Efficient markets may determine self-sufficiency at the micro level for farmers

Watching dedication of farmers and their enthusiasm as they tend their gardens in various parts of the country, refreshes my mind as the psalmist says "like a tree planted by a river bank." Well, if you have seen a Mthethe tree (Acacia polyacantha) growing by a river bank you may picture what it mean. It is always a beautiful scene to look at. This is usually the case for many first time farmers or even experienced farmers when they have adopted a new crop and are inspecting their fields. Each farmer, even subsistence with less than a hectare of land thinks of enough food for his household and some level of surplus to sell and make money.

Farmers grading CG 7 groundnuts before planting in Kapiri, Mchinji; Farmers walking in a red Beans garden in Nandzikhale Dedza; An Irish potato field in Bembeke, Dedza. They need efficient markets.

Starting with first time farmers, I will recall my first experience in venturing into farming. My personal motivation came from an early exposure to farming from my mother, who I would describe as very resilient and hardworking woman I have ever encountered. My mother, at heart is an educator having been a primary school teacher for over 35 years. However, from when I was little, she would take my elder brothers and sisters to the garden. Of course being the youngest, I would mostly play at the garden, although she would make me carry a hoe befitting my age of 5 and assign a few ridges for me to tend. People passing by, would say, "Akulimitsa ndikakubere komwe!" - "She is even making the one still being breast fed farm the garden!" The most joyous time for me in the season, was harvest time, because at the end of the day, my dad would come with a hired pick up from around the neighborhood and the ride in the pick up was the most fun. A one tonne pick up filled with maize, and a young boy, clutch in between some elder men going to unload the maize to create a pile of maize at my parents' house.

Later in the year,  people within the neighborhood would come and buy 90 KG bags of maize. Later, on she would give some of the money to my father to buy fertilizer for the next farming season and with the remainder she would buy some gifts for all of us.  Although my elder brothers would get some money so that they decide what they want to do! So there, my lesson, you could transform the harvest into money. In that lesson, she demonstrated self sufficiency through farming up to her community based marketing.

In the case of my mum, she had a community market at that time, but this is not the case now that she is no longer actively farming at the same scale. However, over 20 years later, having adopted a similar practice of farming to some scale the ease at which my mum did the money conversion has been quite elusive and frustrating sometimes. Furthermore, interacting with small scale farmers reveals an even greater challenge of finding a market. Many people have documented the challenges of marketing crops in Malawi with details such as the report by Prof. P. Kishindo, that analyzed the rice schemes but also touched on the issue of marketing.

The premise of farming at least at small scale assumes sufficient yields for household consumption and sufficient enough surplus for economic gain and yet another level to continue the cycle of production.

So if this were a model then there would be self sufficiency as a function of total yields, amount consumed,  total sales. Of course one would argue, that if there was a self sufficiency model, then that would have to be mediated through availability of a market or some market related variable.

That there is market for most crops seems to be true, as most crops seem to eventually sale. However, the question of market needs to be assessed with a different question:

"What is an efficient market for most farmers in Malawi? How can it be achieved?"

 An efficient market that maximizes profit for the actual farmers. The current liberal market policies seem to demonstrate a level of exploitation for most farmers as the available market will remain inefficient and negatively influence self-sufficiency. A detailed mediation study would of course need to be conducted to tease the issue of an efficient market.

In the presence of free market forces, where the notion, has been to leave everything to demand and supply, it appears that demand and supply in the case of farmers seems to be artificially suppressed due to hurdles that farmers continue to face. These are not the absence of markets, but absence of efficient markets. In the era of free markets, Freakonomiks authors, seem to suggest that markets self define. Yes, they do, but unlike the example of Uber, where you can have a true demand and supply curve, I would argue that without proper infrastructure - regulation and physical networks, it is difficult to achieve this level of demand and supply particularly in resource constrained settings. Maybe, the market needs to be nudged.

In the analysis of P. Kishindo, he argues that in the case of rice schemes, markets existed and were close to the people. He also suggests that the change in policy towards a liberal market policy has resulted in break up of the formal market to more individual markets. Therefore suggesting that despite the opportunity that liberal markets has introduced, there is still a challenge in terms of the efficiency of those markets. Another observation made, in the report, though not characterized as corruption, is the tendency of guardians of free markets, giving themselves a bigger share of the market just because they can. They are in charge anyway!

Given the analysis above, mediation of self sufficiency through presence of markets in Malawi should consider the infrastructure of markets being socio-technical. On the technical aspect of the market, it needs to recognize the infrastructure - in the case of Malawi, an example is Admarc as public infrastructure, being available across the country. Despite the emergence of other organizations in the country, it remains the one with a national presence even in remote areas, with staff at those levels.

So what can be done or what should be done? Perhaps as part of privatization, this institution, should have allowed the current middle men to operate within its framework so that there is some level of coordination. Perhaps government, should allow middle men, but to avoid exploitation of farmers and still maintain the business of the farmers, the middle men should operate within Admarc. How, may this operate, well, Admarc with its national presence could easily become a national exchange, that would become an efficient market towards self-sufficiency.

Maybe just like the case of my mother, who used to achieve self sufficiency at her scale, many farmers on a larger scale should be given access to markets. They should be given not just markets, but efficient markets, so that their vision is truly seen  all the way to self sufficiency.

Consider Moving Beyond Power Back-Up to Alternative Power Source - Continuously Run Power From Your Solar

In an earlier post, well now almost 10 years ago, I laboured with the idea of alternative power faced with the power failures in Malawi due to insufficient power supply. I proposed in that post whilst acknowledging the energy saving philosophy adopted by the Malawi energy company then, ESCOM, that an additional step could be to proactively adopt solar energy to reach a theoretical state where energy demand would be assuaged by consumers supplying electricity too, hence not demanding more power. Well, fast forward the years the deficit still exists and the demand has actually grown as seen from the energy department's reports. The reports further indicates that the demand is only going to grow. The challenges of meeting the power demand will then only grow as seen in the graphic below adopted from the energy department in Malawi:

Energy Demand, adopted from the department of energy website

Well, seeing this, makes me ask what purpose has the biggest power demand in Malawi, and in another graphic, it shows that this is mainly for household use accounting for over 40%. Therefore the prior target on using energy server bulbs. However, this is being done with continued increase in number of households and therefore the savings earned are being cancelled out by the increasing demands on electricity. There have thus been several initiatives to address this demand, but I would like to re-examine the solar options. Despite solar energy being proven feasible the diffusion of these power source has really been mostly in off the grid areas where households have started using solar for small scale businesses such as charging phones for example. The areas facing power outages have not systematically adopted solar as a power source. Probably this could be driven by a number of reasons such as their power demands at household level not being met (hence households feeling that it is not worth it); or the cost of investment; or being overwhelmed with what it takes to set up; or just not being sure what it will bring.

I recently decided to set up solar power at my home in Lilongwe, which is in an area with access to the power grid for some household uses.

Solar Panel on the Roof of Home in Lilongwe

Battery bank and inverter for power storage and conversion to AC from DC.

Now this addresses some of my needs such as lighting and entertainment (TV and radio), but not others such, cooker, refridgerator, which draw more power at household level. Therefore, this remains work in progress. Additionally, the configuration for alternating current with the inverter, should be modified to reduce or explore its full capacity and see what it can do. Since this was installed as a packaged solution, other options have not been explored.


Aside from exploring the capacity of the solar solution, i realize that  it is installed more as a power back-up and not an alternative source of power that may be used even when utility power is on. This would require for example other models such as  residential grid tie solar power systems which I think could actually be models that could bring in balance of power as seen in other places in the world. The general idea being generating power into the national utility when the households are not using the power.  This might of course be regarded as a threat to current model of power generation where there is market guarantee for current utility company; however let's have an open mind - it could also be looked upon as a solution towards the power deficit challenge and a new business model. Having an array of independent households, generating power (AIHGEP) into the grid! Then we could have AIHGEP clusters!

However, given the complexity of getting such kind of setup as grid tie solar systems regularized, I would classify my household equipment into utility equipment and alternative power equipment, Secondly I would isolate all the equipment that require power from a utility company onto a dedicated circuit. I would then use my solar powered circuit to power all the other equipment all the time. In so doing, I will be using the household utility only for those things and freeing up more energy.

Thinking of scale, well beyond my domicile, this is easier said than done, due to various challenges, as mentioned above (legislation for AIHGEPs), but primarily to achieve the energy savings, there needs more thinking around incentives for adopting these types of circuits and some sort of coordination to reach sufficient diffusion. The initial implementation above requires a costly investment. The diffusion also requires some modeling using the principle of return on investment to really see if it's eventually going to be worth it if a coordinating body such as a utility company was to take it up as a new arm of the organization. On a household level, though, I hypothesize that individual investment of alternative power and not power backup, could generate some return on investment. The next step will be to collect actual data on this and build a model.

With the only increasing demands on power, it is important to recognize the power demand being mostly from the household level. If this is redistributed, then it may provide more power for other areas where there is demand. The feasibility of alternative power sources has been demonstrated, but it requires some level of coordination and centralization to achieve the benefits. Examples, of these efforts are being seen through micro-power generators such as the mega project in Mulanje and the the boy who harnessed the wind. Another example in response to community needs has been here. Furthermore, application for other purposes has been demonstrated through village registration, boy you should have seen the grin on the village headman's house when the lights went on! Yet, with these demonstrations, there is still that annoying step where the first choice of power implementation at least in urban and semi-urban areas, the option is a utility company. With demand of power going to the same utility company and limited power from other sources, a different thinking could be to nudge the public by providing them a second option: which would be,  "We shall give you solar power for these needs (lighting and entertainment) from some community based solar farms. - From now own, called AIHGEPs"

Making Malawi Green through Afforestation: A Need for More Coordination

Bluegum Woodlot in Kamgulitse Village, Bembeke, TA Kamenyagwaza,
 Dedza. Part of forest I have maintained over the years.

The environment has fascinated me from an early age, with an interest in trees and their role in preventing environmental degradation. This is right from when I was in primary school at Tsokamkanansi LEA where we would be assigned various extra curricular activities such as watering flower gardens before starting classes for the day. At the time I more or less was going about the activities more as a robot programmed to do the task;  one watering cane, I am done, and then jump into class. As the years progressed from standard 1 to standard 2, the day 21 January, which was then designated tree planting day was announced during the morning assembly by the head teacher then; that it will be tree planting day and as a school we would participate. I was excited, because I knew, "no classes" that day, although I wouldn't say it to my mum who was a primary school teacher there too. But I kept asking her, when 21 January will be so that I could make plans with my friends to play to our hearts content driving wire cars and playing "kick the tin", a variation of hide and seek. 21st January finally dawned, and we were ushered in some sort of order to a nearby area, opposite Tsokamkanansi LEA School to start the planting. Thinking of the plans I had made with my friends to play the day out, it was really an anxious time for me as men in black suits kept making speeches, about planting trees and why it is necessary. When the speeches came to an end, the planting started, but the gentleman who made the first speech had to plant the first tree, water and then everyone had to clap hands. I said, I can do that too, why should we clap hands? Well, then it was hooray, free for all, let the planting begin. Well, as kids we naturally made a game out of the process and started asking each other as we were planting, "iwe wadzala ingati?", - "how many have you planted", in an attempt to out-plant your friends. We soon lost count, as the trees were finished and everyone was now scrambling to head back home. About 2 years later, at that time,  there was what was called, "youth week", we were asked to go and weed the forest, using slashers. It was pretty light work, despite the sense that we were getting at that time, that it was the only option. I was however convinced from this early stage that trees are necessary part of the environment and that public institutions wanted to educate the public on this message. This message is promoted nowadays by public institutions, however, the emerging theme has been that planting is only the beginning in sustaining a tree that takes over 15 years to harvest. The message however, that trees are important seems to have sunk in many peoples minds now with various natural disasters and failings of infrastructure that may be attributed to trees that have been harvested without replanting new ones. However, this 15 year, time seems to be achieved immediately after planting the trees as there seems limited follow up in making sure that the trees mitigate the current challenges. Some people, have diminished the value of planting trees as futile, because no-one follows up. Well maybe it is a strategy with the hope, that "some will survive" and eventually we shall have trees. As one writer, said, "hope is not a strategy", there is need for some level of organization. First, people have realized that planting trees is important. This is good. Then the next question, is how is the planting being done? Have the areas for afforestation been marked out? Who is monitoring the progress? And many other questions that may be posed. Well, my thoughts on the planting is to have a coordinated process that is controlled by a central office(Should be Forestry department). Well, this might already be there, however, the approach that organizations or individuals of goodwill conduct afforestation efforts is suggestive that there is lack of clarity on who initiates the planting. Therefore, the institutions should consider the following steps:

1) Actively map out the target areas for afforestation and share these with the public - the public are already enthusiastic of afforestation, show them where to plant trees. Use the modeling knowledge created from works like these on modeling Dzalanyama forest by K. Munthali.

2)  Coordinate the energy just as done in the tree planting weeks; have some people that have the goodwill to plant, to actually actively create fire breaks and other interventions to ensure that the trees grow.

3)  Mobilize competitions that could support afforestation, for example learning from the campaign of Make Malawi green with Calrsberg green, which in my view was one of the development focussed promotions ever done than some current promotions that I think could have wider developmental impact; but target individuals - consider distributing that mega prize to many people and making your product meaningful.

4)  Monitor progress being made, evaluate and give feedback. Take advantage of the knowledge created by experts in this field (a search on google scholar "Afforestation in Malawi" gives over 4,000 peer reviewed articles), implement the recommendations at scale in key affected areas. Build a learning system for afforestation that will avert these manageable issues of siltation, flooding with distal effects on some key infrastructure.

The experiences, in primary school, revealed, some sort of coordination and energized the zeal for environmental conservation in me and surely some of my friends. In retrospect, the follow up actions (youth week), and the active planning (public officials brought in the seedlings and gave guidance) demonstrated some coordination. The use of us, primary school kids, with malleable brains, well some exploitation maybe but also opportunistic from another angle - using positive youth energy, instead of going to drive my wire toy cars until my heart's content, plant some trees then go and play. The meaningful, promotions of make Malawi green with Calrsberg Green, provided me with realization, that I could take bottle tops exchange them with tree seedlings at my village forestry office and plant them at my family woodlot; a practice I maintained after the promotion, from my pocket money in Secondary school and University. Well, my experience is definitely not unique and could be useful today too. But the model done followed, while in primary school could form a basis for addressing the "follow-up" challenge of ensuring that the trees survive. More effectively though could be the suggested steps in this blog. Hope is not a strategy, let's have a plan and coordinate the current goodwill.

Meeting the Demand of Power through Alternative Power Sources

The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi proudly proclaimed that it provides power everyday all day long in its vision statement which it has since been forced to change. In the background of its vision the opponents to this vision statement claimed that the frequent power outages did not warrant the existence of this statement.
This was perhaps true albeit that a vision statement should point to a future state that an organization wants to be at, and ESCOM was only pointing to this state. A vision can also be a state which may never be attained, but has to be strived for.
ESCOM faces a power demand of 360 Mega Watts and is only able to meet this demand with 240 Mega Watts hence the need for load shedding. With Malawi, being classified as the second largest growing economy, this demand on electricity is only going to grow leading into more power shedding and thus further away from ESCOM’s vision.
The demand for power on ESCOM also leads to other administrative issues, one of which is late connection of Power for different projects. An ESCOM applications officer in Zomba, pointed out that it takes up to 2 months in order to have power connected. This might sound worse, but I have heard, stories of people waiting up to 1 year and even beyond without connections. While most people are worried with this situation some have decided not to stay idle and have resorted to using solar energy in the absence of ESCOM power. This is mainly being used for household power. With the economic boom (2nd largest growing economy in the world), it suggests that there will be demand for industrial power. This means that the power has to be harnessed from somewhere somehow. Explored options have been: Interconnection to Mozambique : Deemed unsustainable because of high costs and donor dependence.
Use of power saving devices : Energy saving light bulbs, recently reduced. They are still more expensive despite the removal of duty on these bulbs.
Increasing capacity of Kapachira power plant – this is work in progress, by the time that this is completed, there will still be more demand than ESCOM can supply. (Making ESCOM still king in energy business)
The demand for power makes it evident that ESCOM will not meet its vision even after the options above. What is needed is power to the people. I don’t mean deregulating energy market, because this can see organizations such as ENRON emerge. Rather, the solution that people have discovered in the name of solar should be encouraged. In order to encourage this Solar energy devices should have their cost further reduced by removal of import hurdles. In addition to this, alternative power sources should be an available power option for most households. This will definitely reduce the power demand on ESCOM and hence balancing the power supply. Maybe other green power (in addition to hydro) will make ESCOM reach its vision.

Malawian Singer Backs Madonna

Recently one of Malawi's leading dj Annie Matumbi, released a single where he launched a commical attack on Malawian NGO bosses that opposed the adoption of David Banda.

In his rhetoric he raises the questions of "why the bosses only became active after the adoption when they knew all along about the adoption?"

He also observes that NGO bosses usually have flashy cars, and live in plush areas as well as send their children to expensive schools.

In one of his lines, he mokes the bosses by saying "Ana anu akadwala ndiye kuti ageya","your kids are only sick when they burp" ,implying that they have enough of everything.

He also recognizes that, NGOs that have been against Madonna, have not looked at internal issues and addressed them adequately. He cites the example of street kids as an outstanding example.

He finishes his song with an ironic twist by joking on any Madonna future visit, "tsono a malawi tikadzongomva kuti Madonna akubwera, tidzakasonkhana ku airport, tidzangomva kuti amadzagula ng'ombe", "people will flock to the airport the next time Madonna comes, only to hear that she came to buy cows!"

Literature Cited
Annie Matumbi, Madonna Single

Generating Reports in Rails

One of quality control measues in software development is the ability to produce reports that are of importance to the users of the system themselves.

The reports ought to be produced at the expected time and should also be tailored to meet the required format so that decisions should be made at the right time.

The above requirements have particularly been impressed upon me with the fact that i had to produce reports for the hospital pharmacy that the organization that i work for provides software to. The ordeal seemed fine on specification(they all seem so!), but when i dived into the actual production of the reports, i realized that huge join queries had to be used in order to generate them.

The application had been developed in VB 6.0, and at this point i was mainly proficient in VB 6.0. I wrote the algorithm of retrieving the data in my mind, but the idea of big queries, and opening and closing connections, kind of put me of writing an application to appropriately produce reports once and for all. I thought that, well, somehow i will produce the queries manually and the rest will take care of itself!

Meanwhile my colleagues had been experimenting with some web technolgies and had talked of ruby on rails. What, are these people all talking about. They are talking of monday languages, come tuesday, they are fading!

However my colleagues, went ahead to implement searches with rails ajax hooks such as observe_field, and produced dynamic searches in no time. "I can do that in VB 6.0 ", i said to myself amid sighs of "cool!,cool!".

So i did my queries, manually and exported them to excel, as i usually did. They did not however fulfill the required format, and they also reached the rightful stakeholders at the wrong time.Something like 2 days later.(Which was bad, considering that some of the data was required for drug forecasting at the pharmacy).

Well i became frustrated. The next day, i did. I had to regenerate some of the queries and add make some corrections. Now there is nothing so bad to be told that your work is not good enough, in a polite way of "can you look at this figure, it shows 10,000, but we only had 400, this month". And this is repeated 10 times.

Okay. Let me try something new. Let me really see how flexible this ruby thing is, so i jumped in with my colleagues did, the hello world legendary program. It worked and this brought gratification.One of my colleagues was a propeller head at web programming languages. He got ruby's message quick and led us into the unknown.......We wrote the base code for the application figured out the aciverecord querying style.

I was immediately impressed at how i could shrink gigantic queries like this :

SELECT epics_drugs.item_code,epics_drugs.description,sum(epics_dispensations.dispensed_quantity) FROM epics_drugs,epics_dispensations,epics_orders,epics_lots WHERE epics_drugs.id=epics_lots.id_epics_drug and epics_lots.id=epics_dispensations.id_epics_lot and epics_orders.id=epics_dispensations.id_epics_order and (epics_orders.date_created >=”2006-07-01 and epics_orders.date_created <=”2006-07-30”)

Into:

@consumptionTotal[drug] += dispensation.quantity_dispensed if dispensation.order.date_created.between?(begin_date,end_date)

Now this was fantastic! Referential integrity was being used in rails and there was no need for me to respecify this. Don't you folks like it when you don't have to say the same thing twice?

A second thing that store my heart were helpers such as the time helpers that allowed me to do logic like:

if order.date_created > 3.months_ago

end

In short coming from a visual basic 6.0 background, the economy and flexibility of ruby code has kept me with it up to now. Currently, i am developing a medical records system for Anti-Retroviral Therapy patients at Baobab Health Partnership, with my colleagues.

Amazed with rails' productivity i shared this exciting technology at a Linux Chix conference right here in Malawi Africa. I will talk about this in my later posts.

Now Rails makes my days.

Changing Rails Environment During Tests

Most rails developers know that rails encourages a testing culture, right from when you generate your controllers. Rails creates a test folder which contains subfolders for unit tests, functional tests. It also creates a fixtures subfolder and mocks subfolder.
Rails also creates three enviroments to operate in, namely the development environment, production environment and test environment. They all require separate databases to run from.

The fixtures subfolder will contain sample data to be used in testing and rails defaults the format of this data to YAML. Fixtures can contain data to be used for various test cases for an application. The following is an example of a fixture:

Normal Registration
first_name: Oliver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 1982-04-17

Awkward Registration
first_name: 0liver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 1982-04-17

Extreme Registration
first_name: Oliver
last_name: Jintha
Date_of_birth: 2982-04-17


Having defined the fixture and written the appropriate unit test for it, the next thing would be to load the fixture data and then to run the actual test.

Loading the data can be done by the command:

rake load_fixtures

This will however load the fixtures in your default enviroment and it will delete the data in your default database, as such, it is required that you specify the environment in which to run before proceeding with loading the fixtures.

This can be done by this command:

export RAILS_ENV=test

Then you can load the fixtures using:

rake load_fixtures

This will not delete your data in the default database as it did in my case.

Literature Cited
Dave Thomas, David Heinemeer Hansson(2006),Agile Web Development with Rails,Raleigh,North Carolina Dallas, Texas(USA), Pragmatic Bookshelf.

http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/5