Agriculture
Why ONE Africa and 36 other organisations have sent an urgent letter to David Cameron
In a few weeks, the UK government will host a major international event in London called Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science. Happening just days before the 2013 G8 Summit in Lough Erne, it will bring together governments, businesses, scientists and civil society to examine strategies that could improve the quality and quantity of food available to the world’s poorest people.
Back in March I attended a highly energised meeting of African civil society organisations in Ethiopia, who had gathered for Africa’s biggest annual forum on agriculture and where we launched our report A Growing Opportunity. We all agreed an urgent message needed to be sent to the international community before the June summit in the UK.
As a result, ONE together with 36 other African organisations have written to UK Prime Minister Cameron asking his government to ensure that African-led agriculture is at the heart of the Nutrition for Growth event, and specifically the existing CAADP plans.
CAADP stands for the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Program. It has already created momentum to reform agriculture in 40 out of 53 African countries and many more are joining. This makes it the single best existing framework that would support the G8 to deliver excellent results from their food security and nutrition investments on the continent.
CAADP will also become the central organising vehicle for the African Union year of Agriculture in 2014. African states have committed themselves become more accountable to their people on accelerated progress in fighting hunger and helping small-holder farmers access better investment, technology and markets to sell their produce.
African leadership, political will and investment is critical to realising the poverty reducing potential of African agriculture. The private sector and international community also has a very important supporting role to play in investing in African-led agriculture.
Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, African Union Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, has said, “Africa has potential, but it cannot eat potential. More coordinated action is needed”.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, the G8 must build on the momentum growing across Africa and fund the agriculture plans already in place.
Read our letter to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and share our graphic on Facebook.
How Grow Africa could be a game changer for African farming and business
ONE US Policy Manager David Hong and ONE Africa Deputy Director Nachilala Nkombo look at the progress made by Grow Africa in the last year.
Today, five African heads of state, four G8 development ministers, and over 100 private sector companies will meet in Cape Town, South Africa at the World Economic Forum on Africa to assess Grow Africa’s work in 2012, the partnership’s first full year in business.
First, here’s a little background. Two years ago, the African Union Commission, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) agency, and the World Economic Forum combined forces to create a new partnership, Grow Africa, which aims to reduce poverty by accelerating private sector investment in African agriculture.
The partnership is led by the organisations above, and includes eight member countries and various stakeholders such as host governments, companies involved in investment, civil society, research institutions, and farmer organisations.
Here at ONE, we’re taking this opportunity to weigh in on Grow Africa’s first annual report. Overall, the initiative made significant progress last year, especially given the small size of its team. ONE hopes for further and more robust reporting in the coming years so the partnership can demonstrate its value and defend its model. Annual reporting gives Grow Africa an opportunity to demonstrate lessons learned over the past year and what challenges lay ahead.
Here are the headlines:
- 97 commitments from 62 companies, of which 39 based are in Africa
- More than $60 million invested in activities that incorporate smallholder farmers
- 270,000 metric tons of commodities sourced within partner countries
- Equivalent of around $300 million in sales from these farmers
- Almost 800,000 smallholders reached with a mix of training, sourcing, and service provision
Obviously, there is a lot to commend here. Thousands of smallholders are being incorporated into commercial food supply chains where they’re growing more food and generating more income for their families. If Grow Africa adds further measures to increase transparency and expand reporting of poverty reduction indicators, the partnership could change the game for farmers and businesses.
For more information on Grow Africa’s report and ONE’s analysis, check out this policy brief.
Watch this and you’ll understand why hunger still exists
After journalist-turned-agriculture activist Roger Thurow witnessed the 2003 famine in Ethiopia first hand, he dropped everything and devoted his life to answering this mind-boggling question: Why are Africa’s small farmers some of the continent’s hungriest people?
Kudos to Roger for not only being brave enough to ask this question, but for doing all the research to be able to answer it, too. I’ve worked with Roger for over a year now at ONE (and read both his books too) – and this TEDx Talk from him brought tears to my eyes. I have never seen such die-hard passion and sincerity in an activist until now, and I am proud to say I work with him.
Please find 20 minutes today to watch this video – then let him know what you think in a comment below.
Did Roger’s TEDx Talk inspire you? In just a few weeks world leaders are meeting in the UK to make big decisions on global nutrition, and we need your help to call for the right action. It could help 25 million children escape malnutrition by 2016 and grow up to reach their full potential.
How much is too much rain? Ask Kenyan farmer Anne a question
In partnership with One Acre Fund, we are following Anne, a smallholder farmer from Kenya, for a whole growing season. From planting to harvest, we will check in every month to see what life is really like for a farmer in rural Kenya. Catch up with Part 1. Written by Hailey Tucker.
Anne at home in Kisiwa, Kenya. Photo: Hailey Tucker
In Western Kenya, successful planting for the year is typically seen as a matter of materials, skill and knowledge. However, most farmers acknowledge that ultimately—regardless of expertise—plant germination can be won or lost by the rains.
For farmers who plant too early, there will not be enough consistent rain to help their crops grow. For farmers who wait long enough but get unlucky, their newly sown seeds will be washed away by heavy rains before the seedlings have a chance to take root.
Trying to pinpoint the prefect timing makes planting one of the most risk-laden choices a farmer can make.
Anne (left) and Rasoa Wasike, both members of the Kabuchai Women’s Group, planting millet. Photo: Hailey Tucker
It had been a few nights in a row when Anne had been too hot to sleep and too hot to even cover herself with any sort of blanket, when she knew it was time. Anne would lay awake on a sweat-moistened mattress and hear a strong wind rustling the trees outside.
“When the temperature stays high at night and the winds are blowing hard from West to East, I believe the rains are very near,” Anne says. “Then in the day, I observe the clouds. If there are dark clouds and they hang closer to the earth than the white clouds, then I know the rains are coming.”
After seeing the signs Anne has come to associate with pending rain, she decided to plant part of her millet for the season on March 22, and then finished the rest of the plot on March 25 after taking a few days off for her mother-in-law’s funeral.
The morning of planting, Anne and her husband Isaac gathered with their relatives to pray over their seeds and fertiliser. “I am a believer,” Anne says. “I am spiritual so before planting my family will pray.” Isaac, who is a pastor at the local church, leads the prayer.
After planting, Anne commented, “Preparing the finger millet land required a lot of commitment and labour because we had to break down the soil very fine and remove all the debris. All of the preparation was worthwhile though because then the planting became easy—even easier than maize.”
On March 23, the rains were heavy and with Anne’s field being situated on a slight slope, her first round of seeds took more water than was ideal. Looking at the field two weeks later, the furrows that once divided her lines of seed are barely visible, but patches of millet are still beginning to appear.
“The rains are a little different this year because they usually come in April,” Anne says. “They came in March this year instead and are also much heavier.”
The first green shoots of millet germinating. Photo: Hailey Tucker
The second half of her field received light rain most of the days immediately following planting, which is the best Anne could have asked for.
“I believe that these are good,” Anne says pointing to the second set of seedlings. “They are much better, I think they will germinate well.”
Have you got a question or message for Anne? Leave a comment and we’ll get them directly to her in Kenya, and try and answer them in the next instalment.
One Acre Fund serves 125,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi, helping them to increase their harvests and incomes. It provides farmers with a service bundle that includes seed and fertiliser, credit, training, and market facilitation, and enables farmers to double their income per planted acre. To learn more about their work, you can read Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season.
Take our agriculture quiz and win prizes!
One of the ways that ONE holds governments to account on their commitments to the world’s poorest people is by publishing reports and sharing them with other organisations, governments and the media. Recently, our policy team did just that with their report, A Growing Opportunity: Measuring Investments in African Agriculture.
Basically, it checks up on the governments who made promises to support agriculture and food security in Africa and answers questions like ‘Which countries have been keeping their promises? Which have not? What more is there to be done?’
Do you think you know the answers to those questions? Test yourself with our quiz. All the answers can be found in the report.
Everyone who gets 100% will be entered into a draw for this amazing ONE goody basket. We’ll announce the winner and the answers on Tuesday 30 April.
The prize includes: a handcrafted fashionABLE scarf, handmade beaded bands and bracelets, bright activist stickers for your laptop, mobile phone covers and a cool ONE apron!
Type your answers in the form below, then click the submit button. Don’t forget to include your email address so we can get back to you if you win. Good luck!
QUIZ: African Agriculture Commitments
1. How many Africans depend of agriculture for their incomes?
a. 1/2
b. 2/3
c. 1/4
d. 3/42. True or False: The CAADP stands for The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme
3. How many countries out of 19 are on track to meet Millenium Development Goals of halving extreme poverty by 2015?
a. Six
b. Eight
c. 18
d. None of the above4. How much labor do women contribute on farms in sub-Saharan Africa?
a. 35 percent
b. 25 percent
c. 95 percent
d. 50 percent5. Who is not part of The New Alliance?
a. G8
b. Private companies
c. National governments
d. Peace Corps6. Which of the following is a reason for African farmers’ inability to produce enough surplus to generate an income?
a. Facing poor infrastructure
b. Expensive fertilizer
c. Unreliable and unpredictable markets
d. All of the above7. At what summit did donors pledge $22 billion over three years to support sustainable agriculture and food security?
a. 2009 G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy
b. Gleneagles Summit
c. Hokkaido G8
d. UN Summit September 20088. How long has the Maputo Declaration been in existence?
a. 2 years
b. 5 years
c. 8 years
d. 10 years9. What are most agricultural plans missing?
a. A call for agricultural development.
b. A clear call for transparency.
c. A clear focus on women farmers.
d. A clear incentive program for market participation.10. What has 2014 been deemed?
a. 2014 African Union “Year of Agriculture”
b. 2014 African Union “Year of the Woman”
c. 2014 African Union “Year of the Market”
d. 2014 African Union “Year of Transparency”
Follow Kenyan farmer Anne from planting to harvest
In partnership with One Acre Fund, we’ll be following Anne, a smallholder farmer from Kenya, for a whole growing season. From planting to harvest, we will check in every month to see what life is really like for a farmer in rural Kenya. Written by Hailey Tucker.
Anne at home in Kisiwa, Kenya. Photo: Hailey Tucker
Anne Wafula wrings her dirt-caked hands as she sits in her living room. She has been tilling soil in a half-acre plot of land to prepare to plant millet, groundnuts, sweet potatoes and cassava; and she is admittedly a little worried about the season ahead.
“As a mother, I am worried about what will happen when harvest time comes,” Anne says. “It is my hope that I should not lack food at this home.”
Anne is a smallholder farmer in Kisiwa, a village in western Kenya. Like most of the world’s poorest people, her main livelihood is farming. For the last few years, she has enjoyed strong harvests.
Anne is a member of One Acre Fund, which provides farmers with fertilizer and seed on credit, teaches the farmers how to more effectively plant their crops, and then allows them to pay back their loans at times of the year when money is easier to come by.
Anne with her husband Isaac and youngest son Steve outside their home in Kisiwa, Kenya. Photo: Hailey Tucker
Since joining One Acre Fund in 2010, Anne has been harvesting 10 bags of maize a year, more than double her previous harvests of four bags.
Anne, whose stoic demeanor softens after a while, is the mother of seven children, two of which she and her husband Isaac adopted. Like many farmers, Anne faces the competing challenges of providing enough food for her family, keeping everyone healthy, and making sure all her children are receiving an education.
Her increased harvests since joining One Acre Fund have helped her grow enough to feed her family and make real life improvements, but as she increases her income, she also has increased her expectations of what she should be able to provide for her children.
Briston Nangesa is their eldest and is studying engineering a local technical college. This is possible because Anne’s improved harvest pays the fees. Many farmers in her village are unable to send their children to secondary school, let alone a technical college. Anne is proud of Briston but she wants to give all her children the same opportunity, and the thought of all those future school fees is daunting.
Anne with some of the crops on her farm. Photo: Hailey Tucker
This season Anne is trying something different. A maize disease appeared in Kenya last year and infected fields had a heavy loss of crops. As a result, One Acre Fund is encouraging its farmers to diversify their crops and reduce the risk of losing everything.
Anne has decided to plant only a small amount of maize and focus most of her energy on growing alternatives: sweet potatoes and cassava for food security, sorghum and millet for income, and beans for nutrition. If the harvest goes well this season, she also hopes to have enough money to start a business selling clothes.
Anne with 3-year old son Steve at home in Kisiwa, Kenya. Photo: Hailey Tucker
As a mother, my biggest concern is that I would like my children to learn, so if they are not able to go to school, that is not good for me. My hopes are that we will harvest well and get the highest yield”.
We’ll be back in a month with the latest news from Anne and her family.
ONE has just launched a new report that looks at investment in African agriculture. Find out which countries are getting it right, and where both donors and African governments need to improve.
One Acre Fund serves 125,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi, helping them to increase their harvests and incomes. It provides farmers with a service bundle that includes seed and fertiliser, credit, training, and market facilitation, and enables farmers to double their income per planted acre. To learn more about their work, you can read Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season.
Infographic: Who is investing in African agriculture?
A decade ago, African leaders made a bold commitment to reverse decades of neglect of the agriculture sector. Big promises were made by both African countries and international donors – but have they been kept?
Today ONE launches a brand new report which answers this question.
A Growing Opportunity: Measuring Investments in African Agriculture takes a closer look at who’s leading the way and who needs to do more. Read the report, or get the headline findings in this infographic.
ONE’s new report: A Growing Opportunity
Ten years ago, Africa’s hunger season reached new levels of desperation. Hunger crises gripped the continent from the Horn to the southern tip. In Ethiopia, the feast of successive bumper harvests had incredibly, swiftly turned to famine, with 14 million people on the doorstep of starvation, surviving on international food aid. A drought spread through central Africa and crept down the east coast, destroying harvests. In southern Africa, AIDS was creating a new kind of famine where it wasn’t the crops that were dying but the farmers who planted them.
The suffering was immense. And it exposed the folly of international development philosophy and practice of the preceding three decades: agricultural development and sustained resilience, particularly for the smallholder farmers, had been woefully neglected. The farmers who grew the majority of the continent’s food, who made up the majority of the population in many countries, were seen as too poor, too remote, too insignificant to be worthy of development efforts. This had been the shared attitude of rich world donor governments, African governments themselves, the mighty development institutions and the private sector.
Something had to change. And it did.
Amid the misery in 2003, African leaders gathered in Maputo, Mozambique and determined to reverse the neglect. At an African Union (AU) summit, the heads of state promised to allocate 10% of national budgets to agriculture and seek 6% annual agricultural growth by 2008. The AU leaders also adopted the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) as a common framework to be implemented by member states to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty through agricultural development. This would be development led and owned by African countries, and supported by donors.
How have the seeds sown by the Maputo Declaration grown?
In a report launched today – a valuable yardstick called, A Growing Opportunity: Measuring Investments in African Agriculture – ONE reviews the past decade and finds some notable successes in terms of mustering money and political commitment, and the impact of agricultural development.
As of January 2013, the report notes, 24 countries had signed CAADP compacts and held their business meetings and launched “solid, costed and technically reviewed” plans to accelerate agricultural development. Another six countries had committed to start the process and develop plans. The report assessed 19 of those plans:
Eight of those 19 countries are on track to meet the first Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015. At least 13 have had 6% annual growth in the agriculture sector. Leading the way has been Ethiopia; by 2011, the government was spending 19.7% of the total budget on agriculture, almost double the Maputo commitment. The result is average annual growth of 24.2% in the agricultural sector in the 2008-2011 period, which, in turn, has accelerated poverty reduction, particularly in the rural areas.
Still, the report notes, much remains to be done.
“Despite progress, Maputo financing commitments are off track,” ONE found. “Disappointingly, our analysis shows that only four of the 19 countries examined have met the target of spending 10% of the national budget on the agriculture section.” Those countries are Ethiopia, Niger, Malawi and Cape Verde. Two more countries are close behind (Senegal and Sierra Leone). And six are at least halfway there (Mali, Tanzania, Gambia, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda). Seven countries, though, are seriously off track, spending less than 5% on agriculture; six of them actually lowered their agriculture spending. The resulting funding gaps of the proposed agricultural development plans in these 19 countries amounted to a $4.4 billion budget shortfall in 2011.
ONE exhorts African leaders to “act with urgency” to fill the gaps in partnership with donors.
As for the donors, their actions also need to match their pledges. Meeting at L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009, the world’s leading industrial countries, known as the G8, pledged $22 billion over three years to support sustainable agriculture and food security in the developing world. In 2012, at their Camp David summit, the G8 leaders launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a partnership between the governments and private companies to accelerate investments in agriculture with the ambitious goal of lifting 50 million people out of poverty over 10 years.
The ONE report found that these G8 countries may have, in words and intentions, met their $22 billion pledges, but only half of the money has been dispersed and is working on the ground.
When the benefits do reach the fields, progress is remarkable. “Sub-Saharan African agriculture could, and should, be thriving,” the report concludes. “Unblocking Africa’s agriculture potential would also unlock its development.”
To accelerate the success, ONE suggests the agriculture development plans need more transparency and greater consultation with civic organizations, particularly farming groups and women’s organizations. They need a clearer focus on women farmers, who do most of the smallholder farming in many countries. And they need a stronger emphasis on improving nutrition as well as production.
This year, ONE says, “is a turning point.” The decade-old commitments to improve African agriculture need to be renewed and bolstered and put into action. Or the days of negligence could begin again.
Surely, no one wants that – not the Africans who depend on agriculture to drive their economies nor the rest of the world that needs African farmers to be as productive as possible to meet the great challenge of feeding a growing global population.
The hunger season in Africa has gone on far too long.
World Water Day: How sand dams are changing women’s lives in Kenya
To celebrate World Water Day we have a guest post from Jonny McKay of Excellent Development. Excellent Development support communities in Kenya to build Sand Dams which provide clean water for life and the opportunity to grow more food to eat, store and sell.
“If a child was born on the way to or from drawing water he was named Mwanzia, which means ‘born on the way’”. Jane Kingongo, Ithime self-help group, Kenya.
Jane Kingongo, a member of the Ithime self-help group in Kenya
For women in the world’s rural drylands, life is defined by the burden of collecting water. For the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, it is a chore with no relief. Even when pregnant, women must trek over long distances in order to provide their families with water.
The strain of this arduous task has terrible health consequences for women. Often alone, some give birth on the journey to or from water points. In the drylands of Ukambani, Kenya, the children of these women are called Mwanzia, which means ‘born on the way.’
We recently spoke to Jane Kinongo, a member of the Ithime Self Help Group in Kenya, who told us something of the impacts water insecurity has for women in her community.
Jane said: “As women it was our duty to fetch water using our back. We would even go to fetch water while pregnant. Sometimes we would be forced to fetch water even when having labour pains. Sometimes someone would miscarry or have a still birth at home due to the long distance.”
Women from the Kyusyani Unyeeyo self-help group in Kenya carrying water
About 66% of Africa is arid or semi-arid drylands like the area where Jane lives. More than 38% of people living in these drylands suffer with water insecurity – meaning that they have less than 1,000 m3 per capita and do not have a reliable source of clean water close to home.
For Jane, this used to mean walking up to 6km carrying 20kg of water on her back each day. It is estimated that more than 152 million hours of women and girls’ time is consumed every day in the same way — collecting water to meet their families’ basic needs. Because of this, millions of women are inhibited from accomplishing little more than survival.
With the same access to resources as men, women could grow 30% more food and reduce global hunger by 150 million people. Yet, wherever they work, they face constraints that reduce their productivity and limit their contributions to the well-being of their families, communities and countries, agricultural production, and economic growth.
A woman from the Kwa Mukonza self-help group in Kenya using a water pump linked to their Sand Dam
Jane’s self-help group is a cooperative of eight women and one man, supported by Excellent Development. They came together in 2009 to overcome their water insecurity by constructing Sand Dams, planting trees and digging terraces. With her self-help group, she has helped build seven Sand Dams, bringing water within 30 minutes for families in her community.
Jane said: “Since the construction of the [Sand] Dams, life has changed dramatically because we now draw water closer to our homes. The health problems [women] faced then have ceased to exist…now the women can rest for three months after giving birth…the problems faced [before] are never.”
More than one in six people worldwide – 894 million – don’t have access to improved water sources.
But, for those children born on the way, women like Jane are building water security and a new way of life in rural Kenya. A life in which women no longer give birth alone, far from home, on a journey to find water.
Find out more about the potential that Sand Dams have to transform millions of lives
Why women and girls are the secret weapon in ending poverty
To celebrate International Women’s Day we’ve picked some of our favourite images and matched them up with facts to show why investing in women and girls is so important here at ONE.
Pupils at Kidoti Primary School in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Photo: Morgana Wingward / ONE.
Women farmers growing sweet potatoes in Tanzania. Photo: ONE.
An employee picking roses at Golden Rose Agrofarms in Ethiopia, where 85% of the workers are young women who have never had a job before. Photo: Morgana Wingward / ONE.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf meets with ONE representatives at the Foreign Ministry in Monrovia. Photo: Morgana Wingward / ONE.
A mother and her baby at a breastfeeding clinic in Ghana. Photo: ONE
Join us in celebrating International Women’s Day by sharing this post with your friends and family.
And make sure you tell the women and girls in your life that they are awesome.
Sources
Education: United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990; UNESCO Education Statistics; UNICEF, Millennium Development Goals: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
Agriculture: IFAD (2001) Assessment of Rural Poverty: Western and Central Africa; The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Girls Grow: A Vital Force in Rural Economies; USAID, Women in Development: Country Snapshot: Kenya and Agriculture & Micro-enterprise
Employment: Phil Borges (2007) Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World. New York; World Bank (2008) Doing Business: Women in Africa; United Nations Development Programme
Politics: D. Dollar, R. Fisman and R. Gatti, Are Women Really the ‘Fairer’ Sex? Corruption and Women in Government, Policy Research Report on Gender and Development Working Paper Series No. 4; Africa Progress Report (2012) Jobs, Justice and Equity – Seizing Opportunities in Times of Global Change
Health:UNICEF (2009) State of the World’s Children: Maternal and Newborn Health; UNAIDS (2012) Together We Will End AIDS; WHO (2012) Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2010
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About the Blog
The International ONE Blog is a daily log of the anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by ONE staff, with guest contributions from ONE volunteers, members and allies.
The content of each post and each comment represents the views of that author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
TAGS: Africa, Agriculture, David Cameron, Ethiopia, Nutrition for Growth, ONE, Spotlight