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.