Post 3 - May 14

Meant to write this a couple nights ago, but then we started drinking beer, and I had to postpone my writing. The last couple days have been pretty insane, we had a pretty sweet set of sector presentations; I made up a sweet game about market facilitation which totally flopped. And on the last day we spent the afternoon on a mini-project where we interviewed 'farmers' and formed a proposal about how a certain project worked. It was a good introduction to field work, and I learned a lot about how I ask questions.
Right now I'm sitting in Amsterdam airport, which is actually a pretty nice airport. Its pretty surreal, being this close. Of course I still have a week or so of travelling before I reach Pemba – when we get to Lilongwe we spend a couple days for in-country training. Then we head for the Zambia border, so we aren't in Malawi for the elections. After a long bus ride, and a couple days visiting the head office for IDE, I finally head off to Pemba to meet my counterpart and figure out exactly what I'll be doing.
Its looking like there are five JFs working for IDE this summer – Vicky, myself, Deg, Sierra and Tony. We are all working on projects related to output markets. The current hypothesis is that the main bottleneck in IDE Zambia's RPI (Rural Prosperity Initiative) is the market facilitation capacity of the field staff. Our job is to partner with existing field staff in the IDE field offices, and find ways to develop output markets in partnership with them. In the process of doing so, we hope to increase the field staff capacity, since they will still be working on the project long after we have left.
One neat part of this project is that we are using an interesting framework: the Value Chains Framework. Instead of the Livelihoods Approach which looks at people and the work they do and the way they live, the Value Chains Framework is more focused on how a product works its way through a market, and what stages add value to the product. For example, a t-shirt starts with a farmer buying cotton seeds and fertilizers and maybe a pump. Then the cotton is harvested and transported to the manufacturer. Finally the manufacturer makes the t-shirt and sells it to the store, who sells it to a customer. The value chains framework looks at all of these stages and searches for weaknesses.
Next a person called a market facilitator is used to repair or form poor or missing linkages. For example a smallholder farmer (farmer with a small plot, in the region a couple ha.) may not be able to sell on at market because he is too far away and has no means to transport his goods. If a market facilitator noticed that lots of nearby farmers had this problem, they may recommend to a manufacturer or supplier to send a truck down to these farmers every week or so to buy the goods. Ideally a contract would be formed to alleviate any issues arising from the farmers not knowing the correct market prices. After some time, the market facilitator can step away from the project, and with a little M&E (monitoring and evaluation) the linkage should continue by itself.
Anyway, time for me to catch a flight, enjoy a couple free Heinekens and get some sleep. I'll hopefully post this one in Lilongwe, once I locate an internet cafe...
...Mike