The endangered and illusive “Income generation”

I was thinking about income generating opportunities, but I’m not sure if it really exists. Does income generation exist or is there just income re-distribution? An example is “Cotton Made in Africa”. Does that just steal profits from cotton farmers in India or China? Side note, Cotton farmers here suck in comparison to cotton farmers in China and India, well maybe the farmers don’t suck, but the yields suck, and they are capable of getting much higher yields, even double.

If you try to start an income generating activity in a village where people don’t have any spare cash, where is the opportunity to make money? If 1 poor person grows tomatoes and sells them to another poor person, how does that generate income? You have to look outside the village. If you try to start income generation in a country that doesn’t have much spare cash, do you have to look to exporting to other countries and if so, is it not just income redistribution then? I guess what I’m asking is if you closed all the borders to a poor community or country, could they generate income on their own? I have no idea. I understand things by seeing examples, so I tried to think about how developed countries have developed, and it seems like it has been more of an income taking venture than generating one, but I’m no expert, so I’d love to see an example of how a developed country developed without taking from someone else’s capital. I look at countries in the Americas, where the original inhabitants were killed by disease and Europeans and a huge amount of fertile land and new crop and animal species were inherited. Then to top it off, slaves were taken from Africa and forced to generate income for owners. I look at Britain, which controlled the oceans and thus trade, and made a fortune basically as a middle man.

These are my understandings, but I could be wrong about any or all of them and would like to know.

I just don’t understand what a completely developed world would look like? Would we in Canada still be able to buy t-shirts for $8 and bananas shipped from Ecuador for $0.6/kg? Is the reason we have developed because we have stolen from and ridden so many other groups of people to the top? I guess another question is, “what would Canada look like without developing countries?” I don’t have a clue. If Zambia is to develop, is it possible to do that without bringing down another country, developed or not, like Canada or India.

In Zambia, people speak English. What I mean is they use the same words we use, however they don’t always have the same meaning. Ex. I’m reading a report on a crop which reads:

Dec.	Good
Jan	Poor
Feb	Better
March	At least

I asked “What does ‘At least’ actually mean?” To which someone replied

“It means it’s better than okay, but not very okay”.

I laughed in my head, because of course, there is no such thing as “very okay” in Canadian English, it’s like saying “very sort of!” I explained all this and my friend said “OH!!! That makes sense, because we were watching BBC news and they said ‘At least 200,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake’. (which translates to ‘it wasn’t that bad, thankfully only 200,000 people died’) We were saying that 200,000 people is a lot and the news lady should acknowledge that and say that 200,000 is a lot and not at least!”

A quote from my favourite comedian, Demetri Martin:

“Sort of is such a fluff word. It has no meaning, it doesn’t add anything to a sentence, it doesn’t change the meaning at all… Unless you say it at the end of very definite things, like :

“It’s a boy!”

Or, “You're going to live”

Background on me and my placement

I arrived in Toronto for pre-departure training at the end of January and touched down in Lusaka international airport in Zambia on March 3. I am on my first placement, living in Katete, Eastern Province with my wife. She is an awesome nurse working at an awesome local hospital. I am working with a mobile finance company and a cotton company, both private, for profit companies, not NGO's.

The mobile finance company is basically an online bank account, but with MUCH cheaper fees than a regular bank and you can access it through your mobile phone. They also do money transfers like Western Union, but again, at a much cheaper rate. They have agents, who are often stores that are agents as well, not solely agents, in most cities in Zambia that you can go to do to deposit, withdraw and send money.

The cotton company does out grower programs (they give seeds and fertilizer on loan at the start of the year and then buy back the cotton at the end of the year and deduct the loan from their payments when they buy. Buying cotton is very competitive, the main competition here being Cargill (I think it's the largest private company in the world, look it up).

Last week we just started buying cotton. The payment system in complicated and costly. Long story short, within a few days of buying the cotton they drive a vehicle with lots of cash with a paper list of farmers that should get money and then give the farmers all their money in cash, which the farmers then spend and stash in their house. The hope is that (and this is a pilot program) some farmers will be paid onto their new mobile accounts the day their cotton is sold, saving the cotton company time, money and confusion all the while saving the farmer time and giving them a bank account.

My role is collecting info so that we can set this up so that it can succeed, as well as "capture learning" (figure out what mistakes were made so that next year it's better), and do some gap filling, capacity building, learn the local language Chewa (CHAY-wa), the small task of understanding rural Zambian culture, make friends, support my wife, capture learning for EWB, blah blah blah.

Funny story, Steph and I went for dinner with 2 bwanas (bosses) from the cotton company and the next day a guy from work said "Who was your friend last night? He came to dinner with you". I was confused, "do you mean one of the bosses?"

"No the other one, I don't know his name, but he came with you"
me "No idea who you're talking about"
After about 2 really awkward minutes of this, I realized the "he" was Steph, my wife, or Steve as she's better known here.

Steve and I along with 5 other white women, including a 6ft. tall blond Norwegian (quite a sight to see us all together) hiked the big hill overlooking our tiny town. From the top we saw what at first appeared to be fairies, just like tinkerbell, then after some more sightings we thought they might just be beautiful locusts, they looked like 5 inch grasshoppers with big bright wings. The wings were a mix of blue, yellow, orange, purple and red, with nice little circles. REALLY beautiful. We ended up deciding they must be fairies.

Cotton subsidies

I was going to say "Things are frustrating here." but decided that it would be more accurate if I just said "Life is frustrating". I could probably start every post like this. This time, the reason I’m frustrated is for two reasons.

1. Farmers here want more money, but they want it the (semi) easy way. They way they want money is with higher prices for their crops. So they just ask why the cotton company doesn’t give a higher price for cotton, or why they don’t give bonus’. They turn a deaf ear when you start talking about global cotton prices or the value of the kwacha and just reply "I don't care. I just need more money to live". This is pretty normal. I’ve heard countless farmers in Canada complain about the price of feed, beef, grain. But you can’t just ask the buyer to give you more money, that’s too easy, you have to be creative. What the cotton company offers is a YIELD program, each letter stands for something, but it’s basically a program that teaches it’s farmers better practices so they can have higher yields. Here, it is more realistic to double yields than it is to double the buying price. Yields here average 700kgs/hectare, but good farming can yield 1400kg/ha. I’ve heard of farmers getting anywhere from 200-1700kg/ha, so yields vary widely and it's not just because of weather.

2. The second thing I’m frustrated about is farming subsidies…Correct me if I’m wrong, but American cotton farmers get an average of $80,000/person per year in subsidies!!!! That is the yearly income of 200 peasant farmers here! Try explaining that to farmers here. "The reason the cotton company doesn’t give a high price for cotton to you isn’t because they don’t want to, but there are farmers getting so much money from the government in other parts of the world that they can afford to sell their crops for such low prices, and you have to compete with them because cotton is a globally traded commodity".

So, farmers that are reading this, or anyone else. What do you think about farm subsidies? Should we cut them? Why shouldn’t we?

The drive home

I went to a field day in Msoro and was expecting it to be just like any other field day. Leave here around 10am, couple hours in the field, have lunch and be back around 3 or 4 pm. I should have known it would be different when 15 people got into a 3 passenger mini truck which was already partly loaded with cotton supplies…The drive was 2hours and 45 minutes one way. The “road” which started as a bumpy dirt road, degraded into what in Canada would be considered an “unmaintained hiking trail”. It was wickedly eroded in places, the elephant grass nearly closed the road and there was a constant danger of being hit by low hanging branches or falling out of the back of our sardine packed truck box. Regardless, we arrived with only stiff joints. Realizing that once we arrived, we were only half way because we had to return, I was prepared for more of the same. What I was not prepared for was rain!


The journey home started with an hour walk because our driver was still distributing picking sacks for the farmers. Once he got us we all packed into the truck we set off. After a while the thunder started and then the rain, tropical rain. We pulled over at the local office and waited for about 45 minutes for the rain to stop, which it didn’t, so we put all our phones and money and bags in the cab and started off again. At least this time we put some old bags of cotton in the back to sit on so we could be comfortable. I thought if I just get wet, it won’t be that bad, I was right, if I just get wet. The problem you see is with elephant grass, it’s about 8 ft. tall and when it gets wet it leans…onto the road. So as I sat in the back of the truck, driving 30-40km/hr, raining, soaking wet elephant grass was slapping me in the face, dropping whatever insects it had on me. At that point I thought, if this is all it is, then I’ll be just okay. I put my arm in front of my face to block the grass and just lay there laughing. I told everyone it would be a great memory of Africa for me that I won’t forget. The other men in the truck said “We’re sitting here suffering and you’re laughing making memories!” and for the rest of the ride home that was the case. After about 2 hours the rain stopped and the sky cleared and the stars were so bright, that it ended up being a nice ride. Oh did I mention we saw some park rangers bringing a dead hippo to the chief so that he could distribute it? Well we did. See the picture below.


It was pretty neat. There is so much myth and wives tales. They said that before you eat hippo you must put the blood on your hand and then let it sit for 5 minutes. After you remove the blood if your hand remains red, you are not worthy to eat the hippo. After some digging I found out the red that remains is a rash, and apparently some people are allergic, so it’s actually an allergy test! We were about 30 km from South Luangwa National Park. One of the top game parks on the continent! Look it up. There was an old park ranger in the truck telling stories about pretty much everything, what animals are used for what witchcraft, what prices you can get for them, how to catch them, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. The way people talk is quite funny, they will mix Chewa (the local language) and English, so you could hear “And of course you take the meat and (continues in chewa)”.

So at the end of the day, the ride home was awesome, I arrived soaking wet, freezing, happy, and was alright with the insects. But…During the night…I woke up scratching and itching. In the morning, well, have a look at the picture.


The following night the itching was so intense that Steph was up with me for hours trying to stop me from scratching my skin off. I was asking her to just take her needle and stab me with it if I couldn’t scratch. Anyways, it’s about a week later and I’m mostly healed up, but it was a tough week. This is a self diagnosis, so remember that, but steph has a book on tropical medicine that she keeps next to the bed. She tells me it’s to keep the mosquito net away from the edge of the bed, but I think it’s actually there to give me nightmares. Reading about parasitic worms and how they travel through the blood and lungs and up your throat and back down to get swallowed! BLAH! So, I diagnosed myself with Chiggers. The book had stuff of lice and mites and chiggers, and I think it was them, plus it’s a fun word to say. Chiggers are the larvae of mites that go to the end of grass and wait for passing mammals. Then they bite and fall off or are washed off. Oh and I have worms for sure now, because I was swimming in Cape McClear or Monkey Bay, which is the schisto (I think that’s what they’re called) worm capital of Lake Malawi. They’re the worms transmitted by snails, and there were lots of snails. Also there was good stuff about the lake, bueatiful water, beaches and cichlids (I think that’s what they’re called, beautiful bright tropical fish in Lake Malawi).

I never know how to end this, and it kind of degraded from single story to listing what parasites I think I have, but either way, I hope it’s interesting.
Oh, I forgot. Something funny about Zambians. They can’t say Steph’s name, and they freely interchange he and she. So I have heard “Your wife, his name is Steve?” to which I reply, “Yes, her name is Steph” which doesn’t clear the issue up one bit!
Zambians also freely interchange R and L so I heard that they have “Lobots” in Chipata, so I asked again and thought I heard “Rowboats”, so I asked again and thought I heard “Robots”. Which of these do you think is the correct answer? It’s Robots. So then I was looking for these ‘robots’ which were near “clossloads” (=crossroads). It turns out that they call traffic lights robots!

Here are a few more pictures: our bedroom, kitchen and home...so take a look!