Liberia

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 31, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

On Market Day in Gio Town, Farmers Learn A New Way to Extract Palm Oil

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development

Wednesday is market day in Gio Town, a small village in Liberia’s Grand Bassa County. By mid-morning the stalls are crowded with vendors and shoppers. Sellers offer brightly pattered lapa cloth, sacks of foufou and rice, and piles of red and green peppers and bitter ball. Buyers roam the rows looking for pots and pans, shoes and a staple of the Liberian diet: palm oil.

Today there’s something new at the market. Mercy Corps is holding a demonstration of the Freedom-2 Oil Mill, a hand-powered device that’s used to extract the oil from palm nuts.

Traditionally, women (sometimes with men assisting) crush the nuts using a stout mortar and pestle. It’s backbreaking labour that often leads to painful rheumatism. Moreover, the technique is harmful to the environment, contaminating water sources with plant wastes.

More oil, less work

As part of its USDA-funded Food for Progress programme, Mercy Corps is demonstrating the benefits of the new mill to farmers from the communities it works with. The mill is one of the key “inputs” — such as seeds, tools and fertilizer — the agency is helping farmers procure so they can protect their health, improve the quantity and quality of their crops and lessen damage to the environment.

A representative from the company that manufactures the mill explains how the process works. After the palm nuts are harvested, they’re piled up and left for a few days while the skin loosens. Farmers then remove the hard caps and chop the nuts with a cutlass (machete). The fruit is boiled for five hours until it’s soft, then poured into the mill. A long pole allows up to six people to turn the crank that grinds the fruit into butter. In the final step, the palm butter is boiled to render it into oil.

“The people who have seen this demonstration are eager to purchase a mill,” says Mercy Corps field programme manager Emmett Freeman. “And the first ones to appreciate it are the women who have done most of the hard labour the traditional technique demands. With the mill, they get more oil — for less work.”

The new way is much more efficient. From 30 branches of palm nuts, the mill produces 15 gallons of oil. The same amount of nuts, using the traditional technique, yields only five gallons of oil.

Communities that decide to invest in this palm oil mill contribute 25 percent of the cost (about £150), while Mercy Corps pays 75 percent (about £450). This partnership model, in which a good part of the input cost is subsidized, has proven to be an effective approach because farmers who share the cost of their own equipment tend to use it more, value it more highly and maintain it better. Too, cost-sharing is a more sustainable development model over the long term.

Support for markets

Mercy Corps’ Food for Progress programme, currently underway in the four central Liberian counties of Bong, Grand Bassa, Margibi and Montserrado, uses market-driven activities to re-establish and improve productive agricultural capacity in the aftermath of the country’s 14-year civil war. We’re also working to support agricultural livelihoods, increase access to food in rural areas and boost income-generating opportunities.

Mercy Corps is increasing agricultural productivity through targeted training and technical assistance, and by providing inputs such as the palm oil mill to farmers. We’re helping area markets function more effectively by improving the linkages between buyers and sellers and supporting agribusinesses and micro-enterprises. We’re also improving farmers’ ability to obtain fair prices for their crops by supporting radio news programmes that air practical agricultural information such as market prices and community events.

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 31, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

A Sweet Business: Cocoa Brings New Hope to Liberian Farmers

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development

Liberia is a lush tropical rainforest, just the right climate to grow cocoa beans. And before the country’s two civil wars, it did just that.

Farmers tended cocoa trees and sold the beans for export on the world market. But the long years of conflict decimated Liberia’s cocoa industry. Because they couldn’t farm cocoa for 14 years, a whole generation of cocoa farmers lost the knowledge they once had. What little cocoa they did grow was poor quality, and yields were low.

“The people who used to grow cocoa were killed or displaced during the war,” said Mercy Corps trainer and technical advisor James Kiadii during a visit we made to the cocoa farm in November. “Now there aren’t many people who know how to farm cocoa correctly. The younger generation needs to re-learn what the older generation once knew.”

Mercy Corps has been investing in the revitalisation of Liberia’s cocoa farming industry, with support from our own start-up arm — the Phoenix Fund — as well as the Aspen Institute. We have been working with the Liberia Produce Marketing Corporation to rehabilitate an 80-acre cocoa farm in Grand Bassa County, helping farmers re-establish it as a new business.

Clearing the land

First we hired workers to clear land that became overgrown during the wars, a cash-for-work approach that infused much-needed funds into the local economy. We’re showing farmers — women and men — how to establish and maintain a plant nursery, introducing new varieties of cocoa trees and improved agricultural practices including pest control. With the skills they learn, farmers are growing their own cocoa seedlings so they can rehabilitate their own farms.

The farmers are learning how to inter-plant banana trees between their rows of cocoa seedlings. The bananas provide the shade young cocoa trees need while they’re getting established, as well as a valuable cash crop in the four to five years before the cocoa trees are productive. Once they’re big enough, the banana trees are cut down so the cocoa trees can get the sunlight they need in order to thrive. Mature cocoa trees continue to bear fruit for 25 years.

Higher-quality beans

Cocoa beans are harvested at the end of the rainy season, and post-harvest processing is a critical step. Mercy Corps is showing farmers better methods of fermentation and drying that yield higher-quality beans.

We’re teaching farmers how to build solar drying sheds, using a special kind of plastic sheeting, where the beans dry faster and more thoroughly than they did the old way, simply laid out in the sun. Before the introduction of the solar sheds, residual moisture in the cocoa beans kept farmers from getting top prices for their crops.

Mercy Corps also is working with vendors of tools and seeds to make sure they’re able to provide cocoa farmers with the supplies they need. In some cases, this involves building roads so that both farmers and vendors can get to the rural markets where buying and selling takes place. We’re also teaching the farmers how to get the information they need to obtain a fair price for their crops.

Mercy Corps’ long-term aim is to help the farmers become fully independent members of a smooth-functioning agricultural “value chain” — the entire growing, processing and sales cycle — without outside assistance.

Sharing learning and labour

On our recent visit to Grand Bassa county, we talked the women and men who are participating in our programme. A first group of 25 farmers has already graduated, and a second group of 25 farmers is now underway. These farmers are sharing what they’ve learned with their friends, neighbors and family members to establish new cocoa farms on their own land, traveling to each other’s farms to share labour and put the new techniques into practice.

“If you have 600 seedlings, you cannot plant them all by yourself,” notes Mercy Corps programme coordinator Emmett Freeman. “When the farmers work together, it’s better — and faster.”

Connecting to buyers

While not all the cocoa trees are mature yet, the Mercy Corps programme is already bearing fruit. We have helped the farmers organise into cooperatives that now have access to credit for seedlings, fertilizers and solar plastic. The coop is building a central warehouse to properly store — and preserve the value of — the dried beans. Most importantly, the co-op now connects directly with buyers to negotiate fair prices.

Cocoa exporters, who sell directly to chocolate manufacturers, are now willing to make the long trip over bumpy dirt roads to visit the farm and to grade and purchase the better-quality cocoa. That means farmers no longer have to carry the heavy bags of beans to market to meet with buyers.

And of course, they’re earning more. Before the Mercy Corps training, area cocoa farmers earned £27 per 50-kg bag. Now, they’re receiving £33 per 50-kg bag.

“If the cocoa is not graded, the farmers can be cheated,” says Kiadii. Before these relationships were established, all the beans were considered to be of a single (low) grade.

Looking ahead, Mercy Corps hopes to see Liberian cocoa farmers take the final step and turn their own cocoa beans into the powder that’s used for chocolate manufacture. Keeping the added value of a finished product in-country will provide another much-needed boost to the recovering cocoa industry.

In a country that’s in genuine need of sustainable businesses that create living-wage jobs, developing a complete seed-to-powder cycle will be a sweet finish indeed.

Posted March 17, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

Redefining Success: My Journey to Liberia

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development, Education, Food/Nutrition, Marginalized Groups, Peaceful Change, Women's Empowerment

Glance down a deeply rutted Monrovia side street and you may see, at the end of the block, a glimpse of palm trees, sandy coastline and the rolling ocean. Blink, and you may briefly imagine you’re in Mexico or another beachy getaway. Blink again, and you’ve unmistakably returned to one of the very poorest countries on earth. Because while Liberia has lush tropical rainforests, and fruits like coconut and papaya that suggest easy abundance, life in this West African country is anything but.

Liberia was brutalized by 14 years of conflict, and even now — seven years after the peace agreement and four years after President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first woman elected head of state in Africa — its leaders and people are struggling mightily to meet the most basic needs: food, water, electricity, roads, schools.

Since 2002, Mercy Corps has been helping the hardworking farmers of Liberia increase their harvests and diversify the foods they grow in fields and kitchen gardens. Our agriculture programmes are helping Liberians eat more nutritiously, protect against future scarcity and earn added income by selling surplus crops.

Mercy Corps is also teaching Liberians basic literacy and numeracy, health and hygiene, and how to mediate village disputes. We’re helping women form savings associations so they can start their own businesses. And we’re helping people practice the skills they need to become leaders in their communities.

The Liberian people I met are able and eager to improve their own lives. With just a bit of help, they’re off and running.

Take farmer Jeanette Koleh, 36, who received training and technical assistance from Mercy Corps to improve the quality and quantity of her crops. “We thank you for bringing us these ideas,” says Jeanette. “We used to not have the idea to do it. Now we are planting a mixed crop and we know it can be a business. We are getting money from it, and we are able to send our children to school. We can care for ourselves.”

Or take livestock breeder Victoria Dannies, 33, who learned from Mercy Corps how to raise goats and is now proving her talent in animal husbandry. With the money she’s earning, her two older children can go to school. Says Victoria proudly: “I pay their school fees, I buy their clothes, and I can take them to the hospital if I need to.”

Just listen to Angie Summerville, 30, who is not only learning about gardening, child care and hygiene from Mercy Corps – she’s also sharing her new knowledge. “We did not have enough food,” says Angie, “and I was only able to feed my children once a day. “But then I learned some gardening from Mercy Corps, and now I can feed them three times a day.” Adds Angie: “We are plenty. If one lady learns a new thing, everybody learns it, because we teach it to her.”

Spending time talking to the people we serve in Liberia has made me think differently about what it means to be successful. After hearing villagers sing a song about how “cocoa will make you rich,” I asked one farmer what it means to be rich.

“Rich is having your household fed,” he said firmly. “It’s keeping money in your home, so you don’t have to live off another person. It’s when people can come to you for some little thing – some cocoa seeds, a chicken – and you are able to give it to them. It’s being able to take your kids to the clinic, to buy them medicine if they are sick. It’s when people come and want to work for you, and you can afford to hire them, so they can feed themselves. That is rich.”

I invite you to meet a few of the resilient and capable people I met during my travels in Liberia.

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 17, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

Changing Her Life With Goats

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development, Education, Rural, Women's Empowerment

Victoria Dannies, 33, is divorced, with three daughters and two sons. Thanks to the training she received in Mercy Corps’ Youth Education for Life Skills (YES) programme, she’s able to take good care of herself and her children.

Victoria learned how to raise goats, and she now breeds and raises them to sell at market. “Mercy Corps taught me how to care for them,” says Victoria, holding a healthy-looking kid on her lap. “I go into the bush and break off the cassava leaves and husks and bring them back to feed the goats. And,” she adds, “I learned how to cure them when they get the cough or the running stomach. I get the antibiotic and put it in their water, and they drink it and get better.”

Victoria keeps one male and a few females to breed. She raises the offspring for a year before selling them for meat; a mid-sized goat brings more than £1,200 LD [£18 to £24 US] – a fortune by local standards. Her little herd is thriving; when we spoke with Victoria, she had six pregnant females, each of which will give birth to two kids. After a year, Victoria will have 12 goats to sell.

With the money she’s earning, Victoria is providing for her family. “I have two children who are big enough to walk the 45 minutes to school,” she says, adding proudly, “I pay their school fees, I buy their clothes, and I can take them to the hospital if I need to.”

“This Mercy Corps programme is good,” says Victoria. “I tell them thank you.” With a little boost and her own hard work, she (and her kids) are growing a solid future for her children.

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 17, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

From War Survivor to Community Leader

Country: Liberia

Topics: Citizen Involvement, Conflict & War, Education, Peaceful Change, Women's Empowerment

Ellen Joe is 36 and divorced, with two daughters and two sons. She’s the chairwoman of the Gbarpaywhea Community Development Committee, which oversees the village peace, education, agriculture and health working groups.

Ellen is a survivor, and today has assumed a position of leadership in her community. She has come a long way. Her experiences during Liberia’s long war years were, to say the least, harrowing.

When war broke out on December 24, 1990, Ellen was married, with one baby daughter. In the chaos, she was separated her from her husband. She fled Grand Bassa County on foot with her child on her back, covering 500 kilometers in about two weeks to make her way to the far north of neighboring Nimba County.

“I did not know anybody there,” Ellen says in the whispery voice she slides into when remembering the years of her suffering. “I was just looking for safety.”

Ellen traveled with her sister, who also carried her baby on her back. “The rebels took her baby and killed it,” she recounts, her eyes gone somber and flat with the memory. “While we were escaping, one of my friends was captured and raped by five soldiers.” Ellen herself was beaten and tortured. At one point the rebels strung her up from the rafters of a hut’s kitchen area and lit a fire underneath her. Somehow, she survived these horrors.

“We did not have food to eat,” she continues. “We were beggars in a strange land.” To survive, Ellen became a “bush wife,” trading sex for food – and life. “I was forced to,” she says in the same monotone, eyes cast down as if to avoid replaying the images in her head. The soldier held her for two years. Ellen is thankful that no children resulted from that time.

“After the war,” she relates, “I left the soldier. I had to find my husband.” The two were reunited, and they had three more children. But the marriage didn’t last, and now Ellen is on her own. “I have no support,” she says.

With all the pain and sadness she has endured, Ellen is clear about what needs to come next. “I wish I had enough money to send my children to school,” she says. “Then I could forget the past and have some joy.”

Ellen has taken advantage of peace-building activities, training and resources offered by Mercy Corps in Gbarpaywhea, and has learned the skills to become a leader in her community. Her village is slowly rebuilding – a process to which she is making positive contributions. Ellen is one of many, many Liberian women who are trying hard to put the long war years behind them and build a better life for their children.

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 17, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

Tiny and Tough

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development, Education, Rural, Women's Empowerment

Annie Garfree is 42, with five daughters and one son. She’s soft-spoken, with smart eyes and a steely determination.

Four days a week, Annie works on her farm, growing bananas, rice, yams and cassava. She makes foufou, a thick porridge, from the cassava, and her family eats oranges and guavas that grow wild. Still, it’s not enough. “It is hard to feed all the children,” she admits. “We do not have sufficient food. When I make more money, I will spend it on food for my family first.”

The other days Annie works on the cocoa farm, located a short walk from her land. She has finished her Mercy Corps training and received her first batch of cocoa seedlings.

Before she could plant them, however, she had to clear the land that became overgrown when no one tended it during the war years. “I used the machete to cut the brush so the cocoa trees can grow,” she says. Annie is tiny – perhaps five feet tall – but she’s lean and strong. “Chopping down the forest is hard work,” she says simply. “Then you have to dig out the roots.” She was paid for her labour, through Mercy Corps’ cash-for-work initiative, which infuses much-needed money into local economies.

In addition to earning money, clearing her land, receiving seedlings, and learning how to plant and care for them, Annie is gaining new strength from her community. “Mercy Corps taught us about unity, about working in groups,” she says. “We can go faster together. I used to work on my own – but now a group of women and men come to my farm to help me.”

Today there’s a light in Annie’s eyes – and when she talks about education, they positively sparkle. Three of her children are in school, and she will send the other three as soon as she can afford it.

“At first, I did not have any hope,” she says, speaking of the hard years after Liberia’s long war, “because with the unemployment rate so high, the little we have cannot keep us up. But Mercy Corps opened the way. The only hope we have now is the cocoa. Cocoa has money in it, to keep the family up. Through my cocoa farming, I can earn more. And in the future, I will be able to pay my children’s school tuition.”

Liberia: Growing Leaders:

Posted March 17, 2010 by Bija Gutoff

Dish Racks Lead to Healthier Children

Country: Liberia

Topics: Agriculture, Economic Development, Education, Food/Nutrition, Peaceful Change, Rural, Water/Sanitation, Women's Empowerment

Of the 12 children that 50-year-old Annie Dolo gave birth to, seven are living. The other five died of malaria and measles. Annie has had a hard life, but she has learned useful skills in the past couple of years, thanks to Mercy Corps’ Community Peacebuilding and Development (CPBD) programme, that are making life better for her and her family.

“I give thanks,” says Annie, “because through the opportunities of Mercy Corps I learned a lot of good things.” One of her classes was in hygiene. Annie learned about the importance of hand-washing before eating. “Before, when the children came in from the latrine, or from playing in the sand, they did not wash their hands. They would start eating. Then they would get the running stomach. As a result, they were malnourished. And many of them became swollen and died. This is one of the causes for children to die.”

Annie continues, “The dog and the chickens used to play in the cooking utensils [lying on the ground]. Then Mercy Corps taught us to build dish racks.” Now she can keep her dishes clean — and her children healthy.

“I was not privileged to go to school when I was small,” says Annie. “And I never thought how to take good care of food. Now I have learned how to save our children from malnutrition. We have a latrine, we are washing our hands, and we are not experiencing the running stomach.”

Annie is also helping to feed her family. “Through 14 years of civil war, we sold vegetables to support ourselves.” Now, as many men cannot find work, women like Annie are often breadwinners for the home. “I want to see development and investment come to our country, so my husband can be employed and help support our family,” she says. Meanwhile, Annie grows corn, peppers and the local vegetable called bitter ball so she can send some of her children to school. She wishes all of them could go, but her “money is small.” It costs about £43 to send a village child to school for a year.

Annie knows education is the key to a better future. She herself is studying her letters, and recently learned to write her name. It’s an accomplishment of which she is enormously proud.

“I don’t want my children to be blind,” Annie says firmly. “To not know how to read and write is blind. If I am blind, I cannot do anything. My child cannot do anything. I can see it [the paper] but I don’t know it [what the words mean]. If they don’t know how to read, they don’t know how to see.”