Below is the opening paragraphs for “Working For Food – Working For Money” by Terry Leahy.
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In 2010, I gave a talk on project design to the ARC-ISCW in Pretoria – a government agricultural research organisation. A researcher from the audience quizzed me about my support for subsistence projects. He had worked on cattle projects in Buluwayo. He said that in his experience people would not work for food but only for money. So you might be able to invent a way in which farmers could increase their subsistence production – their food production. But if this meant they had to do some work to achieve this result, they would not do it. On the other hand if you could find a way to help people increase the production of things they could sell – then they would do work to achieve this end. For example, if people were just planning to slaughter their cattle for home consumption, they could never be persuaded to put in any work to improve the condition of their cattle or their pastures. But if you could find a way to improve their chances of selling their cattle and getting a good price, then they might be quite happy to put in work to erect fences or improve their stock. This way, they would be working for money as they improved their herd and pasture condition.
An implication that you could draw from this is that you can only get people to participate in projects if you are willing to pay them an income – even if the project is intended to improve productivity on their own land. This certainly seems to be the rationale behind many development projects. But, as everyone knows, this strategy causes a typical problem. People enrol in a project to get an income but do not really have any commitment to the infrastructure that they are setting up. So you can get a whole lot of farmers to put in contour bunds by paying them to do so. But after the project is finished the bunds are not maintained. After a while they stop working. Damage from cattle or storms creates gaps which destroy the integrity of the bund and its capacity to hold water. This is something which a bit of simple maintenance work could prevent. Because the local people who have been paid to work on the project have no commitment, this maintenance work is not being done.
If this nostrum about work and money is true, there is quite a barrier to strategies designed to relieve village poverty by increasing subsistence production. You are asking people to put in a lot of work but you are not promising them any cash income. So what do I make of this claim about working for food and working for money? If we take it that this is a true statement about the social reality of African countries, how can we work around it?
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