Nov 17 2010 @ 14:48

Monitoring more than numbers in Malawi

This article was initially published in the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers' Society Notes. It is written by Anna Marie Silvester. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Applied Science and has been working with Engineers Without Borders in Malawi since March 2009.

Bvekelani Nthala is entrepreneurial by nature. A farmer in Malawi, he is both shrewd and hard working. Ten years ago his village selected him to be the village chief. Since then he has led them well and tried to ensure that no one under his leadership goes hungry.

In a country where nearly half of the children under the age of five are chronically malnourished, Bvekelani’s steadfast commitment to reducing hunger is no easy task.

Bvekelani stays up-to-date on all the latest farming technologies and knows that with improved, high quality maize seed he will double his yields this season. What’s more, he knows that if every farmer in his village could also increase their harvests by this much, the risk of going hungry in his village would no longer exist and all the farmers could afford to send their children to school.

While this may sound simple, unfortunately, achieving this is far more complex than it seems. Most farmers in Malawi live in very rural areas. They must travel long distances if they want to buy high yielding seed and fertilizer. This is both expensive and time consuming for farmers who are busy and have little disposable income. And in some cases, the farmers lack even the knowledge of how improved inputs can help increase their yields.

As part of Engineers Without Borders’ Access to Markets team, my job is to connect smallholder farmers, like Bvekelani and the rest of his village, to Malawi’s private sector – such as the businesspeople who sell the improved seed and fertilizer. By forging these connections, our team is increasing access to input suppliers, microcredit, and buyers for rural communities – and in the case of Bvekeleni’s community, helping to bring them one step closer to eliminating hunger.

I work in the monitoring and evaluation department of a large agricultural development project based in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. The project, called the Malawi Agrodealer Strengthening Project (MASP), helps rural farmers access agricultural inputs that will help improve the quantity and quality of their crop yields.

To make this a reality, MASP selects a group of entrepreneurial Malawians to operate small, rural businesses that sell agricultural inputs to farmers. These entrepreneurs, dubbed agrodealers, are trained by MASP to operate these businesses.

When I arrived, MASP’s success was measured in terms of a lengthy set of numerical indicators that had been created by the project’s designers. As an engineer, I have an appreciation for the precision of numerical information. However, numerical information can be misleading if it is focused only on answering specific questions without considering the big picture.

For example, the project designers believed that one of the most important elements of the project was training. Thus, they prioritized the number of agrodealers trained as the key indicator of the project’s success. As a result, MASP’s Project Managers were pressured to train as many agrodealers as possible - in just three years they trained and equipped over 1,000.

However, Malawi’s business environment is complex – transportation is difficult and expensive, capital is hard to come by, interest rates are as high as 30% for small businesses, and the agricultural inputs business is highly seasonal. Because of these factors many of the agrodealers’ businesses were failing within the first year. No one in MASP knew exactly how many of the 1,000 dealers who had been trained remained in business.

When I joined the team, I knew that numerical indicators would be an essential part of evaluating the project’s success (both for the donor and for the project managers). However, I also knew that it was essential to ensure that the numerical indicators reflected the right questions, for example, how many of the MASP trained agrodealers were still in business?

In search of this data, I helped design a survey. The results were both surprising and discouraging: only 300 of the 1,000 agrodealers MASP had trained remained in business. While MASP had focused on hitting targets of the number of trained agrodealers, insufficient resources had been allocated to helping these new businesses grow and be sustainable over time.

This injection of new data has helped to inform MASP’s work. MASP has improved the project’s approach, along with the monitoring and evaluation criteria they measure.

Based on this, MASP has made some big decisions, such as stopping the recruitment and training of new agrodealers. Instead, we are focusing exclusively on supporting the dealers already in the network. Now, we focus on providing advanced business training, helping the agrodealers maintain sufficient stock by linking them with supply companies who can provide goods on credit, and reducing transportation costs for remote agrodealers through the creation of distribution networks.

We are shifting our focus to help agrodealers manage their challenges effectively in the long-term. We continue to go into the field and ask questions that help us to refine this focus. For example, we are currently evaluating our credit program. We’re talking with agrodealers to find out if the program has allowed them to access more stock, and we’re talking with supply companies to find out how to encourage timely repayment.

One of MASP’s agrodealers has established a successful business 10 km from Bvekalani’s village. The agrodealer has been proactive about promoting her business and her products to farmers like Bvekalani. She’s also knowledgeable about their use and is always willing to provide advice.

Last year Bvelekani Nthala used the high yielding seed and fertilizer and he had a good year. After paying his children’s school fees and buying household essentials, such as clothes and soap, he is planning to replace the old, leaky roof on his house with a new one made of tin. This year when he plants, he will again be using high yielding seed and setting an example for his entire village.

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