I recently received this email from Damon Luloff, a grad student at Boston University who has worked on multiple book drives through FORGE (www.forgeprogram.org) at BU. The BU book drives over the past two years have brought in over 7,000 qualifying books for Books for Africa!
Damon has worked in the Meheba refugee settlement in Zambia; he's been managing a project called PACE (Project for African Community Empowerment). You can read more about Damon's work on his fascinating blog: http://www.pacenow.blogspot.com/
Hamjambo!
It's been over a
month since the last update, and a lot has happened. So this may be a long
update. But it's exciting and will be worth your time to read. I
promise.
Both the men's and
women's projects have quickly transformed from vague ideas to real projects that
are being implemented. After deciding on what problems they want to address,
both groups have accelerated into the implementation phase, meeting with me five
times a week and often meeting for hours at a time on their own, even as their
work load has increased due to cultivation. Let me fill you in on the
development of each project over the past month. Ladies
first...
The women are aiming
to help people improve their harvest, the primary source of food and income for
almost everyone in the community. They decided the most effective way to help people improve their harvests in the short- and long-term is by providing them
with fertilizer and hiring a professional agricultural extension worker to give
free workshops for anyone interested in the community. Most farmers are simply
too poor to purchase fertilizer which, if used properly, can triple their
yields. The workshops will educate people on the most effective modern farming
techniques and help them to understand the science behind farming, enabling them
to manage their farms more effectively instead of blindly doing whatever others
are doing in hopes that it will work.
The women
immediately realized that if they wanted to help farmers improve their harvest
this year they would have to work hard and fast. People would be planting soon,
and one of the two types of fertilizer needs to be applied at the same time that
the seeds are planted. The women needed to hurry, but could not proceed hastily.
They were facing a serious challenge--determining what price they would need to charge
people in return for the loans of fertilizer. Instead of charging people
up-front, the women are loaning people fertilizer in return for corn in May,
after people have harvested their crops.
The market rate for
a fifty kilogram bag of fertilizer is about $32. The government subsidizes
fertilizer for registered cooperatives which only have to pay $12 for the same
bag of fertilizer. Unfortunately, it takes six months to register as a
cooperative, meaning that we had to purchase the fertilizer at the market rate.
People in Meheba are not accustomed to having to pay the market rate. They
expected to pay no more than one hundred kilograms of corn per bag of
fertilizer. We eventually calculated that we could make a slim but adequate
profit if we charged people one hundred forty kilograms of corn per bag of
fertilizer. When we conducted a last-minute feasibility analysis to see if
people would be willing to pay that much per bag of fertilizer, only a handful
of people said yes. We had cut the expenses a much as possible and reduced the
profit margin substantially. There was nothing else we could do. We had to
either go for it or wait until next year. But quite a few people in the
community were expecting to receive loans and had prepared their fields in
anticipation of applying fertilizer. (Apparently, how one prepares his field
depends on whether he is planning on using fertilizer or not.) Those people
would be very disappointed if the fertilizer was not
distributed.
So we went for it.
The women commissioned my translator and me to go to Solwezi and buy three and a
half tons of fertilizer. Two days later we rode back on top of a huge truck
carrying seventy bags of fertilizer. The women had been taking applications for
the fertilizer loans while we were gone. They had received eighteen. The day
they scheduled to distribute the fertilizer an additional thirty people showed
up asking to receive the loans too. So it turned out that people were just
bluffing when they said they wouldn't pay one hundred forty kilograms of maize
per bag of fertilizer. Since distributing those seventy bags, rumors have
circulated that we will be loaning out more and dozens of people have asked the
women participants if they can still get some.
I asked a couple of
the women why so few people seemed interested in the beginning and it was only
after the fertilizer showed up that they started coming out of the woodwork to request loans. They told me that very few people had taken the project seriously
until they saw the fertilizer being passed out with their own eyes. They said
that many NGOs have come to the community with big ideas in the past, gotten
people excited, and then not delivered. It has turned the people of Zone F into
skeptics. Understandably. I was happy to have the opportunity to show them that
there are still organizations like FORGE who honor their word and deliver on
their promises.
At the same time as
all this was happening, the women found a highly qualified extension worker who
lives in the camp to give two workshops a week. He is a tall, quiet man with a
huge smile who is always on time, which is very unusual and unfortunate since
most of the attendees of the workshops show up over an hour late. I have
attended two of the workshops so far and am glad to report that not only does he
know what he is talking about, he is also an excellent and patient teacher. It's
not often that you find someone who is an expert in his field and an excellent
teacher as well. Community members listen attentively and ask dozens of
questions that they have probably had for years. After the extension worker
answers them thoughtfully and clearly, everyone nods and smiles at each other. I
smile too. Funny how knowledge can make you so happy.
The women's next
challenge is to build the storehouse where they will keep all the corn they will
be receiving in May. In order to make a profit, they will need to keep it in
storage until next September or January, when the prices for corn will be about
three times higher than they are in May, when the supply is high and the demand
low. In order to build the storehouse, they need $1,000. I have encouraged them
to seek investors in their business to pay for the construction expenses. They
think it will be difficult to find investors. Very few people in the community
have ever invested in anything before. No one has witnessed how the business is
run because it has just started. And in a poor community, people are very
risk-averse with the little money they have. Still, the women believe they can
attract $500 of investment capital from among people in the community. I told
them that I would commit to matching every dollar (or kwacha) that they raise
through my own fundraising efforts.
In addition to that
$500, I would also like to raise an additional $2,500 for their project. According to the current plan, they will be forced to sell their corn in
September so that they have cash to purchase more fertilizer in October to be
distributed in November. The market for corn in September is good, but it peaks
in January. If they were able to sell the corn in January instead of September
they could more than double their profits of $350 to almost $1,000. In following
years the profits would be even greater because they would be buying the
fertilizer at the discounted price as a registered cooperative organization.
Having an extra $2,500 would enable them to buy the fertilizer in October and
still keep the corn until January.
Increased profits
will be good for three reasons. First, it will allow them to purchase more
fertilizer each year, helping more and more farmers every year. Second, it will
give the people who invested in the business a better pay-off for their
investment, making them and others more willing to invest in the future. Third,
PACE is by far the biggest investor in the business. A large majority of the
profits will belong to PACE. I have stipulated that those profits may only be
used either for reinvestment in the business of for other PACE-authorized social
projects or enterprises that they come up with. That means that if the women
start a scholarship program for children in the community to go to high school
with the profits from this business, bigger profits will allow more children to
be sent to high school from Zone F each year. The additional $2,500 will pay off
in a big way in the long-term.
Just thirty
donations of $100 will multiply the benefits of this project several times over.
Please consider giving $100 (or whatever you are able to give, more or less) for
the women's project. It may be the biggest bang you ever get out of $100 holiday
gift. Please make checks out to "FORGE" and send them
to:
Damon
Luloff
312 NE Eaglewood
Dr.
Ankeny, IA
50021
Now, onto the men's
project...
The men's project is
a bit simpler in many ways. They aim to provide transportation to Zone F, which
has not had access to transportation in years. Currently if anyone wants to
travel out of the camp, they have to walk about ninety minutes to the nearest
bus stop (and as my translator says, "that's ninety minutes if one is a strong
walker"). If they buy anything in the city they have to carry it back that same
distance once the bus drops them off, usually after dusk. The men originally
wanted to buy a five ton truck to transport people and goods all over the camp,
to the nearest big town Solwezi, to the border of Congo (one of the best markets
in the region), and anywhere else people want to go. However, after seeing that
the budget would be $12,000 and that they'd have to raise $9,500 of that on
their own, they changed their strategy.
They decided to buy
a minibus instead, which they are hoping to buy for about $4,000. PACE invested
$2,500 in the project, meaning that they had to come up with the rest of the $1,500. After seeing results with the women's project, people in the community
with the means to contribute that kind of capital were no longer skeptical about
PACE and FORGE. In just two days the men were able to raise the remaining $1,500
they needed to start the business. They brought this money to me so that I could
physically see it to show that they weren't joking... They weren't
joking. I
was impressed. They said that people in the community wanted the project to
start as soon as possible. People had gone long enough without transportation.
They also told me that they wanted to get started before I left so that I could
take pictures and video to show PACE donors and supporters (you) that the
project had really started--so you could see it with your own eyes. As my
translator often says about the men: "They are very
serious."
According to their
calculations, the minibus should bring in at least $300 a week in pure profit.
They plan on saving all the profits so that in May they can put a down payment
on the five ton vehicle they originally wanted to buy and start operating it
once people harvest their crops and need to start transporting them. Usually,
vehicle operators come into Zone F from outside Meheba and charge exorbitant
rates. People have no option but to accept. Not this year! According to the
men's calculations, they will be able to charge 25% less than other operators
and still make the $300 a week profit. Now that's community
empowerment!
I still wish I could
stay an extra month or two to see the projects through their initial stages. But
when I leave in one week, I will leave confident that they will succeed. I hope
you are confident too.
This will be my last
update from Zambia. I want to express my gratitude to all of you who have
supported PACE over the past year, helping to bring what was once just an idea
into fruition. It's come a long way and has turned into everything I hoped it
would be. It truly would not have been possible without you. I wish you could
see the impact your support and contributions have made here. As much as I try
to express and describe the change you've made possible here in this lengthy
email, I'm sure I don't do justice to the actual impact you have had. I hope
that you can see what a difference you have made as an individual supporting a
community you have never met. The people of Zone F thank you daily. I wish you
could hear the things they say and hear the genuineness in the way they say
them.
If PACE proves to be
half as successful as it looks like it will be in Zone F, I will be compelled to
implement it in other communities in Africa. With your support, I'm sure that it
will be possible.
Aksanti sana! (Thank
you SO much!)