Tag: work

I’m so thoroughly tired today, in so many ways.

Woke up at 5 am to see the Canadian election results. Thoroughly disappointed. I’m afraid I’ll have to stop calling myself Canadian for at least another 4 years.

Took taxi (matatu/public buses) to Mbale. Already late because the taxi took forever to fill up and kept stopping every 5 minutes. Got on bodaboda (motorcycle with driver for hire) to go another 45 minutes. Got caught in the rain and had to wait half an hour. Very wet. The driver started complaining and being annoying about me giving him more money. I knew I was already paying a bit more than the actual price and I told him that. He wouldn’t stop talking. One of my biggest pet peeves – if we agree on a price, we agree on a price. Don’t make me annoyed. I finally said just leave me here and I’ll catch a taxi. He shut up. He still tried to ask once I got off. I was angry enough to slap him, not least because I was already an hour late.

Fortunately, the field visit went really well. The farmers are mostly doing great! Very happy.

By the end of the day, it started raining again. Soaked, again. Brrr….it’s actually cold now when it rains.

Tried to catch taxi back to Mbale. Three of them passed without an empty seat.

Bought roasted maize (so good!) but the guy cheated me and it turns out it was only half a cob of maize…oh well, I didn’t want any more any ways.

Taxi took forever to depart Mbale. Sat next to a huge mama who took up all my space. The taxi felt like it had never heard of the word “suspension” before, on a road that was 50% potholes, in pitch dark. My brain felt like it was literally pounded to mush by all the potholes. Then the taxi got a flat tyre. Great.

Got call from colleague, who was stuck in the field and might come back really late. She might have to stay over at my place. Which of course I said OK. I even volunteered to get her dinner. Not knowing that I would arrive too late to buy anything from the restaurants.

Got into my town. Got cat called by all the drunk boda drivers (of course, as usual).

Got home. Tons of emails. Supervisors coming in two days.

Eat (no appetite), shower, write blog to de-stress.

Wait for colleague to arrive (?)…

Ugandan gospel music on full blast outside my window. I guess I should be happy the usual blaring theatre sounds aren’t happening tonight?

I was exhausted yesterday.

Field visits on Wednesday and Thursday. (I’ve finally visited all four districts!) Field visits are usually already really long days because I have to get up early to get to the field, walk around the whole day in the scorching sun or pouring rain to visit farms, and then attend one or two farm group meetings at the end of the day. Then take a really long trip back home. I still don’t have a car (my guess – it’s going to come in two months) so I’m taking public transport, which you can wait for 5 minutes to 1.5 hours for it to fill up with people and actually depart. One of my supervisors yelled at me about why I didn’t rent a car. But I feel like it’s so wasteful. I really only need transport on the tarmac roads to get to the point where I meet up with my field staff. Once there, I just jump on their motorcycles. You can’t drive a car in the field: the roads are too narrow and the rains can ruin your car any time. I think from now on, I’ll just take a bodaboda (motorcycles for hire with a driver) whenever the wait for the buses (taxis) is too long. Let her think I’m stubborn. I’m not going to waste that much organization money to rent a car for a whole day and then use it for three hours on paved roads.

But it’s worth it. I’m so happy to be out in the fields. Just seeing the farms and talking directly with the farmers. It’s amazing to see how well most of the crops are growing. It makes me almost giddy to see my field staff and the farmers so happy. Of course, and the assurance that the loan will probably be repaid in full this season.

On Thursday though, there was a huge down pour of rain (as is how rainy season works here) right before I was trying to leave. So we took shelter for almost 1.5 hours. It was so cold that even some hail stones came down. I had nothing more than a coat because most of the days are really hot. I really need to get a rain coat. Once the rain lightened a bit, we braved it and tried to get back to the main road. But the road was under construction and water was everywhere. I thought we were going to break our legs because the motorcycle felt like it would flip over all time. Thank goodness for my very experience field staff who has been riding a motorcycle in these conditions for a long time. It was seriously the worst motorcycle ride I’ve been in.

I was shivering by the time I got back to the road and I still had to take public transport back. Waited for so long for the first taxi to a town called Mbale (one hour away from Tororo). Decided I really need food, so I ate quickly. But that meant that it was late and the taxis weren’t filling up as fast as usual. I waited another hour for the taxi to depart Mbale. I got home at 9:30 pm. So grateful that electricity was on so I could have a hot shower (and grateful that I have a hot shower). The moment I got out of the shower, my phone rang and I had to go back to the office to print a lot of documents for the next day. The factory is now open 24/7 because of production deadlines. Poor management, some of them get so little sleep. It took me two hours to get the printer to work (the desktop was so slow it opened 10 pages of pdf in 1 hour. I had 189 pages to print. It took me two hours to figure out how to download the printer driver onto my computer because the internet was so slow). I finally left around 1 am. Got home, fell asleep immediately.

Got up at 6 am the next morning to prepare for the weekly team meeting. Took taxi back to Mbale. Waited an hour because my field staff were all late an hour. Although the silver lining was I talked to an interesting guy at the inn while waiting. Another post for another time. Had a really good meeting. I’m quite happy at how the meetings are going; I think we’re really starting to build a team now. At the end, I was told that the walk to work protests were surrounding Mbale. So I had to wait before I could go back to the office. Luckily I had my computer and lots of receipts to sort out, so I worked the whole afternoon. I left at 4 pm and the streets were eerily quiet with burnt tyre (?) remains. The taxi also took forever to leave. I actually don’t mind because I support these actions against Museveni (president of 25 years).

I took a 15 minute nap once I got home, but I had to get back to the office. My supervisor was demanding a report as soon as possible. Funnily, I was really in the work zone so I got a lot done. My colleague also came back from distribution of inputs to the farmers at 9:30 pm (we work hard here, mh?). We were ready to go by 10:30 pm but we had to wait for a car from Kampala to arrive at the factory because we had to wait for the management at the factory to drive us home (there are no bodabodas this late at night). So I got home at 11:30 pm. I’m still exhausted. But most probably I will work today (Saturday) just so I won’t fall too behind.

Interesting thing happened at the office apparently. It was HIV/AIDS day, so they tested everyone for HIV/AIDS. I heard that only one person (I think one of the labourers working on the production) was tested positive. I immediately asked if they would be fired. Thankfully they wouldn’t be. They’ll just have a private conversation with the doctor. Darn, I missed a free test.

On second thought, I’m really glad I didn’t take the other job in Tanzania. Just getting one report done in a week is killing me. (Although I’m told I’m actually good at writing reports. I’m fast and accurate? But I really don’t like writing them. Getting me to sit down and write for three hours is really hard unless it’s something non-boring) I hate reports. With a vengeance. With steam coming out of my ears. I’m so glad I have field visits tomorrow and the day after.

2. Farmers (and people in general) keeping problems a secret until they are on the verge of being discovered.

I don’t know if it’s a trust thing. Or is it a culture thing to keep problems hidden (trust me, I know how it is. Saving face is huge in Chinese culture). But in any company, project, program, etc, it’s impossible to function when your own staff are keeping problems hidden from you. Last season, we estimate that only one-quarter of what was contracted to be farmed was actually planted. This isn’t even including what was planted, but was reported to be a failed harvest. Problem is, we didn’t really have a proper monitoring system set up last season, so we can only rely on the honesty of the farmers. And when there’s a huge loan to be repaid, honesty levels drop through the floor. The point is, though, that none of this was brought up until one month before we were supposed to collect the harvest. All along, for 5 months, our field staff were told that everything was going very well from the farmers. Even when my supervisors and visitors from the Bank came, the farmers still said everything is going well. No problems mentioned. Frankly, we didn’t really have any reason to not believe them before. Until this disaster harvest was revealed when we actually went out and collected.

Or that the farmers never complained that they were missing inputs from last season’s start until the end of the season. The inputs are actually bought with their own money (which has been lent by the bank), and they didn’t report that they didn’t get them. Would you just keep quiet for 6 months if the store didn’t give you what you paid for? I don’t really understand it. Maybe the farmers didn’t know how the program is supposed to work because it was the first season. Maybe the farmers thought it wasn’t a loan and just a handout so couldn’t care enough to complain (although technically they would still be losing money if it were a handout). Maybe they thought some of the leaders took the fertilizer/seeds as ‘a little something’ so they didn’t dare complain. I don’t know. Either way, the problem was kept in the dark and now we have to struggle to handle both last season’s and this season’s problems because of belated complaints.

Complaints are good! We need them on time!

I find it very often that people here would just say everything’s well, even when it’s not. Just like in Tanzania, the reply to “how are you?” “how is your work?” “how is everything going?” is always “fine.” Even with my field staff, when I phone almost every day to check on them, I have to ask very specific questions about what activity they were doing to get a picture of how it is going. If I ask “how is it in the field” the only answer would be “it is fair (fine).”

This takes asking the right questions in the right way to a new level for me. It’s not only when asking complicated questions to break them into simpler bits, or asking sensitive questions in a culturally appropriate way, or asking the same question in different ways to compare answers. It’s being cautious and digging deeper for almost anything that is reported to me. It’s to be aware that there are probably problems lurking everywhere, and my field staff know it, but aren’t reporting until the last minute. It’s also to request our staff to be cautious about what the farmers are reporting. Does it make sense? If not, ask more questions.

I’ve made it very clear that we need to be brutally honest within our team, or else the project will fail. If there are any problems, I want to hear about it immediately. Each weekly internal team meeting we have, I make sure the field advisors report about their week of activities and problems encountered first, rather than me talking. I think this is a bit against the culture, as most of the meetings with farmers that I have gone to, the field advisors talk for an hour before allowing any questions from the farmers. I’ve already seen some improvements in that when I call, the field advisors voluntarily tell me more problems than before. And during the team meetings, there is a lot more discussion about the problems we have encountered and how we can deal with them. I hope that we can continue to build this culture within the team, and hopefully eventually to the farmers.

Since I haven’t written anything of interest to anyone lately (those ranty, stream of consciousness posts are more for myself than anything else), I thought I would do a brief job update post. Not that I have much else in my life recently. Other than reading news and blogs and books. Plus, as much trouble as it is, I actually enjoy my work.

Recap: the scheme I work with is basically trying to link small scale (minimum and mostly 1 acre) farmers to loan and selling services. So we partner with two large companies – a huge, multinational bank and a huge, multinational agriculture commodity trading company. The bank provides the loans for agriculture inputs (fertilizer, seeds etc), we bulk buy the inputs for lower prices (and to hopefully prevent the farmers from misusing the money), deliver it to the farmers, the farmers plant and grow, and finally the trading company buys all the outputs. The farmers repay their loan through selling to the trading company. My organization is the facilitator/mediator. If the scheme were working perfectly, we don’t even need to be in the picture. But since it’s just starting up, we run around trying to nag all the partners to do what they’ve agreed to do. Our current biggest problem is just like the sub-prime mortgage crisis – the farmers aren’t repaying their loans. The whole scheme falls apart. There are, of course, many, many valid and non-valid reasons…all of them headaches.

So recent problems:

1. Fertilizer thieves

There are basically two kinds. First, the group leaders give the members less than they applied for as a loan and sell the rest for personal profit. So much for the ‘”African” community spirit’ that is often touted in development literature. This is allowed to happen, with farmers fearing to complain, because there is such a large culture of ‘kickbacks.’ It’s natural that the leaders take their cut. I would too if I were in power. If we didn’t let the leader take their cut, there would be future benefits because you’ll be kicked out of the group. Some of the farmers in a particularly problematic group actually started complaining. The next morning, the group leader had called a meeting. By the afternoon, every single one of the farmers changed their complaints. This even happens at a higher level. The factory I work at gets business from a certain UN agency. Apparently for every contract awarded, said agency officials would come and ask for ‘a little something.’ Of course, the factory has to pay, or else no future business.

Second, the individual farmers that face cash flow problems and decide to sell their inputs. Problem predicted, but still hard to understand. One farmer sold his inputs to buy a mattress. Others to pay school fees for their children. There is no concept that this is a business loan, to be used to grow your business, so that you can buy 10 mattresses at the end of the season. No, cash flow is such a huge problem in these communities that anything that can give immediate cash is much prized. (Hm, does that mean money here has a larger discount value than back home? Or maybe I’m just mixing up my finance concepts.) Fundamentally, I don’t think the farmers understand the value of the agriculture inputs. They don’t understand how much it is worth at market price because they applied for the loan in aggregate (and to say the truth, we haven’t been very good at communicating exactly how much the loan is. Part of the problem is that our field advisors are afraid to say how much it actually is, I think.), so they don’t hesitate to sell the inputs at a much lower price to solve their cash flow problems. They also don’t understand that these inputs (improved seeds and fertilizer) will actually increase their yields by 6 or 7 times. There’s huge value in investing in your agri-business. But they’ve never seen that before and for farmers, seeing is believing.

So because of all this, I’ve spent a significant part of my time here chasing after fertilizer thieves. Confiscating fertilizer in markets (and nearly getting mobbed by the crowd – people are angry when you prevent them from making handsome profits), following the police around for investigations (much more boring than you think), and just generally being concerned about the safety of our field advisors (because they are the targets when people don’t get their illegal profits).

2. Farmers (and people in general) keeping problems a secret until they are on the verge of being discovered.

3. Training our own staff in changing mindsets. No more NGO give-aways.

4. And I can go on, but let me explain 2 and 3 next time.

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.

I’ve arrived safe and sound, but very tired, to Tororo, Uganda.

Very intense two days – one for sitting in a car for almost 12 hours and the other for long explosive meetings.

I’ve jumped right into the mess of things and I hope my job will turn out well!

More once I really get settled.