I worked on a project to create affordable, electric vegetable graters for rural farmers in Ghana [1]. For comparison, the price point of our grater was $150USD and was still seen as too expensive by a substantial portion of our customers, some of whom opted to purchase the graters on an installment basis (3 x $50 every 6 months as our group traveled to Ghana bi-annually).
The main problems our rural customers faced were much more basic in nature and cannot be solved by a $60k farming kit: uncontrollable and sometimes devastating wet/dry seasonal cycles that could decimate an entire crop, making financial planning very difficult. Subsequently many of our customers lived day-to-day off whatever they sold their produce for at the market, making securing loans/financing to invest in capital (more land, equipment, livestock) impossible.
At one of the farms we visited, I noticed a half-built brick house next to the main family house. The farm owner explained that they were building a second home, but that they had to do it literally "brick-by-brick", purchasing a few bricks with extra income when they could afford to buy them. He explained this investment in bricks was their form of saving for the future: the small amounts of extra money would get spent otherwise on food or other necessities rather than put into a bank account or stashed under a mattress.
Other basic problems included a relatively high marginal cost of transporting goods to market and little access to market price data. No agricultural education info. Communal access to heavy farming machinery (graters, plows, etc.) with no accountability for these devices (they end up breaking and nobody wants to pay to fix them). Unreliable electric grid, and no chance the cellular service would be reliable/affordable enough to get an IoT system up and running on a small farm, even if the farmers did have time left over after planting, harvesting, and processing their crops, and looking after their families. Everything is harder and more manual when you lack scale, and you can't order a replacement solar panel/battery/raspberry pi off amazon.
Since the goal of our project was to get the grater into the hands of as many cassava-grating women as possible, at marginally-above-cost, we decided to sell into restaurants and explore other cash-rich markets to cross-subsidize sales to small acreage farmers. We also wanted to sell direct, or close-to-direct (at least in the beginning) to build a relationship with our customers, get to know them, get feedback on the products, and spread news of the product thru word of mouth.
That said, maybe we should have looked to sell our graters to governments/NGOs so we could have scaled up faster.
I've seen brick by brick construction before in peruvian shantytowns, but they lived in the houses the entire time.
They would start with bamboo stakes, woven bamboo mats and sheets of black PVC plastic to construct temporary walls and and claim squatting rights on the land. Then they would slowly buy bricks and stack them up to supplement the walls.
Eventually they would buy cement to construct proper walls and proper roofing materials (the black PVC sheeting was used as a roof until then)
In the long term, they might repeat the process and start on a second story.
Based on what you have said here I feel like technology such as iPhones and IoT networks is not what these people need. Would it help to provide some kind of farming manual with instructions on how to build and maintain farm equipment, how to create a co-op to sell locally, etc? Has it been done? What about providing a printing press to publish pricing data on a daily/weekly basis to try and make that information available to more people? These seem like problems that must have existed in the US in the last 100-150 years, what did we do?
"In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.
Social media - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.
Avaaj Otalo is a service for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. This service was designed in the summer of 2008 as a collaboration between UC Berkeley School of Information, Stanford HCI Group, IBM India Research Laboratory and Development Support Center (DSC), an NGO in Gujarat, India.
By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record, browse, and respond to agriculturual questions and answers. In addition to the Q&A forum, the service includes an announcements board of headline-like snippets updated regularly by DSC staff, and a radio archive to listen to past episodes of DSC's popular weekly radio program."
Avaaj Otalo led to the founding of Awaaz.De (literally, "give voice"), a company in India that provides a hosted solution for deploying voice-based social media.
To go one level deeper than the unpredictable weather and poor economics of the small-time farm, I think much of the "problem" of subsistence farming is cultural/societal and there's not much the rural farmers or the NGOs/charities can do to help other than one-off projects like the cassava grater that address specific, painful parts of the process, such as manual grating, but not the entire subsistence farming process/system as a whole.
We spent some time with the best and the brightest Ghanaian college students at Ashesi University [1], many of whom were middle/upper class and set on entering business and politics after graduation. Some discussed practical solutions to the problem, such as farmer co-ops. But all were fed up with the corruption and unstable governance of the country - which is actually extremely stable compared to Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad (Boko Haram). I heard that word 20 times during the half a day we spent with them - corruption this, corruption that. I left with the feeling that the current government and previous generations had let these students down, but that they were determined not to repeat those mistakes.
We also met the CEO and founder of the University, Patrick Awuah, who studied at Swarthmore in 1985 on a full scholarship and went on to work at Microsoft for 8 years as a software engineer and manager. He firmly believes in instilling ethics and self-reliance through education is the way forward for the country, and indeed the entire continent: "If you come back in 30 years, universities will be competing for the best and brightest students. I hope that universities will also be competing on things such as whose students are the most ethical. If that happens, it will change the continent."
I used to believe that religion was a crucial and effective way of passing an ethical code from one generation to the next. But every Ghanaian I met was either Christian or Muslim, and some even expressed concern for my soul when I said I wasn't religious. All taxi drivers would say a prayer and touch their jesus piece hanging from the rear view mirror before every journey (very disconcerting). I also spent some time in Afghanistan, where during the month of Ramadan, I and the other expats had to drink water out of sight in the bathroom at work when we were thirsty so as not to offend practicing muslims, and the entire country shut down after 2pm every day.
Yet despite hugely religious populations, both of these countries experience high levels of corruption, which I think isn't worse than the corruption that occurs in the US, it's just more visible - there's not enough to go around so favor currying/bribes/tribalism is more apparent than it is in wealthier nations where we've developed discrete ways of channeling and accumulating wealth. Corruption in poorer countries is very "in your face" - bribes to the police or politicians, kidnapping, torture, murder.
I'm not sure how it happened, but we were able to build better infrastructure in the US over the past 150 years - both physical (power, water, transportation, internet) and social (checks and balances, constitution, BOR, legal system, decently-managed welfare system). There was a lot of prosperity to go around, after WWII ended the great depression at least.
I suspect it had a lot to do with our financial successes following WWII and the unprecedented technological progress over the past century that allowed the majority of people in the US to prosper. I think our strong capitalist roots also helped, as we moved from an agriculture -> industrial -> services based economy (not a value judgment), while much of Africa was subjected to colonization and many of its resources, both material and human capital, were sent elsewhere. We corporatized and scaled up our agricultural sector, which has its pros (less back breaking labor, a lot more food) and cons (blander, genetically-weaker crops, danger of oligopoly). I think Mr. Awuah's comment is interesting because in 30 years, the best and the brightest Ghanaians may feel compelled to return home and improve life for their fellow Ghanaians, the same way he did after studying and working abroad.
In summary I believe more forward-thinking universities like Ashesi and more leaders like Patrick Awuah need to step forward to help instill a love for ethics, altruism, and the feeling of eating hard-earned bread after a long day of work in bright young students. This will address the core of the problem of the back-breaking labor needed for subsistence farming, but will take a long time. Until then we can chip away at edge problems, like cassava grating, and as another commenter pointed out, information access through smart phones.
This is all conjecture though, and I'm not big on either African or US history, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
[1] In 2012, the university was ranked by PwC as the seventh most respected organisation in Ghana, becoming the first university to make the list. Ashesi's President, Dr. Patrick Awuah, was also ranked the 4th Most Respected CEO in Ghana. In 2015, Africa.com again named Ashesi among its list of top 10 African Universities (excluding South Africa). (From > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashesi_University)
> I used to believe that religion was a crucial and effective way of passing an ethical code from one generation to the next. But every Ghanaian I met was either Christian or Muslim, and some even expressed concern for my soul when I said I wasn't religious.
I suspect what you might be seeing is moral licensing. I was first introduced to this as a discrete concept in Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History (episode 1). Interestingly, he predicted that because of it Hillary Clinton would suffer quite harsh criticism if she were to be elected (prior to the election). Listening to it for the first time after the election I couldn't help but think he was right in general but quite off about how it would be expressed. We had just elected the first black president, after all...
> Yet despite hugely religious populations, both of these countries experience high levels of corruption, which I think isn't worse than the corruption that occurs in the US, it's just more visible.
Can you explain yourself more? In your opinion: Is the US succeeding despite the corruption or is it the difference in the type of corruption that is holding Ghana back?
Also thank you for your comment, very interesting and refreshing!
As i read it the longterm water supply is the main problem? Is there a way to cheaply build synthetic cysterns, that can be fixed with existing such as clay?
I thought about freeze/heat fracturing?
You mentioned communal access to capital equipment - what was the organizational structure that acquired/owned this equipment? And how was this organisation run and to whom was it accountable?
Not OP, but thought this link to Hungary's attempts at collective farming might be relevant [1]. Being Hungarian, I've heard many anecdotal stories lamenting the abolishment of that system, to the detriment of small land owners. (In general, in the post-socialist economy, nothing seems to have taken its place, leading to obvious problems of scale and access to equipment.)
The last sentence in the article is quite shocking, though unattributed:
> By 1989, Hungary's total annual agricultural output was larger than that of France.
Oh yeah - I'm Israeli, so I know what a well-known run agricultural collective can do (in the kibbutz as well as the "lite" version, the moshava). I'm more curious to know what the equivalent structure is in Ghana, and why it has such trouble managing equipment. This has been done before, they're just not doing it well.
They are building a house a few bricks at a time using discretionary income after necessities to buy those bricks. Indoor farming would be far too expensive.
The main problems our rural customers faced were much more basic in nature and cannot be solved by a $60k farming kit: uncontrollable and sometimes devastating wet/dry seasonal cycles that could decimate an entire crop, making financial planning very difficult. Subsequently many of our customers lived day-to-day off whatever they sold their produce for at the market, making securing loans/financing to invest in capital (more land, equipment, livestock) impossible.
At one of the farms we visited, I noticed a half-built brick house next to the main family house. The farm owner explained that they were building a second home, but that they had to do it literally "brick-by-brick", purchasing a few bricks with extra income when they could afford to buy them. He explained this investment in bricks was their form of saving for the future: the small amounts of extra money would get spent otherwise on food or other necessities rather than put into a bank account or stashed under a mattress.
Other basic problems included a relatively high marginal cost of transporting goods to market and little access to market price data. No agricultural education info. Communal access to heavy farming machinery (graters, plows, etc.) with no accountability for these devices (they end up breaking and nobody wants to pay to fix them). Unreliable electric grid, and no chance the cellular service would be reliable/affordable enough to get an IoT system up and running on a small farm, even if the farmers did have time left over after planting, harvesting, and processing their crops, and looking after their families. Everything is harder and more manual when you lack scale, and you can't order a replacement solar panel/battery/raspberry pi off amazon.
Since the goal of our project was to get the grater into the hands of as many cassava-grating women as possible, at marginally-above-cost, we decided to sell into restaurants and explore other cash-rich markets to cross-subsidize sales to small acreage farmers. We also wanted to sell direct, or close-to-direct (at least in the beginning) to build a relationship with our customers, get to know them, get feedback on the products, and spread news of the product thru word of mouth.
That said, maybe we should have looked to sell our graters to governments/NGOs so we could have scaled up faster.
[1] http://www.olin.edu/academics/experience/engineering-capston...