Terry Leahy and Monika Goforth
Below is the opening paragraphs for “A Winning Formula for Food Security in Southern Africa” by Terry Leahy and Monika Goforth .
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The ‘Food Security Outreach’ model
The remarkable success of the Chikukwa project (described in the previous chapter) surely owes a lot to the fact that it is an “embedded project”. The German couple who were the catalysts for the project arrived as schoolteachers in the Chikukwa villages. They wanted to live in the villages and belong to the Chikukwa community. They achieved this as they helped their neighbours and friends to save their villages from hunger and environmental catastrophe. With the assistance of their own Chikukwa organisation, the villagers developed their committees and clubs and took democratic control to make the project work. The management team was initially those who had formed the first village club to look at these problems. A majority of future appointments came from local professional people who had already shown their commitment. As readers must be well aware, this is a far cry from the standard modus operandi of projects operating in the African villages. Typically, projects are staffed by professionals who live in a larger town or urban centre, not in the rural areas serviced by their project. Commonly, an NGO or government project only works with the same people for a maximum of three years.
It is unrealistic to expect that most projects will be as lucky as the Chikukwa project. Project are not likely to have embedded professionals running the project for the long haul and living in the same communities as the beneficiaries. The reality is that most NGOs and government agencies will work from some central urban area or large town. They will be staffed by professionals who want to live where they can have a middle class social life and send their children to good schools. They will travel by car to work in the villages. They will supply the professional expertise necessary to run a project and will work with villagers who are the “poorest of the poor”.
So this chapter is about how projects can work in these more standard situations. I am calling the project design I am going to be talking about “food security outreach” projects. They work from a large town or city and reach out to the rural areas. They concentrate on food security issues for the vast bulk of villagers rather than on commercial agriculture for richer farmers.
The three organizations to be examined all work on “feeding the farmer first” using low input technologies. They also break decisively with dominant models for project design. I am arguing that the “Food Security Outreach” model seems likely to be best practice for food security projects in rural Southern and South-Eastern Africa. I will be looking at the following organizations.
- The first is TSURO in the Chimanimani district of Zimbabwe. This operates in twenty-two of the twenty-four wards of a district with 120 thousand people. The data for this organization is the most extensive. In 2010, as part of our work making the film on this project and the Chikukwa project, my sister and I conducted interviews with twenty-one staff from the project, and with thirty-six beneficiaries. This data was supplemented by participant observation including farm visits, attendance at a community mediation and an annual planning meeting of TSURO staff. After our visit was completed I organized a small survey of 25 beneficiaries, so I could get some more systematic data. Five interviewees were chosen in each of five districts. In 2014, I returned to this organization and conducted further field trips to interview beneficiaries and see projects.
- The second organization is KULIKA in Uganda. This organization carries out work in a variety of rural communities throughout south-eastern Uganda. The data for this organization comes from their various publications and from interviews with two of the management staff, Elijah Kyamuwendo and Albert Obukulem. I met Elijah at the international permaculture conference in Malawi in 2009 and he invited me back to witness their operations first hand in 2010. I went to visit their headquarters in Kampala and Elijah and I drove out to their demonstration farm in the country. It was there that I met Albert.
- The third organization is Is’Baya, which operates in the Eastern Cape villages of South Africa. It works jointly on projects with the South African government Agricultural Research Centre. The management team is dispersed through various provinces of South Africa, although members have connections with the Eastern Cape through their personal histories. I met Peter Jones, one of the initiators of this project at a rural development conference in Eastern Cape in 2009. In 2010, I arranged to interview Rose Du Preez, an agricultural scientist employed by the ARC who has been working with the project since the beginning. Since then I have made a second visit in 2014 and worked with Is’Baya for several months in the villages, going with the field officers to communities where they were having meetings with the beneficiaries. Through this I was introduced to the monitors for the projects in the villages. I decided to spend about three weeks of my visit staying in two of the fifty villages that they work with.
I have chosen to review these three projects because what they are doing is so different from the dominant models of project design that have been failing all over Africa. In all of my research since 2003, I have discovered very few projects that did not operate with these dominant models. Almost all projects stressed commercial solutions to food insecurity and were organized to set up an entrepreneurial community group or give support to leading farmers to try out a commercial strategy. It was equally apparent that very few of these commercial projects were effective in the long term. So, the projects I am talking about in this chapter are some of the few that depart from these dominant models. Their resemblance to each other was discovered. The Is’Baya project was first encountered through a presentation at Walter Sisulu University in Eastern Cape. The KULIKA project was presented at an international permaculture conference in Malawi in 2009 and people from the TSURO project also represented their organization at that same event. Research to follow up these initial discoveries took place in subsequent years.
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