Turning farmers into entrepreneurs

by Catherine Mgendi

A new model of farming in Africa aims at making farmers into entrepreneurs who view farming as a business. Farmers in two villages in central Malawi came together in March to review progress towards achieving their five-year visions.

An elderly woman envisioned a full granary that will considerably shorten the "hunger months," when crops fail due to poor rains, leading to famine. "I want to have a permanent brick house with iron roof sheets, and to furnish it with good chairs, and nice utensils," a man called out. "We want all our children to go to school and to be able to cement the earthen floors of our pigsties soon," said another.

Following the collapse of commercial farming in neighbouring Zimbabwe, Malawi has increasingly had to source its pork supplies elsewhere, opening up a world of opportunity for business-minded farmers. These farmers' wishes could well be the beginnings of a visionary new
African farming enterprise.

"We want farmers to look at farming as a business," says Dr. Jemimah Njuki, a researcher with the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Njuki and her colleagues in Uganda and Zimbabwe pioneered, and have for the last five years tested efforts to move African agriculture from its predominantly subsistence nature to an enterprise-oriented occupation satisfying market and consumer need.

At a glance, this new approach, Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) could easily be dismissed as yet another fad in the revolving development merry go round that has been characterised by a flurry of participatory approaches thrust upon farmers, leaving them feeling robbed of their indigenous knowledge and their intellectual property rights, with nothing to show for such participation.

The ERI model was developed by CIAT together with NGOs, agricultural research and extension agencies in Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It helps farmers to identify their problems, guides them to re-orient their thinking towards the assets at their disposal-land, human, social, physical, financial-and how they can deploy these to achieve their aspirations.

The ERI approach transcends the stereotyped projection of farmers' needs as being confined to inputs like improved technologies, fertilisers and pesticides. It seeks to understand farmers' aspirations, which as it turns out also include schooling for their children, better housing and living conditions, even the comfort and convenience of cars, over and above vehicles to transport produce to the market. Farmers begin to visualise how their modest farming activities and assets can be the means to a better life. Most importantly, the ERI process brings African farmers to the realisation that they are far from poor; that they have valuable assets that when coupled with information from markets and agricultural research can be developed to transform their lives.

The visioning process is borrowed from a down-to-earth community empowerment approach, the River Code model, developed in the 1980s in Zimbabwe and Kenya to help small-scale farmers change their perspective on the role of extension agents and NGOs in their development, and to enable them to take charge of their progress, or the lack of it.

The River Code model is illustrated with a skit. It is acted out with a development worker encountering two farmers discussing how to cross a wide, fast-flowing, crocodile-infested river to a land of plenty on the other side. The well-intentioned development worker decides to carry the farmers across one at a time. On the first leg, the development worker gets tired part-way through the journey, abandoning the first farmer on a desolate island in the river in order to fetch the second. The latter chooses to be guided rather than carried across, quickly learning to avoid pitfalls and pick solid stepping stones, thereby getting safely across to the land of plenty.

The model guides farmers through a process of visualising where they would like to be in five years. It helps them anticipate challenges they are likely to encounter and how to overcome them, for example by seeking information from extension agents.

"What happens today is that middlemen and other third parties come and tell farmers to produce certain commodities because "there is a market." Farmers, without knowing what and where the market is, what type of commodity the market wants, in what amounts and at what price, go along, thinking they will reap good returns. But our studies show that the outcomes are often not beneficial as farmers end up over-producing commodities that do not match market needs and are rejected, or commodities that remain uncollected and go to waste if the middlemen do not return," says Njuki.

The model recognises that African farmers need to organise themselves into groups so they can pool their produce in order to supply quantities required by manufacturers helping them to secure long-term contracts. These groups have more bargaining power in negotiating prices, and are a good entry point for developing farmers' leadership and management skills. In addition, they bring together varied skills.

For example, farmer groups implementing ERI have a research committee that seeks localised solutions to crop improvement, soil management and resource use on behalf of other farmers before the technologies are widely adopted. They also have a market research committee that visits local markets and other potential outlets such as hotels, manufacturers and exporters shopping for new markets, negotiating better prices, and looking out for new market opportunities. A monitoring and evaluation committee ensures that group action plans are implemented on schedule, and that the plans are adjusted in line with lessons from their experiences.

Furthermore, analysis of the gender dynamics within ERI farmer groups and communities is yielding findings with significant implications for development projects and extension workers. Increased assertiveness among women and gender-disaggregated data clearly bring out information on income changes within households, and show which enterprises benefit women more. Emerging trends show that men tend to take charge of higher income activities such as tobacco farming, mobilising most resources available, including women's labour, at the expense of the food-securing activities women tend to be involved in, like bean farming.

"The challenge is to ensure that women undertake enterprises that are not in competition with men?s higher earning activities. Women must also have full control of their enterprises as evidence shows that incomes controlled by women are more likely to be invested in improving the welfare of the family. But at the same time, we must recognise that women need opportunities that break gender stereotypes," says Njuki.

The ERI model is increasingly gaining popularity with governments and development partners. Tanzania established an Agriculture Marketing Systems Development Programme, currently being implemented in 36 districts as the method of choice for community empowerment, rural innovation and dissemination of new technologies. Malawi is making similar efforts through a consortium of NGOs called I-Life, which to date has taken the approach to seven districts.

The International Development Research Institute has recently invested in scaling up this approach in countries where it has already been tested, like Burkina Faso and Ghana, in collaboration with the African Soil Fertility Network. The World Bank too is supporting adoption of ERI in Rwanda's Rural Sector Support Programme.

The East African