Enterprise based development

On Saturday I went to the VSO office for a meeting with the Programme Office staff and Dr Sal Buckler, a researcher and VSO volunteer who has been doing a VSO / Barclays study on enterprise based development. We talked a little about the projects we have here, and a little about her work, but we spent most of the meeting planning a forum that the British High Commission had agreed to host for us. We wanted to bring people together, show them what we are working on, highlight some of Dr Buckler’s research, and start to get the audience thinking and talking about how we might find a new way to bring corporates and investors in to provide capital for development.

We planned that, after opening speeches from the British High Commissioner and our Country Director, Samba (Programme Manager) would give an introduction to VSO The Gambia’s strategic plan, then I would give a presentation on the World Bank Growth and Competitiveness Project, followed by Dr Buckler talking about her research. I went away and spent Saturday evening and Sunday morning working on my presentation, and then tweaked it with the office staff on Monday.

On Monday I also met again with Dr Buckler, and a few other volunteers who are working on the Growth and Competitiveness Project. We had a more in depth chat about what we have been doing, the groundnut value chain, the challenges that we are facing, and what we needed in order to ‘add value’ to our project. I hate the phrase ‘added value’.  It gets thrown around all the time and I think of it as a filler that is used when people don’t know what else to say.  But sometimes it fits and I have come to realise that sometimes I have to say it, even though it makes me shudder!

We were talking a lot about issues across the value chain that impact on our project. Our funding enables us to provide training on business development and build capacity around technical growing and processing techniques. But there is so much that falls outside the scope of our project that hinders what we are trying to do. For example, technical training can advise on the importance of crop rotation and the need to improve soil fertility, yet land tenure and ownership often means that farmers get moved on every year to a different piece of land. This means that they can’t plan or rotate crops as they might wish, yet changing this will require serious cultural and systemic changes that our project probably won’t even come close to.

However, Dr Buckler’s research was really interesting and she spoke of what she had seen across Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. She has been researching projects where big companies have invested in development. This is often for two reasons; to help their corporate and social responsibility targets and also to ensure sustainability for their own businesses and production. For example, a well-known chocolate company has been working with cocoa farmers in Ghana. They were worried about declining production; cocoa trees were not being well looked after, established cocoa farmers were getting older and retiring, and young people weren’t showing much interest in cocoa farming. The company were concerned that the supply of cocoa could eventually run out. So they established community projects to inject some life back into cocoa farming, and the model that they used has turned out to be really effective. If we could get something like that going for groundnuts, and get backing and resources from a big company who are the ‘end users’ of groundnut, then it would really help us.

Tuesday rolled around and I started to feel a little nervous! First up was a lunch hosted by the High Commissioner for the VSO programme office staff, Dr Buckler and I. The food was delicious, although I didn’t eat much as I was feeling the butterflies! But when it came down to it my presentation went well, and as soon as I stood up I didn’t feel nervous - it was just pre-performance jitters! After the presentations had finished we went into a smaller room for discussion. The event was attended by the Permanent Secretary for Trade, and representatives were there from the World Bank, UNDP, Standard Chartered, the Chamber of Commerce and many other finance and development ‘heavyweights’. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of multi-agency sharing, and you could see that people had a lot to get off their chest. Our Country Director was trying to push them to think of new ideas, new possibilities, and it took a while to get there, but once people said what they needed to say you could see them starting to think more creatively, and by the end the conversation had been really useful. As a result of the event it was agreed that a working group will be formed and the meetings will continue. Tuesday’s forum was a first, and was intended to be a catalyst for other events – I think it went well and I hope that the interest continues.