Quarterly Report 3

Hi all,
I know it has been a long time. I have some backlogged blogs I will be putting up here in the next few days, about four of them on my awesome experience of the last month in Rwanda, where I was learning cupping, doing interviews, trying to speak French, talking to people about coffee, experienceing genocide commemoration week, and eating tons of bananas and french fries (who knew fries were such a staple food the world over?). Anyway, thank you all for continuing to read even when I am bad about updates. Here is my third quartely report. Hard to believe we are down to the last few months...


Africa. It is a continent that in my younger days I didn’t expect to visit. Full of mystery. Dark and different, unknown. In Tanzania, I stepped out of the Arusha Airport unsure of what I was stepping into; excited, but nervous. How would I get by in countries where English (or Spanish) were not so widely spoken? How would this continent be different than where I had spent the last few months, in somewhere more familiar? Starting this section of the project on a new continent, I was faced with many more of these questions than when I hopped on an airplane headed for Nicaragua. They needled my confidence as much as the questions I had about my project coming in.
But the magic of the Watson is that we are each given the opportunity to claim parts of the world that before seemed unimaginable. My self-confidence has been boosted greatly these last few months, as I have found that I can make my way in new countries on an unfamiliar continent in countries that seemed daunting to begin with. I have learned that I can communicate in places where my knowledge of local languages is exceedingly limited. I have spent hours laughing, chatting and communicating with people when our shared vocabulary consists of only a dozen words.
My experience working with organizations in Africa has helped mature my understanding of how community development happens. I am passionate about ensuring that people have opportunities and access to resources. This year has been about investigating models that facilitate development in that way. However, I came into the year imagining that cooperatives needed to be philanthropic and solely development focused. In Nicaragua I was disturbed by the focus of CECOCAFEN on business. How could producers relate to this? How did this best serve members? Why were they so profit oriented? Shouldn’t they put more effort into their education programs and other development initiatives rather then being so business driven?
During these three months, I have reevaluated this preconception and come to understand that in order to be successful, cooperatives must be business oriented. I have realized that having some focus on efficiency is not a negative trait, nor does it imply that the group is not working to aid and empower members. Rather, it illustrates a commitment to running successful programs. Many of the cooperatives that I have encountered in these two countries are working to build infrastructure that is integral to increasing farmer incomes. I have come to understand that this is a clear precursory step to implementing education or other kinds of empowerment programs. In addition, seeing how people are incorporated and empowered through the development of successful small businesses has shown me one very successful way to ensure producer empowerment and ownership of projects. By developing structures that increase income while working to develop cooperative spirit and community consciousness, people and communities are far more empowered than by aid models implemented in so many places. I have seen how strategies for gender equality and reducing child labor can be worked into business models. This focus is changing the way many cooperatives operate.
In Tanzania the history of giant, unresponsive, and mismanaged cooperatives is one of the major challenges to developing successful producer organizations today. Farmers are not anxious to jump into a ‘cooperative’ when their previous experience included handing over their products and never receiving payment. It was very interesting to work with both NGOs and parts of the Tanzanian government, USAID, and other organizations to see how producers are negotiating this history in attempts to create new farmer organizations. New Farmer Business Groups seem to be replacing historical cooperatives, with similar missions but more of a focus on business development in hopes of avoiding some of the pitfalls of past cooperatives.
In Rwanda, current cooperatives are fighting hard to dispel a historical conception of cooperatives as government-run farmer welfare programs. They are working to change mindsets to cooperatives as business, increase democratic participation and ownership of organizations. In the southern region of Rwanda, where I spent my time, this approach has helped farmers to double and in some cases triple farmer incomes in the last five years, creating new opportunities for members as well as providing a model for cooperative development around the world.
Also during this time, I attended my first conference with the international coffee community. In February, I spent four days at the East African Fine Coffee Association Conference In Arusha, Tanzania. It was held at a multi-million dollar resort, and present were those from the Founder of Starbucks to new independent roasters to producers from all over Eastern Africa. It was fascinating to see and imagine how all of these people are related as links in the chain of a $90 billion per year business.
Meeting exporters, importers, roasters, and others improved my understanding of the international coffee industry as well as the position of small-scale farmers within that industry. I learned more about certification, and the challenges facing those at the consumer end of the coffee industry. I was also able to hear their advice to producers, which was very enlightening, providing a virtual roadmap for growing quality for specialty markets. It is based on quality, not on labels. Consumers will not repeatedly purchase low quality products simply because they are marked with a Fair Trade or Rainbow Alliance label. Dependence upon consumer’s social conscience does not empower consumers or producers. Putting a focus on improving quality to empower producers to cultivate products that can sustainably increase their incomes allows independent development and empowerment. They avoid becoming dependent upon the philanthropy of consumers that puts producers at the will of fluctuating disposable incomes.
Since arriving in Africa, I have also been able to see how much I have learned. My ability to make comparisons has expanded. I have much more knowledge about the kinds of questions to ask to get the information that I want. I am able to question and challenge people and models that I see. I can determine which programs present in one place would be helpful in another and have been able to share that information. This exchange is the crux of the Watson Fellowship. It also helps me to understand how I want to be involved with development work in the future. It is fascinating and inspiring for me to see models that are working. I am thinking of applying for a Fulbright in the future to work on implementing some quality control programs at communities I have visited this year. It is awesome to imagine how my work from this year may shape my future, and how the knowledge that I have gained will be useful in the future to more than myself. Also, I have decided to return to Guatemala after visiting Ethiopia in June to talk to a few of the people I didn’t know to talk to when I was first there.
On life experience notes, I have had many other adventures during these months. Getting to talk to Amelia has been amazing, to engage about each other’s projects as well as about our experience as Watson fellows in general. It has helped me to know how our experiences are similar and different, and which ones are related to being a Watson Fellow. We traveled together to see Rwanda’s mountain gorillas, which was awesome! (If any of you get the chance to come to Rwanda, I recommend it as highly as possible!) I also trained during my time in Rwanda as a coffee cupper, learning to identify and score coffee quality, a necessary skill if I want to work in this area in the future. By the end of my month, I was impressed that my scoring of the coffee more or less matched that of the girls who work each day at the coffee lab. Finally, this process, which has seemed mysterious for much of the year, is coming clearer! Perhaps I will be able to do a cupping at the conference in August. Hard to believe how quickly that will be coming up…