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!