New Job

If you’ve been following my posts for the last while, you may know that I’ve taken up a new job. It has been exactly two weeks since I’ve started.

I’m not going to give away specific details about which organization I work with or the partner organizations because I don’t want to censor what I write.

But in general, I like to explain my work as a microfinancing scheme with a twist for small holder farmers. We’re basically a facilitator between a large a bank, a large agriculture commodity trader, and thousands of small scale farmers. Our goal is to help these farmers access financing and market opportunities that they would have never had otherwise. More concretely, we’re trying to try out a loan product that the bank can, ultimately, scale up to many more farmers. We’re trying to promote farming as a business, rather than purely subsistence.

One thing is clear though, we are not your  give-everything-away-for-free-without-any-results kind of NGO that has traditionally worked in these areas. We’re in the suspended space of being between a for-profit company because we charge the farmers for our services and a non-profit because we only charge a certain percentage, never more. Our intent is to be self-sustaining, not to earn crazy profits.

It’s a bit of a complicated scheme and it’s still in pilot phase. Apparently it’s really one of the few pilots of its kind, of its scale in Africa, or maybe the world.

I know alarm bells are probably already ringing in your heads after my brief description. It did for me at first. This is not organic/biodynamic/conservation/good for the soil kind of agriculture. These farmers get access to loans for conventional chemical fertilizers, pesticides etc (but fortunately, non-GMO seed). It’s not a completely not-for-profit. It’s unclear how the farmers’ food security will be affected by becoming more market oriented (it may actually increase if the program is set up correctly). These are important questions that bother me also.

However, I do not see any other way to help a large amount of farmers gain proper access to financial services and market opportunities. It’s actually an amazing opportunity for the farmers; as far as I know, farmers in developing or developed countries rarely get this kind of chance to have two huge companies backing them up in a fair deal (as far as I can tell). Since it’s an interesting pilot, and I was hoping to gain some private sector experience, I decided I would like to become part of the team.

My specific job is to be a local coordinator of sorts for this pilot. Lots of pushing and nagging and team building as I see it. Let’s see how it turns out.