What you can leave behind

It’s 10 days until my last day of work with MTZ before I start to do some travelling and thoughts have been largely occupied by what I can leave behind.

Whilst presenting to farmers two weeks ago I realised that while it’s a great experience, presenting to the farmers of Eastern province once or twice probably won’t have much of a lasting effect when it comes to taking the project forward in the future. This is one of the bigger criticisms of outside intervention for development in Zambia and in Africa – that well meaning people come, do the job and then leave a big vacuum when they go home. Cue one of my least favourite phrases, “Capacity Building” (second only to “Sensitization”, which is apparently what I’ve been doing to farmers in the East.)

Quite a lot’s happened in 8 weeks.

We have 10 retailers signed up to offering farmers some sort of discount for vouchers, including the Zambian Educational Publishing House, who see this as an opportunity to improve educational attainment in rural areas where spending on school materials has traditionally been much lower than in Lusaka. We might have had more - one small agro-retailer’s wife felt that we were Satanists. There’s no way back from there really.

We have 10,000 marketing flyers ready to farmers to advertise this and a number of retailers, cotton buyers and farmers are familiar with the idea.

With some luck and even more enthusiasm, people might even accept some vouchers. One farmer told us he would like to sell us an ox for some.

Now I’m actively trying to do as little as possible independently. It feels a bit odd, but I don’t want phone calls from irate shopkeepers when I’m watching leopards in South Luangwa. And more importantly, the staff who come from Eastern province and the staff I’ve been working with here have a better grasp of what’s needed anyway.

So it’s not me designing next week’s training programme and it probably won’t be me who gets on the bus to Chipata next to rustle up some more interest and help with a radio advert. If it works out I won’t be able to take credit for any of that.