Sober at the ginnery

Good news since my last post!  The ploughing window was slipping away, banks were being slow, and their appetite for risk was lower than what we think the farmers deserve…so the ginnery has decided to pilot going it alone, and has made 30 ox-plough loans itself!  

We ordered the oxen & ploughs from Soroti, and asked the suppliers to test them on the ginnery land, to make sure they were fully trained before we delivered them to the farmers.

These oxen passed the test with flying colours…

But this black and white one on the right didn’t…. He just wanted to lie down, even though his partner was happy to plough.  The suppliers pulled on his tail, gave him a smack with a stick, and stuck mud over his nostrils so he couldn’t breath - all tried & tested techniques for making the oxen move - but he still wanted to lie down.  

…I saw him being led off to the market later in the day; that’ll teach him not to embarrass the suppliers.

We’ve structured loans for the farmers with similar interest rates they’d get from the bank, but much lower administration costs, and pay-back periods which fit their harvests.  There’s bound to be issues to work out as we go along, but for now, at least farmers are clearing land that’s been bush for 20 years, and of course, hopefully planting more cotton.  

This weekend’s work should have been so rewarding that I could easily ignore the festivities in England and not wish I was there.  But instead two exhausting 12 hour days meeting farmers in the field just left me with a feeling of how difficult everything is.

We were there to introduce a Kampala-based bank to the farmers, open their individual bank accounts and do CRB checks, all in preparation for distributing ox-plough loans in the near future.  Instead, farmers raised questions, the banks appetite for the risk shrank, and everyone left disappointed with the loans unconfirmed.

In Anaka village, we learnt from the farmers the difficulty they have providing their ‘family’ land as security.  The bank needs each farmer to get a letter from their local councillor describing the land boundaries, and then have this signed by every family member and boundary neighbour.  Amone Patrick told us how hard it is to extract signatures from suspicious family members who have heard about the land-grabbings going on elsewhere in Uganda and think this might be a trick by the bank.

In Alero village, farmers explained how much they struggle to manage their cash flow.  December loan repayments are fairly easily paid via cotton, but the payment six months later in June is harder.  Little is being harvested by then, and while very good prices are available for those who have stored produce, it takes discipline to do so.  They asked too whether they could have insurance in case the oxen dies – but the bank refused:  “You’ll just kill the bull and eat it, and then come to us for a payout!”

In Atiak sub-county, the farmers told us they weren’t willing to work in groups to make the loans more affordable.  A charismatic elderly female farmer told us that NGOs had tried to share oxen in groups and it hadn’t worked.  The bank emphasized the benefits – much cheaper payments, less risk, help from each other with training and looking after the animals.  But with a typically Ugandan blend of laughter and deadly seriousness, they said no, it would never work.  A few glanced at the nearby stone monument to the horrendous Atiak massacre of around 300 civilians and abduction of many others by the LRA in 1995.  Mistrust still runs deep here.

Just outside Pabbo, next to a school filled with Christians singing and shaking tambourines to celebrate Martyrs Day, farmers explained to us how much they need these loans.  Omony Jackson, Chairman of the group, already has oxen & an ox-plough.  He has cleared 3 more acres for cotton this year, so he’ll grow 5 acres instead of 2.  He gets very good yields, so in projected revenue (from cotton) that’s $1700 instead of $700, and that’s pretty transformational for his family.

But at this point the bank raised their own concerns.   They won’t include anything but cotton & sesame in their projected revenues; they won’t project a revenue increase of more than 50%; they won’t provide a loan for more than 50% of a farmers’ projected revenue.   Those restrictions, no doubt reinforced by the farmers’ concerns, don’t leave us with very many farmers who qualify.

On Sunday evening I travelled back to Gulu with a headache from the sunshine and my bones rattling from the potholes in the murram road.   I felt pretty defeated.   Shaky land rights, uneven cash-flow, difficulties of working together, and simply low income that relies on the weather – all these things make loaning to smallholders high-risk and complicated.   But we have to sit down together and work out a way, because as Omony Jackson told his group, “this is how we will lift ourselves higher”.

Its really nice to just stumble across a t-shirt company in America that uses cotton grown by the farmers here in Northern Uganda and ginned in our ginnery in Gulu.  

There’s even a video (cheesily narrated) which shows Gulu, inside the ginnery, and also the textile factory in Kampaala that I visited a couple of weeks ago…  

I’m just showing it now to my colleagues - they’re thrilled to be ‘famous’!

http://www.forgottenshirts.com/

A brief plea for help….

I’d like to run some training for my colleagues on some fairly key management things:  work-planning, budgeting, record-keeping, even filing.  The issue is, these things are pretty basic, and to be completely honest kind of boring, so I need to create some training that is a) not patronising, b) at least a little bit fun, and c) very useful.

I feel like this must’ve been done a million times, in similar developing-country SME contexts, so please can someone save me a lot of time and my colleagues a lot of boredom, and send some fantastic resources?  I will be very grateful, and no doubt my colleagues will be too!  

In return I will happily provide a fascinating insider tour of a Ugandan cotton ginnery on whatever date suits you best.

tamsinchislett@gmail.com

Thanks!

ps.  And for a select few of you reading this… this might sound like a brain question, but no a PowerPoint deck full of marimekkos will not do the trick.

Sitting in front of 10 farmers, with an itchy grass-rash spreading up your arms, and a whole lot of mango stuck between your teeth, is not the best time to find out the ginnery’s field network (those who train the smallholder farmers) have made a fairly big mistake.  

Last week my colleague and I visited one of the brand new chili nurseries we’re helping farmers to plant.  There are 35 nurseries in all, enough for 400 acres of red birdseye chili which the ginnery will buy back from farmers in a few months time.

I entertained the women by helping to build the nurseries - carrying five foot long pieces of thin grass, shaking off the tiny bugs that fell out all over my shoulders, spreading it thinly over the bamboo & palm structures that will shade the seedlings, trying not to itch as the grass irritated my skin.

Afterwards as a reward I was given a saucepan full of twenty or so small yellow mangoes to work my way through as we rested under the tree they had fallen from.  Just as all the stringy fibres had got stuck in my teeth, the farmers asked…

“You say you’ll buy the dried chillies for 5,000 shillings a kilo, but is this like cotton, where we hear one price and then you come back offering something lower?” 

I winced.  I don’t know who in our field network had started the 5000 shillings rumour, but this was really bad news.  The trouble is, we don’t know yet what we can sell the chilies for, and given we need to buy & sell at a profit we can’t guarantee a purchase price.  They’re organic, so we know we’ll get a premium, but the price certainly might be lower than 5,000.

Through a mouthful of mango strands, I tried to spread message that the 5,000 was a mistake, that the price will be good & better than they can find elsewhere, but we won’t know until a few months time.  Not an easy message to bring, but far better to be honest now while farmers are deciding what to plant, than later when expectations have been raised.  This time I think we were lucky, and the rumour had not spread far, but as a business, we need to learn to avoid making promises we can’t keep.

Lunchtime on Saturday, at Gulu’s Ethiopian restaurant (actually run by Eritreans, but I guess they don’t quite have the same brand yet), we had an interesting debate on the big-picture issues for Northern Uganda’s economic development. 

It’s fairly obvious that agriculture will be the North’s economic base.  Land is plentiful & fertile, the climate is good with two growing seasons, there are populations in South Sudan and DRC to export to, let alone Uganda’s still growing populace to feed.   But at the moment, not much of the land is being farmed, and of the land that is, I’d estimate at least 95% of it is farmed by smallholders.    

So naturally everyone at lunch - representatives from Danida, aBi Trust, African scholars, and Ugandan locals – agreed that lots more needs to be done to support those smallholders.  Many farmers here have 10 or even 20 acres, but often only 2-3 are cultivated while the rest are overgrown with thick bush.  The farmers need support to clear the land, training in getting high yields, access to affordable inputs, and involvement in stable premium markets.  They need better storage facilities and cheaper transportation options.  Most of all they need to be able to access financial institutions & save & borrow to make the most of every shilling that they earn.

10 acres, and a yield of 500kg/ acre of cotton, at this year’s UGX 1200/kg cotton price would be transformational for farmers here, but it still amounts to a shockingly tiny $2400 in revenue.  Helping smallholders grow is crucial, and I’m proud of the ginnery plans to help thousands of them, but its often discussed as if it’s the only option.  For once, we discussed commercial farming too.

A Ugandan joined us at lunch to tell us about his 1,200 acre (5 square mile) farm about 60km west of Gulu.  He farms just 100 acres of it because he doesn’t have the capital to invest in the rest.  He explained that he’s too scared to use the land as collateral to get a loan from the bank – if the climate ruins one year’s crop, he might lose the farm.  I can understand that, as it’s not like Uganda has social safety nets for people who take those kinds of risks and lose.

But the obvious answer seems to me to get an equity partner in:  lease 50% of the land for 20 years or so to someone who has the money to make it productive and use the lease revenue to farm the remaining 600 acres (and get rich).  The farm-owner responded to that suggestion by stating that culturally it’s ‘not right’, and that his neighbours would cause problems.  He’s referring to the fact that such a willing, able & capitalised partner is more than likely to be ‘foreign’ (which interestingly can often mean a Southern Ugandan, as much as a white person).  While I don’t doubt neighbours can make things difficult, I would’ve thought that the view from his house, across 1,100 acres of vast wasted unused land, would be enough to make this guy think that he could set an example of how this culture needs to change.

It’s easy from afar to romanticise life as a smallholder living off the land.  But in smallholder farming, risks are so high, particularly proportionate to the less-than-spectacular maximum gains.  Most smallholders are ‘entrepreneurs’ by necessity, not by choice.  Of course it’s vital to find ways to give every smallholder the best chance at making the most of their land.  But it’s also important to support the development of commercial farms, which can provide reliable secure jobs, and be competitive in the global markets.   It will take significant capital, and as the Ugandan at the lunch table described, a fairly huge shift in the northern Ugandan culture.   

If you want to buy a cotton t-shirt made entirely in Uganda, farm to coathanger, (I know you do), then Phenix Logistics are your guys.  Today they kindly gave me a grand tour of their factory in Kampala so I finally got to find out how our cotton lint gets turned into school uniforms, amongst other things.  Here’s some pics!

Here’s cotton lint, ready to go.  Phenix receive our cotton in big 190kg bales, wrapped in cotton covers & tied up with metal bale ties.  They break open the bale ties with an axe (really) and break up the lint again by hand, ‘til it looks nice n fluffy like this….

First the lint gets cleaned in about three different machines.  The stuff that gets removed is basically dirty tumble-dryer fluff (its that same weird shade of grey-ish purple too).   Then, the cotton is pulled into straight lines by tiny-teethed combs going round a roller.  The machine pictured below was off, so its hard to tell, but the combs are in the grey rows and they go round the green roller.

The streamlined cotton gets coiled into these big drums.  It’s like giant loopy cooked spaghetti, and the thick airy strands break just as easily….

The machine below is an added extra - it removes the shorter fibres (somehow) to leave only the long ones…which means less weight, but better quality, more expensive cotton.  Some cotton gets this treatment, some doesn’t.

Next the big soft loopy loops are flattened into smaller strands, and twisted at the same time to make them stronger.  Then that process is repeated in another machine, making the strands even smaller.  (In this photo the cotton starts top-left, and gets woven onto the bobbins at the bottom).

At this stage, you have yarn!

Then this crazy machine takes over.  All the yarn is fed in at the top - about 30 pieces at once - and somewhere in the middle it all gets stitched together, and the cotton cloth falls out the bottom!

For blue cotton, head over to the blue dye house (blue overalls is a coincidence I think, although that would be cool).

And finally to the sewing hall, to make some blue school-shirts, crafted from cotton grown on Ugandan farms.

Acumen Fund’s East Africa Fellows visited some of our organic cotton farmers yesterday.  It took a while to get to the village, not least because a truck driver had broken down on a narrow road ahead of us, locked up his truck, and disappeared with the keys.  

We were forced to turn round and take a ‘shortcut’ on a village road through the bush, mowing down a few small bushes on the way in our big rickety bus.  

When we eventually got there, the farmers gave us a very warm welcome, dancing along the path to the bus to greet us.  (A few were very enthusiastic - as a general rule, the later we are to meet farmers, the more of them will have started on the waraji (gin) sachets…).  The children danced, sang and drummed, a brilliant performance which if I remember rightly from last time I saw it means something like ‘Thank you to the government for all you have done….but please can you stop messing around and do lots more essential things’.  (That may have been a non-literal translation). 

Stella translated while the Acumen Fund Fellows introduced themselves, and farmers stepped forward to describe their work with the ginnery.  I was worried to begin with as the first few farmers all said the same thing - “The organic programme has helped me pay for my children’s school fees” - which is hardly enlightening, and sounds like we’ve rolled these farmers out to give the company an ego boost. 

But I needn’t have worried:  eventually a young man stood up with a piece of paper and listed 10 questions he had for the visitors.  It became clear there was a bit of confusion - the questions were really for the cotton ginnery - but I had to smile when he read out a long list of demands and queries on all the topics that were really bothering the farmers.  It’s difficult to write this without sounding patronising, but the fact that a young farmer stands up in front of 100 other farmers & 25 visitors and reads out a pre-organised list of demands is actually brilliant.  I’d take that over a pre-rehearsed ‘the ginnery is great’ comment any day, because open and honest back and forth discussion with farmers is much more valuable, and this way we can try to get to the bottom of what the farmers really need instead of imposing what we think they need.  

It also of course reminded me that there’s lots of work to do - and that things that I de-prioritise because there’s lots going on, are actually day-to-day concerns for farmers.  Definitely motivating to hear the issues straight from farmers’ themselves.

The session closed with another dance and the Fellows joined in, which, judging from the farmers’ smiles & laughter, almost made up for our late-ness.  

Lastly, two photos that I love…  

The first one, of children watching the dance through an ipad screen:

And the second, of the dance following us out all the way to the bus:

Children’s voices and giggles outside my window kept me awake last night, so at 1.30am, I got out of bed to try to work out what was going on.  The electricity was off so I stood in the dark in my kitchen and peered out of my second-floor apartment window hoping noone would notice me there in my pyjamas.

The whole street was blacked out, except for one bright light underneath my balcony.  As I watched, a lady and two young daughters arrived out of the gloom from the right and disappeared under the concrete balcony out of view.  A few minutes later three children appeared from below the balcony and walked, giggling, off into the dark.  In the dim light, I could just make out they were carrying bulky black plastic bags full of…. what?

It was so mysterious.  Had some kids broken in to the internet cafe below my flat and started looting computers?  But the building would be locked, and looting is hardly a family-friendly exercise.  Was someone selling something?  But why in the middle of the night, on an otherwise deserted quiet street?  

Eventually the intrigue got too much and I made Max go to investigate.  The answer, was white ants.  A plague of white ants had clustered around the light - the only light left on in Gulu (battery-powered, in the middle of an electricity outtage) - and for Gulu locals, that means free food if you can catch them!   The ants have huge bodies, and four long thin white-translucent wings.  Pick the wings off, dry the ants in the sun, and fry in oil and salt = delicious crunchy insect popcorn.   (I’ve tried them, I lied about the delicious bit).

Gulu is as welcoming, friendly and sunny as ever, but while I’ve been gone a pretty shocking and disturbing incident happened in one of the rural areas we work in.  

Last month, a team from the ginnery started planting pine trees on a ~300ha remote piece of land north of Gulu.  It’s potentially a great business and an important antidote to Uganda’s rampant deforestation, albeit one that requires 18 years of patience and faith, and a bit of luck in avoiding forest fires. 

A South African manager and many Ugandan employees have been living in a small group of tents on the land.   Last Thursday, around 9pm, the entire group was attacked by local villagers.  The villagers outnumbered the ginnery’s employees, and beat them using weapons including canes and pangas (metal tools). 

I’m relieved to be able to write that no one died, but many were severely injured and brought to hospital in Gulu town.  I can’t imagine how scary it must’ve been, being so far from anywhere, and not knowing how far the attackers would go before they stopped.

Why did they attack?  It’s hard to find rhyme or reason.   It’s both very disconcerting and coldly fascinating to me that the locals retaliated against the pine project despite the logical benefits it would bring them:  employment options, and therefore regular income as well as more people buying locally grown food, better infrastructure such as roads.   All this in a very very remote area, where people are cut-off and destitute.  But when the locals were offered jobs, they weren’t interested.

This wasn’t a case of people’s land being ‘grabbed’; the land was owned and leased solely by the father of the ginnery’s accountant, and before the pine it was empty, with just tall grass growing in the fertile soils. 

The ginnery staff can barely understand it either; when I’ve asked them, they talk about a cultural attitude that attaches more importance to land than anything else – above jobs, security, even food.  And they explained it was also a result of tempers flaring over larger land purchases happening nearby.  Museveni, Uganda’s President, visited a neighbouring area last week to formally announce the handover of 40,000 hectares to the Madhvani’s, an Indian family conglomerate who will build Uganda’s largest sugar cane plantation.

It’s a reminder to me that there are many cultural things I just do not and cannot understand.   Sometimes people act in completely unexpected ways, even when the opposite, rational response seems so blatantly obvious.  At the same time Max reminds me not to credit the attackers with some grand agenda when they are just drunken thugs, and he’s right, Waraji (Ugandan gin) sold in dirt-cheap plastic sachets takes a big share of blame for the attack.

So the ginnery is cancelling the lease and abandoning work on the land.    The team will return their focus to other pine forests they’re planting, in areas where, so far, local communities have welcomed the commercial development of unused land.  And the police are working to track down the attackers and bring them to justice. 

Ps.  Despite the blatant thuggery in this situation, the reaction of locals to land purchases is very topical right now.  As the Guardian reported yesterday, Museveni is on the verge of chucking Oxfam out of Uganda for suggesting he was involved in forced evictions from land in order to sell it to large companies…