run by two 20-year old volunteers that built school gardens to teach children about nutrition. It’s called Project DISC (part of Slow Food International).

In Rwanda, we met with families outside Kigali benefiting from a donation of small livestock from Heifer International.

In Mozambique, we attended a training session in which farmers were brought in from across the country to share with each other what was working. This will culminate in a free book of best practices, published in multiple indigenous languages.

In Zambia, we visited COMACO, whose sustainable, high-wage, non-profit peanut butter, organic rice, and honey under the label It’s Wild, were selling in major grocery stores across the country.

In Ghana, we met with a women’s co-operative that was processing palm oil.

As our plane landed at Dorval this week, we were filled with optimism and the African continent seemed not so far away, and much less hopeless. What we loved about many of the projects we visited is that they were Africa-led, often by local volunteers, and with very modest resources.

Bernard Pollack is travel blogging from Africa with his partner Danielle Nierenberg. You can follow them online at BorderJumpers (www.borderjumpers.org).

Helping Farmers Benefit Economically From Wildlife Conservation

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Wildlife conservation and sustainable farming practices are becoming increasing prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa (see Protecting Wildlife While Improving Food Security, Health, and Livelihoods, Helping Conserve Wildlife-and Agriculture-in Mozambique, and In Botswana, Cultivating an Interest in Agriculture and Conservation). Yet efforts to preserve elephants, rhinos, and other wildlife are difficult in countries plagued by political unrest and conflict.

In Zimbabwe, for example, “it’s pretty hard to get anything done,” says Raol du Toit, Director of the Rhino Conservation Trust. Although a new president, Morgan Tsvangirai, was elected in 2008, Zimbabwe’s 86-year-old dictator Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country for more than 30 years, refused to cede power. A “power-sharing agreement” between the two leaders allows the country to function, but just barely. Unemployment rates are over 90 percent, and people who voice public opposition to Mugabe are often jailed and even tortured.

Despite these obstacles, du Toit is helping farming communities benefit economically from efforts to save dwindling populations of rhinos and other wildlife. While many conservation groups seek to protect wildlife from farmers, the Rhino Conservation Trust has a very different approach. Rather than telling farmers not to farm in areas where wildlife are present, they help communities realize that protecting wildlife can be in their own best interest.

“Wildlife is like a herd of cattle,” says du Toit, and farmers “will get benefits” if they manage and conserve local wildlife species. This “horns and thorns” approach gives farmers an opportunity to be paid for the ecosystem services they provide through more sustainable farming practices-including protecting wildlife, conserving water, preventing deforestation, and sequestering carbon in the soil. The solution is to help farmers practice agriculture “in appropriate areas, using appropriate practices.”

What’s needed, according to du Toit, is more “landscape-level planning” that takes into account the needs of wildlife, the environment, and farming communities. Rather than relying on development agencies and governments to decide where cattle fences should go or where farmers should plant their crops, local communities and stakeholders need to be part of the process. Development aid, says du Toit, should follow what local stakeholders need and perceive, not the other way around. “We need to trust people on the ground, rather than just planning for them.”

More locally based partnership arrangements, such as the Laikipia Wildlife Forum developed in Kenya, can help both farmers and wildlife survive. The Forum has united the community, from smallholder farmers to tourism ventures, in the fight to preserve wildlife and manage natural resources, helping to improve local livelihoods.

Educating children early about the benefits of wildlife is also important. The Rhino Conservation Trust has developed a school materials project that teaches children the importance of conserving rhinos.

And despite the political turmoil in Zimbabwe, the country still has wildlife resources that other countries don’t have, giving it the opportunity to both protect these assets and profit from their conservation.

For more about rhino conservation in Zimbabwe, see Raol du Toit’s presentation at the AHEAD workshop last year.