I have done quite a bit of traveling in the last little while and have visited a handful of countries, but out of all of them there are two places that I have fallen in love with (one of which has become my new home) – Mali and Malawi!

Mali is an amazing country - point blank. In December I spent about five weeks traveling around with a friend, embarking on all sorts of adventures, encountering all types of people. Now reflecting on it all what really sticks out in my mind is the country’s beautiful diversity in people and landscape. But what was amazing was that I got the impression that this diversity was paralleled with a strong sense of unity. Moreover, what makes Mali beautiful is that it has a well promoted culture, producing some incredibly talented artists and musicians (Amadou and Mariam, H. Koita, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure to name a few) and preserving its history so much that there are four UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Mali is also home to the fabled town of Timbuktu. What a magical place! Although today it is an impoverished town, what I found exciting is Timbuktu’s status as a place of cross-roads – it is still an intersection of the east-west north-south trans-Saharan trade (gold, salt and now tourists!) and a meeting point of the African populations of the south and the Arabs of the North.

And today, it is a peaceful place. While there I went on a four day camel ride into the Sahara desert staying in Tuareg villages. What really struck me was what seemed like such seamless integration between the southern African tribes and the northern Tuaregs. When in so many Sahelian countries there is conflict between the African and Arab populations (Niger, Chad, Sudan) it was inspiring to see that racial clashes don’t have to exist.

In short, the whole trip was wonderful. And my holidays were very unique with Christmas in a village in Dogon country (gorgeous ancient villages on cliff walls) and New Years in the Sahara with a Tuareg community. I definitely recommend anyone to visit Mali!
And…(I’ll throw in one last plug) if you want to make your trip extra special go in January for the annual Festival in the Desert – a music festival celebrating Tuareg culture, drawing musicians from Mali, Mauritania, Niger and thousands of visitors from all over the world! (There is a BBC slideshow on it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6310685.stm)



So, now I find myself in Malawi – the warm heart of Africa. It is very much the opposite of Mali in geography, history, and culture, but equally magical. Malawi is a tiny land locked country wedged between Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique and it is visited for its beautiful landscape and parks - towering 3000 meter mountains, a huge fresh water lake with ocean-like colorful fish and thick forests full of wildlife. The capital, Lilongwe is extremely green and it even has a huge nature reserve right in the middle of the city!

I have not yet had any opportunity to leave the city, and therefore can’t paint as much of a tourism picture of Malawi. But staying in one place, I feel that so far I have been able to have a very different but in the end equally positive experience

During my first days in Malawi I was feeling a little bit sad. I was feeling nostalgic and struck by how different Malawi was from the other places I had seen in West Africa. The cities are very different, the people are very different, their views and perceptions are different, how they enjoy themselves is different …everything. I think I was obstructed by a lens that had bias filters of how things are done in other places and how things should be as I know them. All I saw was no dancing, less traditional clothes, very reserved people no night life and so on. But looking back on this I can’t help but laugh at myself and ask what was I expecting?

This has made me realize just how easy it is as a foreigner to homogenize Africa. Totally unaware, it’s as if our experience with the media back home spoils our imaginations by always telling us the same oversimplified story but with different names and in different places. The African farmer, the African tribe, the African safari, the African dancing, the African children, the African smiles. And slowly Congo becomes Ghana becomes Chad becomes Zambia becomes one uniform Africa. And yes, deep down people are people, just like people from Vancouver are like people from Kansas…but cultures are not cultures. And Africa is an incredibly rich and diverse place.

As I spend more time here and make new friends I am slowly starting to unravel and discover all the subtleties of Malawian culture. It really does take time. And it reminds me how much I miss out when just visiting a place for a short time or not engaging with the local people.

I am living with a family here. I decided to do this for these exact reasons; that being to learn from and better understand Malawians. It is a household of 11 – a widow (Stelia), her children, her deceased brother’s children, her deceased sister’s children, her orphaned neighbor, her cousin’s daughter and a Rwandan refugee. Considering the Aids pandemic that has ravaged the country I am only guessing what happened to all these people…but I don’t want to ask. I figure it doesn’t really matter in the end. The family is happy and functional, a house full of such wonderful, wonderful, really wonderful people! And Stelia has the warmest and most patient heart, I really feel lucky to have crossed paths with her.

With my set up, I am learning so much and enjoying Malawi. And enjoying how different it is from Mali…and Ghana and Burkina! Although I have not yet had the chance to physically travel, I am happy in this experience of getting to know the people and travel through their stories, their experiences and everything that shapes them and their culture.

Mali and Malawi – two beautiful places that I have gotten to know in two very different ways. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore some countries on this continent and to still be here today. I feel even more fortunate to have been able to live with and build friendships with the local people which has allowed for quite the eye opening journey. And lastly, I look forward to the rest of my stay in Malawi and am excited for all the adventures to come!

At the beginning of the month of August I got to stay in a village called Tsevekoppe for the installation of an MFP. Tsevekoppe is a tiny fishing and farming village in the Brong Ahafo Region situated on the shores of Lake Volta. Getting to Tsevekoppe was certainly an adventure as at this time of the year (rainy season) the road is so bad that it is virtually impassable. So the only way to travel with all our equipment was to take a local canoe powered by an outboard motor, dodging tree stumps and weaving between islands.

Just to give a little background, Lake Volta is a man made lake, and it is actually the biggest man made lake in the world. It was created in 1965 after the construction of the Akosombo dam (Nkrumah’s highly controversial project), a dam that still today is the main source of power for Ghana. In flooding 8500 square kilometers it created what looks like a sea punctured by thousands of tree stumps - very hazardous for boats to navigate resulting in many accidents and deaths annually. (A little fact for you Canadians: former PM Joe Clark just signed a deal with the Ghanaian government for his company Clark Sustainable Resource Developments to log all the hardwood trees from the lake…an interesting endeavor)

Anyway, we traveled for two hours by boat - carrying the massive diesel engine, corn mill, cassava grater and cassava press as well as ten passengers (yes, in a wooden canoe) - to land on the shores of what honestly was a tropical paradise. The place was a tapestry of color, where butterflies danced around blossoming flowers, coconut and banana trees and where vegetable gardens filled with strong, healthy plants were interspersed amongst perfectly thatched houses. And it was immaculate…I don’t know, maybe I’ve spent too much time in Accra where it’s seething with garbage, pollution and open sewage, but I was really blown away at how clean Tsevekoppe was. Other villages I have visited were also very clean – not yet bombarded by western products and packaging – but this one was something…well, something to write home about.

When we were unloading the boat, I couldn’t help but drag my feet as I carried the equipment, my mind occupied by what this place might look like ten years down the line when it is “developed”. Is the MFP one step towards turning Tsevekoppe into a destitute city slum? Bringing first money then garbage, then televisions and all the other polluting amenities of the more developed city? Rural development is supposedly meant to address rural-urban migration, but what does addressing this phenomenon mean?

Nothing is static, everything is dynamic and everything is always changing. But what is that change meant to be, and who is shaping the change or who should shape the change? Tsevekoppe will change, but will it always be beautiful? Is there a way that it can change and stay beautiful? And with that change what will happen to the people?

Having spent most of my time in Accra, the Ghanaians I have gotten to know best are the urban poor. For most of them, their lives are dominated by unemployment and they literally spend most of their time watching television. The youth mostly talk to me about embellished lives portrayed in American films and of their one dream of going there…and then go on to bombard me with an insatiable series of questions on how to get a US or Canadian visa.
There is such a noticeable contrast between the people in the village and those in Accra…and I hate to make a generalization on just a few days visit, but they really do seem happier. Forgive me for reductionism, but I can’t help but question whether it’s because in the village they have something to do.

I’ll never forget one comment made on the BBC “Have your say” on the question of what is happiness (after an article ranking Nigerians as the happiest people in the world… ???). The comment was made by a Russian man who was reflecting on his happier life before the fall of the Soviet Union. (I wish I could find it and directly quote it… but I endlessly searched the BBC archives and no luck.) Basically what he was saying was that happiness depended on whether you had something to do. I think he is right. Who is poorer, someone who is outside working on their farms all day versus someone who can’t find a job and therefore sits in front of their TV set from dawn to dusk.

So this brings me to the question of endless rumination - what is poverty? The immaculate village or the destitute city slum? A lack of basic needs or an excess of vulnerability? A question of happiness, opportunities, family or employment? Or maybe just a social construct … or I dare say a political construct.
And who is the poor one – the farmer in Tsevekoppe, the unemployed in Accra, or the homeless in Canada?
So, then what is poverty reduction? Is it turning Tsevekoppe into a larger city with all it’s environmental and social problems?
And finally, can I be cheeky and ask, what is “poverty research”? It seems like there are countless centers, institutes, all swallowing up money for research… Even worse is the myriad of papers on poverty research detailing what needs to be further researched and advocating an increase in spending for more research! So this is where aid money is going? I’d rather hand it to my neighbor to spend on his son’s school fees.

So, on the question of poverty, the only conclusion that I have come to is that it can not be reduced to one definition, one way of thinking or one approach. Although there are some approaches that are better than others, such as ABCD that I mentioned in the last update.

As for Tsevekoppe…what does development mean? I don’t know, but it’s a question that has been keeping me up at night.

One thing that has really irked me about development is the jargon. Intermixed with the rhetoric of participatory or bottom-up approaches, there is a language that is used that is incredibly top down. A community group is a beneficiary and their life becomes a project. An organization must assess a beneficiary’s needs and then create an intervention – usually a service that can only be met by that organization. The well being of the beneficiary is dependent on being a client, resulting in them becoming consumers of services rather than producers.

But what if the language was changed and the focus shifted? What if the center of attention was on what a community has, rather than what it needs? Or what if a community member was treated like a citizen with skills and assets, rather than a client with deficiencies?

Well, this is exactly what a non-governmental organization called the Africa 2000 Network is doing using something called Assets Based Community Development (ABCD).

ABCD is an approach to community development based on the principle that communities have assets and strengths that are underutilized due to the community’s focus on their problems. The aim of ABCD is to identify strengths and assets within a community and to give them the tools to effectively use and manage this capital to start developing the community from the inside. Furthermore, the approach aims to change the attitude that communities are poor and must wait for outside help to begin their own development, allowing for regained confidence in local ideas, empowerment of individuals and the strengthening of community spirit.

One technique that is central to ABCD is appreciative inquiry. The methodology is centered on the premise that effective community development starts with building relationships at the community level through appreciating community achievements. In other words by asking community members to talk about what they pride themselves on, energy can be found to build confidence in community driven initiatives. The concept is obvious but strangely underused for a sector that is meant to empower people!

Some other techniques used are “leaky bucket economic analysis”, a tool for explaining community economics; assets mapping with a focus on social assets and skills mapping to identify skills and capacities in a community.

Another unique aspect to the Africa 2000 program is that they are working with the regional and district governments by running workshops for them on ABCD and how to implement it. I find this particularly amazing as it builds capacity of one of the main community development financiers in progressive development approaches.

When I was introduced to Africa 2000 by another EWB volunteer I was immediately inspired. Bringing all of a new approach, new language and new attitude to development, I can’t help but think that there is a lot potential for impact.
Myself, I am really excited to learn more about ABCD! I have the manual and am arranging for the director of Africa 2000 to come and do a workshop at KITE, and hopefully we can find some way to incorporate it into the MFP project.

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Asset Based Community Development is a term coined by John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in Illinois in their book Building Communities from the Inside Out: A path toward finding and mobilizing community assets. ABCD has been adopted by institutions such as the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia as well several NGOs such as Africa 2000 Network.

For more information visit:
http://www.coady.stfx.ca/work/ABCD/
http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html

The tro tro, a dilapidated minivan, gutted and refurbished, is the pin-up vehicle of Ghana’s transport system. They are everywhere, taking over the streets, intercity, intra-city and probably even intra-country. Nissan, Mazda, Volkswagen, Mercedes - every make and every model, all of which have graced the streets of Ghana since colonial rule. Upon my arrival in Ghana, I was immediately mesmerized by this unique and efficient transport system and I was eager to understand not only how it functions, but also the people behind it.

I have to admit, that at first I was a little bit intimidated. These vehicles, packed with people, limbs hanging out the windows and a man barely hanging on to the door shouting out the final destination, this was very different then the Canadian public transport scene. Colored in stickers and slogans of all themes, the most common being “Thank God” or “Trust in God, Always” – I couldn’t help but wonder if this was meant as an ominous warning as to whether your barely running tro tro or tipsy driver will get you to your destination in one piece!

In getting to know the tro tro system I quickly learned that you don’t have to go looking for adventure when riding the vehicles. I have had roller coaster rides plenty, finding myself in tro tros that have run out of gas while careening down a hill or having drivers decide to go in reverse against heavy traffic. Probably my most memorable tro tro ride was when I boarded an ancient flat nosed Volkswagen with the engine located in an elevated case beside the driver. Thinking I was lucky to get the front seat, I found myself very much unlucky and sitting directly on top of the deafening V12 motor with nothing but a thin cloth separating me from the scorching metal! It didn’t help that the driver took the road quite aggressively, making me think that I was for sure doomed. With a blistering behind, I was very thankful when the ride was finally over.

When I got over my small fear (and minor wounds) I learned to appreciate the tro tro for much more than comic relief. In a place where publicly funded transport doesn’t exist, the functionality of the tro tro system is rather amazing – a transportation system created by the people for the people.

In addition to transportation, in a poverty stricken country, rife with unemployment tro tros provide a livelihood for many Ghanaians. According to the UNDP, urban unemployment is estimated at 20% and poses as one of Ghana’s biggest problems. Ghana faces rapid urbanization, but within the urban centers the employment opportunities are not growing fast enough to accommodate the increasing population. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, poverty in urban centers, particularly the capital Accra is growing at an escalating rate, and it estimates that in Accra, 40% of households are food insecure

Martin Mensah, a tro tro driver explained to me while on route that he had been doing this job for five years. Previously he worked for a company which made and installed household tiles, but after not being paid for seven months, the company went bankrupt. Such stories are not uncommon in urban Ghana. Martin, then went on to lament how little he gets paid, sometimes as little as 300 000 cedi a month, while the vehicle owner cashes in an average of 100 000 cedi a day!

Tro tros are typically privately owned. However, the owner often has little to do with the day-to-day running of the vehicle. Some owners have multiple vehicles and can be considered somewhat of an unofficial tro tro company. The owner will then hire a driver or several drivers who are required to have a tro tro driving permit; apparently this is strictly regulated. It is then up to the driver to find tro tro mates (a person that sits in the back to collect money and call out the destination) and chose how they will be paid.

For tro tro mates, it seems to be even more difficult. Ishmael, a mate that works at the station near my home, explained that he does not work every day, only when he can because there are many people like him who want to do this easy job. He says he does this work in an effort to save money for school. At the age of 20, he finished junior secondary school (equivalent to junior high in Canada), but can’t afford the school fees to continue on to senior secondary. However, the money he makes from being a tro tro mate is too small – he is lucky if he gets 15 000 cedi at the end of a day.

In Accra, it seems that unemployment is ubiquitous. Even with post secondary education, for many it is impossible to find a job and as a result will turn to options such as selling produce on the street, driving taxis or driving tro tros.

This problem is multifaceted however, and can only be dealt with by taking an integrated approach addressed by all sectors. With this in mind, I hope that the multifunctional platform program that I am working on can be one piece of the puzzle. Although the MFP is meant to address rural energy poverty issues, it is also indirectly a program in minimizing rural-urban migration. By providing income generating options through energy services, minimizing the labor burden for women and allowing more children to attend school, there is hope that the MFP will create an incentive for people to remain in their rural communities and live a life that they value.

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This morning as I was rushing to get to work I ran into Ishmael again. Smiling as always and eager to get me into his vehicle, he was laughing while commenting on my new confidence with the tro tro system and my ability to ask for the stop in Twi. This time I got to ride in the front, relieved that I had the luxury of a cushioned seat. As I waited in the car I watched through the cracked window the city wake up, people flooding the streets and starting their day, many making their way to the tro tro station. When we finally took off, I turned to look behind me to see the rusted car filled with adults going to work and children going to school. This gave me hope and I couldn’t help but wonder whether things maybe are getting better for people in Accra - perhaps soon Ishmael too will also be riding the tro tro on his way to school.

For the longest time I would refer to the Mulifunctional Platform (MFP) as a rural electrification project and describe only the MFP as what it is ( a diesel Lister type engine mounted on a chassis that can run multiple agro-processing machines and electricity generators at once) rather than what it does or who it’s meant to impact. Often I will get a somewhat negative reaction from people when I describe this “electrification” project. Honestly, I don’t blame them considering they are taking it as the proliferation of big, noisy, polluting machines. But this is not the case at all. This sort of description is totally misleading and it undermines the scope of the program as the MFP is much more than a machine and electrification isn’t intended as the end result, but rather as a means to an end.

Even though, I know this, I often still question it and wonder whether the MFP really isn’t much more than a machine. But last week while on holiday with my mother, we visited a tiny MFP village called Changnayili and it was during our stay that it hit home for me what the potential impacts of the project were.

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One cloudy afternoon last week, my mother and I were sitting under a neem tree in a farmer’s field, chewing shea fruits and talking about development. After observing that the only source of water these people had was a guinea worm infested pond, their shelter consisted of mud huts and that not only their livelihoods, but their survival depended on farming, she asked me to the describe the MFP project to her as she didn’t feel that electrification was a priority for these tiny farming villages.

I answered by first asking her to quickly tell me how she would define “poverty”. She responded by describing poverty as a lack of food, shelter and basic needs. I then asked her why she felt people didn’t have access to food, shelter and basic needs and she responded that it was likely due to a lack of income. Finally I asked her, why are they lacking income and she couldn’t answer. It’s not a simple question and there are countless factors to consider. None of these questions are simple, all having thousands of different conflicting answers, but the idea is not to come up with one answer, but rather a way of thinking about development and poverty.

I guess, during the shaping of the MFP project, similar questions were asked and it was realized that one of the major factors affecting income levels was time.

Time – I never really understood its value until I visited Changnayili. Not having time is something that I regularly complain about, but the lack of time felt by these people is different, unforgiving and much more consequential.


The rains have started and thus it’s farming season …actually it begun a while back, preparing and clearing the fields, planting, etc. but now it’s in full force, weeding tending, planting, more weeding, and then more planting. Now it’s time to plant maize, last month it was yams and cassava, next month tomatoes, followed by groundnuts and beans. Before that it was preparing the fields, building the yam mounds, which probably is some of the hardest work a person can do.

For the women, they are in charge of harvesting, grain processing, vegetable farming, shea butter making, oil pressing on top of the usual cooking, cleaning, repairing the homes, fetching water, buying and selling from surrounding villages and lastly taking care of their children. Maybe it doesn’t sound like so much, but I tell you when everything is done by hand these are the most laborious, time consuming and exhausting activities. No matter how much I was told, I had no comprehension of how much work people, particularly women have to do and it was only when on one of the days when one family in the village needed a new mud floor that I started to clue in.

Building a floor is woman’s work; so along with every other in the woman in the village I decided to take part in the construction. There were at least twenty of us, probably more, old and young, children no older than five and grandmothers at least sixty. We started by carrying bucket loads of dirt from an open pit about 500 meters away from the house, all in queue, one after another. After collecting (which took at least an hour) the real work started - pounding. We pounded and pounded for hours, all day, until the pile of dirt was a solid mud floor with a hardness equivalent to concrete. I can’t even begin to explain how exhausting the process was, I hardly lasted an hour! But the women weren’t only working on the floor, when it was time for a break they go back to their other work, cooking for the farmers or processing grains. They continued throughout the day alternating between jobs until the floor was finished.

Grain and food processing takes up a majority of women’s time and is done for both subsistence and income generation (depending on how much time they have). Milling corn to make flour, dehulling rice, grinding dried cassava, making shea butter and pressing groundnut oil are the main activities and when done by hand, there is barely enough time to process what is needed for subsistence. Milling is rarely done by hand anymore as usually there is at least one corn mill in a nearby village. But when I say nearby, I mean a several hour walk away, and if women have to go to this ‘near by’ corn mill, they can only take with them what they can carry, that is, enough for subsistence. But of course, they want to process more so that they can sell some of their grain, to generate at least some income to help them get a little bit out of poverty. So what do they do? Get help. And who is readily available to help them? Non other than their children.

This brings me back to first question I asked my mother – what is poverty – as some would include lack of education in their definition. So, why are people lacking education? In the Ghana context it’s not because there aren’t any schools, but rather because families can’t afford the school fees and furthermore the children are needed to help on the farms and with grain processing

So to come full circle – why rural electrification? And more specifically why MFP? Because the MFP allows women’s groups to process grains and other food products directly in their communities which frees up some of their time, helps them produce enough to generate some income and allows their children to attend school.

Finally what’s different between the MFP and other privately owned mills? Often the other mills are not operational due to a plethora of technical, management, operational or social problems. To address this, the project provides management, business, operation and maintenance training as well as basic literacy training. Furthermore, local artisans in the vicinity of the beneficiary communities are trained in the manufacture and repair of the equipment. There are countless other program activities that have been put in place to ensure that it is sustainable.

To sum it up, the MFP project is not intended for rural electrification only, but rather to empower women, cooperatives, individual entrepreneurs or whoever is interested, by helping them purchase agro-processing equipment so that they can start their own agro-processing or energy service businesses resulting in community members with access to mechanized grain-processing, families generating income from the extra grain processed, children attending school as they are not need to help with grain processing, reinvestment in the community in the form of infrastructure and so on…

…ideally

Of course with this project like any other development project there are countless challenges. I’m not even sure where to start. One of the biggest problems is that there is a lot of competition from electric agro-processing devices, which offer services at a cheaper price. Hence, the project has a criterion that they only implement in communities that are at least 10 km away from the electricity grid. But in Ghana, the electrification rates are high (as compared to other West African countries), which of course is a good thing, but for those who are acquiring the diesel powered MFP in non-electrified communities, they run the risk of going out of business in a few years as the grid extends. Well, this isn’t completely true, as electrification rates are much higher in talk than in reality. Unfortunately, promises of electrification are a bit of political tool to win support during election time. Sometimes politicians will just bring poles, and sometimes the community actually gets electricity, but this is not always the case. Talk or not, this posses a challenge to the initial program plan and thankfully we have had the freedom to explore program modifications.

Another challenge is the dependence on diesel. Oil prices are going through the roof here – it’s ridiculous, the government has increased the price four times since I arrived in February! Not only is there the cost issue, but also the question of environmental sustainability. Therefore, there is a lot of research going into alternative or clean burning fuels for the motors ranging from bio-diesels made from jatropha to LPG (liquid petroleum gas, i.e. propane).

In addition to this, there are a number of management and implementation challenges due to resource constraints that have significantly slowed down the whole program. And this, I guess, is where I come in. I play the role of an extra resource to take on all the activities and research that would benefit the project, but that have not been prioritized due to budgetary or time constraints. Furthermore, I am taken as a fresh pair of eyes to help identify program challenges and bottlenecks and make recommendations on ways forward. I guess this is a bit of an intangible description of my activities, but honestly I have been working in all areas of the project and doing what I can to help to make sure it is a success!