A True End to Poverty

                                                                    My cassava farm.

Today I would like to talk about something I believe will probably become a reoccurring theme in my posts and currently the focus of my non-profit Clash International—farming as a tool for poverty reduction and development.  Again, I am only speaking based on my experience in Ghana, but I think the importance of agriculture is relevant in many countries.  Often times, I feel poverty is viewed in the development sector as something far more complicated than it actually is—some mysterious illness without any known cure.  Consequently, development organizations often end up treating the more immediate symptoms of poverty: illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, etc.  Little attention is actually spent searching for and implementing a cure.   The cure, however, lies in what I don’t think many of us feel comfortable talking about: money.  Poverty exists, because people do not have money; poverty would not exist if people had money.  That is all there really is to it.  So, how do we get money to the people who don’t have it?  And not just for now, but for the rest of their lives?  By creating jobs—jobs that are accessible to everyone regardless of their literacy level, location, or demographic.  As a farmer whose harvests put him and his brothers through junior high, senior high, and university, this is where I believe agriculture can facilitate job creation and poverty reduction.

For so many of us in Ghana, farming is not a foreign concept.  Many of us have been farmers since birth, carried to farm each morning strapped to our mothers’ backs with a two-yard piece of cloth.  We are familiar with the techniques and accustomed to the labor, but we don’t always know how to turn this technique and labor into a profitable business for ourselves and our families.  While we often know how to farm, we don’t always know how to run a business.  We easily overlook business strategies.  For example: market-assessment.  When is there a good market for our produce?  Are we planting and harvesting accordingly?  Or, we don’t always consider investing in our farms.  If we have a profitable year, we often take all that money as personal profit instead of using a portion to expand our business the following year.  Sometimes we even take the next year off, waiting for the money to run out before we head back to our farms.

Simply put, we often don’t view farming as a legitimate occupation at all.  We don’t see it as a way to generate sustainable revenue, but as a means to an end.  Farming, of course, will not be for everybody; but for so many of us, it’s a skill set we already possess and an occupation that is readily available to us.  It is a gaping, untapped opportunity in Ghana.  We can create our own jobs, use these jobs to make our own money, and use this money to end our own poverty.  It is the development and facilitation of this process and processes like this that I believe can truly end poverty country-wide.  So to those of us in the development sector, let’s move away from treating the symptoms, and start administering the cure.