Program delivery

Program continuation vs. disadoption partly had to do with program delivery. As mentioned, the program in Arusha had a 6-month pause between recruitment of farmers and staff placement, which had a large effect on disadoption. In Kiambu in contrast, the program was rolled out immediately after recruitment.

5The units are derived from factor analysis score of floor, roof, and wall materials, and elec-tricity

Survey results

Figure 2.8 shows the percent of households surveyed who received training from FCI. As expected, the comparison households received no training, baseline par-ticipants received some, and most active parpar-ticipants received training.

Figure 2.8: Trainings attended

Figure 2.9 illustrates the impact of staff on price information, variety infor-mation, seed supply to farmers. This figure shows two things: evidence of staff presence, and plausibility for a possible staff effect on desired program outputs of production and marketing.

Figure 2.10 shows the percent of active participant households adopting desired practices between baseline and follow-up. Practices included growing and selling TAVs at all, and selling TAVs or purchasing inputs as a group. No changes were observed in Kiambu, because rates of desired activities were already so high, prob-ably due to the residual impact of FCI’s pilot program in the same villages. Each category except group sales, however, increased significantly (p<0.05) in Arusha.

Figure 2.9: TF Project staff impact

Figure 2.10: Program activity outputs

From pilot project to scale-up: Deja vu or lessons learned?

As stated, the TF Project was a scale-up of a pilot project, which was highly successful in Kiambu, and all but forgotten in Arusha. Many of the factors that contributed to the success of the pilot project (2003-2006) in Kiambu and its failure in Tanzania remained the same and are relevant here, including external barriers

and facilitators to success.

Barriers and facilitators

The first set of factors that facilitated program success in Kiambu compared to Arusha had to do with context in each place. Kiambu is next to Nairobi, which has a population of approximately 6 million. Many supermarkets have opened in Nairobi in recent years, several of which the project was able to work with to market traditional foods to consumers. That was not an easy or an automatic feat - it still required substantial effort for the program to successfully connect small farmer groups to supermarket chains, and to convince the supermarket manage-ment to try the project. Yet Nairobi provided ample opportunity to try such a project, while Arusha did not offer as many opportunities. Arusha has a popu-lation of 200,000 - 30 times smaller than Nairobi - many of whom are expatriate Europeans and North Americans. From the start it might have been possible, but involving perhaps more and different challenges, to market “heritage” foods to a foreign clientele, who had no memories of eating such vegetables as children and therefore little or no familiarity with the somewhat bitter leaves. Further com-plicating the situation was that during the pilot project and scale-up, there was only one supermarket in Arusha, part of a South African-owned chain that had a general policy of importing its produce from South Africa. The supermarket management was not very receptive to marketing TAVs, particularly given their expatriate clientele, added to the fact that they had had unfavorable experiences in the past trying to partner with local farmers for fresh produce supply [237].

Finally, the supermarket was located right across the street from a multi-acre out-door market which operated every day. Tanzanian and foreign residents alike did most of their produce shopping at the open air market, or at other smaller outdoor markets found throughout the city. Therefore, unlike the supermarkets in Nairobi,

the supermarket in Arusha was not an optimal base for TAV promotion.

Another advantage Nairobi had over Arusha in facilitating project success was a small but committed base of city residents who sought to buy TAVs, even while many urban consumers needed to be convinced to try them. In Nairobi, it is not easy to grow a home garden, and many people who moved to the city from Western Kenya and other provinces where TAVs are still commonly used may have craved the taste of TAVs that they grew up eating. These people would have been the first to buy TAVs once they were offered in supermarkets and other Nairobi markets. In Arusha, in contrast, it appeared that many Tanzanian residents who would have desired TAVs had the ability to grow or collect them for themselves, in small garden plots or larger farms they owned away from their city home. In focus group discussions for this study, Arusha farmers sometimes noted that a limitation to TAV sales was that anyone could go and pick TAVs from the wild for themselves.

(This was not necessarily true if a consumer desired a specific variety and volume, but in general it was easier for people to produce TAVs for themselves in Arusha than in Nairobi.) TAVs were sold in all the large outdoor markets in Arusha, but large increases in demand looked more uncertain there than for Nairobi - unless the expatriate and tourist market could be tapped.

A very important facilitating factor was that this project rode on the momen-tum of a decades-long history of TAV promotion in Kenya.⁶ Efforts to revitalize TAV production and consumption in Kenya started in the 1970s. At first confined to small regional projects and university studies, more partners and grants to pro-mote TAVs started building through the 1990s. By 2001, a multi-organization meeting and loose consortium of universities, local NGOs, international agricul-tural research organizations (CGIAR and AVRDC), and government institutions

6All information on the history of TAV promotion was obtained from an interview with Dr.

Patrick Maundu, a researcher at Bioversity International and the Kenya National Museums, who has personally been involved in TAV promotion activities in Kenya since 1985.

(Kenya National Museums and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute) began in-tensified promotional efforts. These included an annual government-supported TAV promotion festival, including a parade, banners, a TAV cooking competi-tion, and a traditional dance festival. FCI, though it had an important and suc-cessful role in connecting smallholder farmers to markets in Nairobi in its pilot program from 2003-2006, was only one of 12 NGOs supported in TAV-promotion projects throughout the country at the same time, and was clearly supported by the facilitating environment of multiple other TAV promotional activities going on simultaneously with their own promotions.

At a national policy level, TAVs are also gaining some traction in Kenya. The Kenyan government now serves TAVs in their cafeterias,⁷ and is drafting an up-dated National Food and Nutrition Policy with specific reference to TAVs, in par-ticular the policy of including TAVs in training materials for agricultural and health extension agents.⁸

Contrast that environment to Tanzania, where to date there have been no co-ordinated efforts to promote TAVs, and no mention of TAVs in any government policy. Since the 1990s, AVRDC has been the only organization to provide techni-cal expertise, seeds, and training in agronomic and cooking techniques for TAVs, as well as nutritional analysis and information consistently. They have partnered on a limited scale with Bioversity International (a CGIAR agency), but the main Bioversity offices are in Nairobi, where that organization’s promotions of TAVs have been focused. Some researchers at Sokoine University (the main agricul-tural university in Tanzania) and European and North American universities have studied TAVs in Tanzania, but not on a coordinated basis. While AVRDC has

7Personal communication: interview with Eunice Motemi, affiliated with Kenyatta National Hospital and the Kenya Ministry of Health, August 26, 2008.

8Personal communication: interview with Tumwet, Kenya Ministry of Agriculture, August 26, 2008.

carried the torch for TAVs in Tanzania, they have not benefited from extensive partnerships such as those in Kenya. Furthermore their reach is mostly within the Arusha region, where farmers can attend trainings at the Center and staff and affiliated researchers can more easily travel to nearby farms. At the 2007 annual national agricultural exposition, AVRDC appeared to be the only booth in the fair to include any seeds or information about TAVs.⁹ This was in stark contrast to Kenya’s proposed national-level policy changes and annual government-sponsored festival for TAV promotion, in collaboration with international institutions and civil society activities.

Implementation

In addition to the divergent contexts in which the pilot project took place, FCI’s program implementation (2003-2006) was also very different between Kiambu and Arusha.¹⁰ During the pilot project, FCI did not have an office in Arusha; staff based in Nairobi periodically traveled across the border to Arusha to visit farmer groups (a six-hour trip on rough roads). Initially, FCI staff spent some time in Arusha, promoting the project, inviting farmers to join, and forming farmer groups among those who expressed interest. FCI also partnered with local extension agents employed by the Tanzania Ministry of Agriculture, as a strategy so that the extension agents could keep in regular contact with farmer grops to sustain the program momentum [237]. While partnership with extension agents was politically necessary and may have seemed like a good idea practically as well, it turned out the extension agents varied greatly in their contact with farmers as well as in their commitment to any program ideas. During post-pilot follow-up interviews in 2007, one group reported that they had not seen their extension agent in over a

9Personal observation.

10Tara Simpson’s Cornell University M.P.S. thesis [237] explored in depth why the FCI pilot project failed in Arusha.

year, although the agent in question was still employed and assigned to their village [237]. Not all extension agents were absent, but even those most engaged could not effectively sustain the FCI pilot project, because they had limited understanding of what exactly, operationally, the project was trying to do, and could not be responsible for any specific program activities other than mere contact with the groups that had been formed. FCI staff, increasingly busy with the Kenya side of the project, visited Arusha infrequently and most farmers who had been initially involved reported that the project had been “abandoned” shortly after the groups were formed [237]. While they had not made any major investment in the project, several farmers reported dissatisfaction with what they felt was raising of false expectations at the start of the project [237].

In contrast, FCI staff were in weekly contact with groups in Kiambu, and between visits to farmer groups, were busy working with supermarkets, traders, and other brokers to set up links between the new farmer groups and opportunities for sale and transport. Kiambu groups received frequent trainings on group leadership, management, and market-oriented production, none of which the Arusha groups received. Midway into the pilot project, as noted above, the farmer groups had successfully initiated contracts with major Nairobi supermarkets.

The TF Project took several steps to correct these problems in the scale-up.

Firstly, they hired two full-time staff to be stationed in Arusha, where they shared an office with AVRDC. Collaboration with AVRDC was the best possible partner-ship, given AVRDC’s history of working with TAVs in Arusha. This collaboration and office placement allowed FCI to depend far less on extension agents than dur-ing the pilot project - which was clearly a strategy that had not worked well. Bedur-ing placed in Arusha allowed the FCI staff to have frequent contact (usually weekly meetings) with the farmer groups, much as was being done in Kiambu.

Trans-portation, however, was inherently more difficult in Arusha as some groups were very far from the offices on rough, dusty roads, and the transportation budget was inadequate to cover FCI staff’s costs. In the scale-up, location of staff did not limit farmer visits, but transportation still did. Staff visited the distant groups less frequently.

Another improvement made in the TF project over the pilot project was an un-planned and opportunistic collaboration with another NGO in Arusha, AAIDRO (Archdiocese and International Development Relief Office). AAIDRO was starting a program on market access for farmers at the same time as the TF Project was starting, and although the program theories were quite different, the similar pro-gram aims caused FCI and AAIDRO staff to decide to work together in villages, each implementing complementary program activities. FCI staff noted that the AAIDRO activity of group savings and small cash loans was a major motivator for farmers to attend meetings, which helped FCI staff to reach the farmer groups without having to provide 100% of the motivation to meet.

In both project phases, understanding of program theory among individual FCI staff was remarkably cohesive. In 2008 interviews with each staff member involved in both the pilot project and the TF Project, each staff member reported an identical chain of activities and events that would lead to the desired program outcomes. Therefore confusion over program activities or messages was definitely not a limiting factor for program success in either country. The only difference in program implementation between the countries was what was actually imple-mented: how often the groups were reached, how much support they had, and whether market linkages were aggressively pursued. In Arusha, the group support and market linkages were overall much less what was being done in Kiambu.

A limitation that the TF Project did not address was that of weaker marketing

possibilities for TAVs in Arusha through the planned venues. Supermarkets did not seem to offer many possibilities in Arusha for the reasons mentioned. Due to the high tourist and expatriate population in Arusha, a different marketing stategy was needed to reach new markets, compared to the strategy used in Nairobi which targeted wealthy Kenyan consumers. The scaled-up program failed to sufficiently explore and exploit innovative other marketing channels. The tourist population offered a virtually untouched niche market for TAVs, as many backpackers sought

“African” food for their short stays near Mt. Kilimanjaro, but only found standard continental fare at hotels and restaurants. Interviews with several hotel chefs in Arusha revealed that the chefs were quite interested and willing to experiment with using TAVs in their recipes. While this information was offered to TF staff, they felt that they lacked the capacity to make many changes to their strategy once the program had been planned and begun, and the strategy that had worked well in Kenya was not substantially changed for Arusha.

The underlying problem behind the lopsided implementation of the pilot project in both phases was lack of funds. With limited funds, FCI made the strategic choice to use funds and staff time in the location where success was most probable. Given the background circumstances described above, there was no question that the most promising site was Kiambu. FCI’s success with their Kiambu farmer groups, and their international recognition for that success, allowed them to receive a grant to scale up the project in Kiambu and three other locations, including Arusha. An unfortunate reality of fund-raising is the unintended consequence that in order to show impact, programs will gravitate toward easy targets and shy away from those most in need; in this case, the Arusha farmers had the weakest hope of market linkages, and were therefore the hardest to help.