Boring but perhaps necessary background info

            The foundation I am working for is trying to help farmers in the North of Haiti increase their income. As it stands, it is dismally difficult for farmers to eke out anything more than a subsistence livelihood. Haiti has some of the lowest agricultural productivity out there, due to just about every reason you can think of. The farms are tiny (like, Rooke family back yard size), there is little to no mechanization, not much land is irrigated, the soil fertility is poor, etc. Seeds and fertilizer can be hard to find at the right growing seasons, and even if they’re available, farmers often can’t get credit to buy them. Even the idea of “the right growing season” is sketchy, since there has been little agricultural research in Haiti. Farmers do what their fathers taught them and what everyone else does, rather than what any science has proven to be the most effective and efficient way to prepare, plant, harvest, and process. Add in extreme weather and erosion, exacerbated by climate change, and you have a tidy little uphill battle for yourself.

            The foundation is doing a bunch of stuff to try to intervene. The core activity is a loan program, enabling the farmers to get the credit and inputs they need in order to plant when they want (or really, when the foundation tells them it’s a good time). The foundation supplies seeds and tree saplings that are known to give higher yields or produce high-value fruit. They have a technical team that follows up with the farmers all season to teach them better cultivation techniques and give them advice when problems crop up. After the harvest, the farmers pay back the loans with their products. And then the next season starts, and they do it all over again.

            The foundation is doing a lot of research to determine what are the best seed varieties for the local area, and what is the most productive way to cultivate them. They are planning to have their own seed production facility, in order to reduce the reliance on outside suppliers, and to operate a corn and rice mill, so the farmers can sell directly to the mill and retain the value that would otherwise go to middlemen.  They are also doing a lot with compost, to try to recycle crop waste that is otherwise burned and to help increase the soil fertility without chemical fertilizers.

            Obviously I fit right in here, with my years of experience with agriculture and my advanced degree in soil science and my deep love of high-value tree crops like mangoes and avocadoes.

The office

 So what am I doing, exactly?

            If you had told me five years ago that I’d be spending this summer in Haiti, that would not have seemed farfetched to me. If you told me that I’d be going in order to set up information system to inform evidence-based, data-driven, results-focused management decision-making—at that, my English-major-with-a-vague-interest-in-the-whole-world self would have raised an eyebrow. Probably the most disorienting experience I’ve had so far is when my boss introduced me to someone as “our data person.”

            To the initiated, I am setting up the foundation’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system. To the lay reader, this means that I am helping them to make sure their program is on track and to see if they are having the impact that they’re hoping to have. I will help crystalize the logic of their program (if we give the farmers better seeds, they will grow more and make more money), determine what they need to measure, (how many farmers they give seeds to, do the farmers plant them correctly, how much corn do they grow), and how and when they measure it (at the start of the program, survey the farmers to see what their houses are made of; 5 years later, survey them again to see if they’ve been able to upgrade). The idea is that if they have reliable information about all this stuff, they can change and adapt the program in order to get the best results.

If this does not sound exciting to you, I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. M&E is super boring to explain. Just take my word for it that, for me, this is an engaging, creative project, and (hopefully) it will help the foundation do their work better. (And, as a white chick who hates teaching, can’t speak Creole, can’t administer a vaccine, can’t build anything, and can’t raise money, it’s one of the very few ways I can be helpful in Haiti, or any other developing country).

My day-to-day is of limited interest, since it mostly consists of sitting at a laptop revising the same documents over and over and over again. But I am learning a lot about farmers and farming, which is interesting. About which more later.