Terracing in Nepal

IDE has been working in Nepal since the early 90’s and the Nepal programme is now one of the largest within the IDE family.  Since establishment IDE Nepal has reached more than 170,000 poor farming families and achieved an average annual per family income increase of £125.

I was struck by how effectively the small scale IDE client farmers near Pokhara (to the west of Kathmandu) are using tiny terraced pockets of land high up the sides of mountains to grow irrigated fruit and vegetables for the market. 

A recent innovation that is proving to be very popular is the plastic greenhouse.  These are cheap and easy to construct. They enable the farmers to protect plants from heavy rain and disease to grow tomatoes during the rainy season.   During the main season in the lowlands the farmers’ can fetch around 10-15 Nepalese Rupees a kilo (£0.8 – £0.12), however during the monsoon the prices rise to 50 – 70 Rupees per kg (£0.40 – £0.60) – so there is significant additional income to be made by growing tomatoes during the rains.

Pabritra planting using new IDE Nepal drip irrigation system

Whilst there I met three women farmers who were just starting to use irrigation with the support of a Department for International Development (DFID – British Government) funded project.   Pabitra Pariyar had just bought a drip irrigation system for 1900 Rupees (£16) from the local manufacturer IDE has been supporting.  Before adopting the drip irrigation technology Pabitra was growing maize and millet on her 1/8 hectare plot, selling a little surplus for 2-400 Rupees (£1.70 – £3.40).  Pabitra has high hopes that she will make much more cash income by selling the cabbages she is planting. 

In another village I met Radha Lansal.  Unusually for a woman in rural Nepal Radha lives alone.  Radha first started irrigated farming in 2007 with the support of the IDE Rural Prosperity Initiative.   Before joining the project Radha grew rain fed crops on her 500 square metre plot to eat and had very little cash.   In the first year she earned nearly £430 in cash income from growing vegetables, using this cash she has rented more land – adding another 1000 square metres – and last year increased her income to £683.   When I asked Radha how she was using her increased income she showed her independent spirit – she said she is saving £300 a year for the future when she knows she may not be able to work so hard.

With Radha (photo Bimala Colavito)

 I left Nepal further inspired by the potential that even the smallest plot of land in the most difficult place can enable farmers to dramatically increase their incomes.  These farmers just need the tools, knowledge and water to really transform their lives.

Meeting Anita on her farm

However, I soon warmed to her charm and immense enthusiasm for farming.   Anita described her increasingly profitable journey in smallholder farming ‘we used to just have a small kitchen garden, using a bucket.  After IDE came and showed us the benefits of irrigation we realised that farming is a business and can make lots of money’.  

In the last few years since she first purchased a treadle pump she is now earning over $700 a season from her irrigated vegetables, and her total farm income (including a new seed multiplication business) to over $2200.  True to her businesslike approach Anita has continued to invest in her business ‘we never used that money – but have a problem transporting produce the 14km to the nearest market – so we bought a second hand car’

Anita checks market prices

Anita is also a great demonstration of the power of the mobile phone.  Throughout our discussion she took a number of calls on her mobile, she explained that the phone enabled her to ‘get the latest market prices, and if someone wants tomatoes they just give a call and I send my boys with a couple of crates’.

Now not only is Anita getting worldwide fame – but she is spreading her learning and experience about irrigated farming to her neighbour farmers.  She often hosts demonstration days on her farm to show others how to also achieve the same success.

Farmer Brian Kapeta describes his transport problems

Today I met Brian Kabeta on his farm near Pemba, a couple of hours drive south of the Zambian capital Lusaka.  

Brian is one of IDE’s success stories:  Before IDE introduced him to the treadle pump, he carried buckets of water by Ox cart from the nearby river to a small plot of cabbages and earned no more than $100 cash income.  He dramatically increased his income during 2006 – his first season with a pump.  By 2007 he had saved enough money to buy a diesel powered pump and now earns over $2000 gross a year from growing a wide range of fruit and vegetables using irrigation. 

This year Brian has grown watermelon for the first time.  He cut a great deal with the Spar supermarket in the nearby town of Choma to provide 50 melons every couple of days for a great price of $0.33 a kilo (that’s over $1.60 for an average 5kg watermelon).  However, he was scratching his head wondering how to get them the 50 km to Choma tomorrow in line with his contract.  Yesterday, Brian waited from 6am until 2pm to hitch a lift to the market, time he could have been spent working on his farm.   

Being entrepreneurial, and seeing the chance of an empty pick-up truck – we left Brian’s farm with 50 watermelons in the back of our pick up. 

Brian's watermelons

Brian’s problem is common across most smallholder farmers when the move from subsistence farming to growing fruit and vegetables for market.   For example I met Busu Geleto in Ziway, Ethiopia last year.  When Busu doubled her income by using a treadle pump to grow vegetables the first thing she did with her new cash was to invest in a donkey cart, which she was also renting to her neighbour farmers to get their produce to market.

IDE’s origins in the early 80’s was in the development and marketing of low cost donkey carts for refugees in Somalia.  Perhaps we should go back to our roots?

Solar steam pump field testing in Ziway, Ethiopia

I have just left Ethiopia where I visited Ziway in the Rift Valley where IDE is field testing a radical new way to for poor farmers to pump water for irrigation in the developing world.

IDE has gone back to 19th Century technology - but using the power of the sun rather than fossil fuels to create steam and drive a water lifting pump. 

An umbrella kind of device called a parabolic mirror concentrates the rays of the sun onto a central pot of water.  This water soon reaches boiling point and creates steam that travels down a plastic tube to drive the steam pump to lift water out of a well.  

We have nine pumps being tested and assessed in farmer’s fields in the Rift Valley area.  These are showing real promise to revolutionise the way smallholder farmers irrigate their fields, enabling them to grow high value crops for market – without the time and effort required for manual pumping. 

Nick Jeffries a student and volunteer from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales is currently studying the efficiency of these pumps using a range of monitoring techniques – I am looking forward to seeing the results soon, early data indicates that the pump can deliver around 5000 litres of water a day to a farmer’s fields.  

Expectations that a final pump would retail in the region of $250.   A comparable cost to a small diesel pump – but of course without the need for a farmer to buy fuel.

June 1^st 2009 Return to Ethiopia

I arrived back in Ethiopia yesterday.  It has been nearly four years since I left with a heavily pregnant wife to return to the UK to start a family.  It is very exciting to be back, though Ethiopia has never really left me and played a central role in my decision to start working for IDE.  It is difficult to forget the scenes in the drought of 2003 – severely malnourished children lined in therapeutic feeding centres in the apparently luscious and fertile Sidama is a scene that will not leave me.  As will my determination to do something about it. Hence joining IDE.

Addis Ababa seems like one big building site with construction all over the place.  After arriving from London in the night I spent a sleepless few hours at the hotel – kept awake by the Saturday night disco next to the my hotel.  Ironically named Hotel Dreamliner.  I wasn’t doing much dreaming there…  I headed out of the hotel to go to a café down the road where I used to have lunch, though of course this was long gone and a block being constructed in its place.

This morning I had a briefing at the IDE office and drove for 3 hours down the Rift Valley with the IDE driver Tilahun and accountant Meron.   At the edge of the city the Chinese have built their own version of the Spagetti junction to completely replace what was once a wonderfully confused crossroads which was aptly named ‘Confusion’ – the fancy new junction has kept the name and the Addis drivers seem to be equally muddled about how to get across it.   We were headed for the IDE ‘Rural Prosperity Initiative’ in Ziway, next to one of the Rift Valley lakes. 

As we drove down the long straight road South we passed at least four huge new greenhouse complexes, mainly growing flowers for the European market and competing heavily with the Kenya flower farmers.  Ethiopia at an advantage being a shorter flight to Amsterdam.  This looks to be an exciting new development for Ethiopia and I made a note to look into these companies – mostly joint ventures with European investors apparently.

We stopped off on the way down next to some people selling tomatoes, onions by the side of the road not far from Ziway to get an idea of market prices:  35 Birr or £2 for a bucket of onions (about 10kg) and 12 Birr or 60p for the same quantity of tomatoes.  Inflation has hit the onion market:  A year ago the bucket would be 10 Birr.   These vegetables were grown near the lake Koka, the first of the string of Ethiopian rift valley lakes. Mainly grown on land rented by investors using diesel pumps for irrigation – these people were in a different league from the smallholder farmers IDE works with.

Today we were going to see the IDE ‘rope and washer pumps’  these have been sold to over 350 farmers near Ziway at a 50% subsidized price of 749 Birr or £40, with the view that it was important to get some ‘early adopters’ going to demonstrate the technology and spread the word in their community.  We spent an hour talking to one farmer who had an inspiring story:

From prisoner to farmer/entrepreneur: Tadesse Mekuria

42 year old Tadesse Mekuria is from the Gurage region of Ethiopia.  11 years ago he got into a quarrel with a neighbour which ended up in a fight, the neighbour came off worse (though survived) and as a result Tadesse was sent to jail for 10 years.  On his release Tadesse felt he couldn’t return to his home village because of his bad name there. He was however, able to rent the small plot of land he owned there.  Instead he set up home in Ziway.  Initially he tried to make a living by working as a tailor in the local town.  This was not very successful and he found he was really only employed for about 2 days a week, bringing in about £2-3 for each day worked.  He also tried some petty trading with chilli pepper, but this wasn’t very successful. His income did not go very far, with four children to care for – none of whom he could send to school.

When Tadesse met the IDE field team in December 2008 he was immediately interested in the rope and washer pumps they were promoting and applied for a micro credit loan to buy one.  Using the money he had saved from renting his plot of land in his home village he bought 1000 sq metres of land for 6350 Birr (£320) and started growing  onion, kale, carrots, pepper, maize and sweet potato.   So far this has proved very successful and in the last six months he has already made 5800 Birr (£290) net income from these crops.  He has been particularly pleased with the onion seedlings that he has sold on at a good profit – and he is already on the second cycle with these. 

Tadesse’s plans for the future  

I wasn’t able to meet any of his children (aged 10, 12, 14 and 17) because they are now at school.  Tadesse has plans to replace his thatch roof on his hut (leaky in the rainy season) with a corrugated iron one.  His real dream though is to return to his home village as a successful man and bring rope and washer pumps with him to make up for past misdeeds.  Next week Tadesse plans to buy a pump at full price from the shop in Ziway and take it to his brothers in Gurage and spread the micro-irrigation revolution there…

It is now Sunday 7th and I am back in Addis with a reasonable access to the internet so only able to upload this now

Had some fascinating conversations with the board members – many have been involved in IDE since its founding.  I heard stories of the early days helping poor Somali refugee blacksmiths to make a good living through designing and building low cost donkey carts, which then enabled their owners to earn a good income of $200 a month hauling wood and food bags.   Somalis have definitely not lost their entrepreneurial spirit….

At lunch with IDE founder Paul Polak we both got excited about the possibilities of making mosquito nets for developing countries more affordable by good design and effective supply chains.  Why do they need to be subsidised? 

On the plane over to Denver I finished reading Paul’s book Out of Poverty which is a great introduction to IDE’s approach.  I would recommend it to anyone who wants to help people in developing countries escape from poverty.

Some people have said I must be crazy to be taking on the leadership of a charity given the current recession.  However, quite the opposite I feel that this will be an opportunity for an organisation like IDE – that has thrown away the rule book of how to ‘do development and aid’ with its market based solutions.

For a long time I have been looking for an approach to poverty reduction that builds on people’s  abilities to solve their own problems themselves rather than providing hand outs and encouraging dependency.  

It is nearly 4 years since I left Ethiopia but memories of the country and its people are very much still with me.   I have been focusing elsewhere in the world over the last 4 years – Eastern Europe and the UK - but Africa draws me back.   In particular the memories of the famine in 2003, when the NGO I worked for provided large scale emergency feeding programmes.  The severely malnourished children in the therapeutic feeding centres were a terrible demonstration of the failure of policy and development.   We were there to patch it up that time but never really made much progress with resolving the underlying problems.

Mostly out of frustration that there has to be a better way of helping countries like Ethiopia to pull itself out of the famine and poverty.  To give the people more hope and respect.  Well I really think I have found an organisation in IDE that has at least part of the answer. 

The traditional approach to charity and development has been proven not to work.   Giving aid to charity ‘beneficiaries’ provides scant dignity to the people.  A more respectful approach, and one that the developed world demands as a right, is to be regarded as a customer.  A person who is demanding, who wants the best, who is willing to invest in a product that will make a difference to their future. 

This is the IDE approach.    Fundamentally respectful of the creativity of farmers in the developing world – and doing its best to try and meet the demands of these farmers for products and services which will really enable them to climb out of the poverty trap.