First days in the field

After making three trips to the airport, changing my flight itinerary, sitting in a crowded micro for four hours from a city with a functioning airport, and sleeping in a dingy guesthouse with a loud fan and someone else’s old toothbrush in the bathroom, I have to say I was kind of wondering why on earth I do this. The last few days reminded me why.

On Thursday morning the area manager for the project who would be showing me around picked me up on his motorbike and we road off through the jungle. All I had to do was watch the mist rise over the mountains. I love my job.

We visited eight villages in three days, meeting in each one with a group of farmers who have participated in the project. If you’re just tuning in, I’m looking at an agricultural development project that helps farmers capitalize on a newly constructed road corridor by cultivating and selling high-value products like vegetables. I’m trying to understand what are the factors that can make a project like this successful and sustainable. In each village I heard about their success story: higher incomes from their tomatoes or goats that allow them to send their kids to school and stop going to India to work for half the year, better health from clean drinking water and fresh vegetables, the community groups they’ve created to manage all of this. Overall, pretty impressive.

But then they would go on to tell me about all the things they need to keep it going – more trainings, another irrigation canal, more technical support – and I have to wonder what’s going to happen when this project runs out in two months. Who will they turn to when they want to expand their irrigation system but can’t get a loan to do it, or when their tomatoes get some disease, or when tomato prices drop? This project has focused on the capacity building that development people talk about all the time, by creating farmers’ groups in villages and giving them training and support so they can carry on after the NGO leaves. But there is obviously something missing, because the people I’ve been talking to don’t think they can do it alone.