EXPERIENCED GUIDES LEAD OUR JOURNEY

While venturing into the field, our group of eleven was always accompanied by several local Opportunity staff members, including the loan officer who was directly responsible for the clients we would visit that day. These additional companions taught us much about the local people and their context.

Monday’s loan officer for instance has been with Opportunity for four years. Prior to that he taught high school. When asked why he made the shift to banking, he said he is still a teacher, only now he teaches adults and loves to see people grow and be transformed.

He has five children of his own, and is personally responsible for 17 Trust Groups which represent 600 borrowers. He meets with three or four groups each day for about 30 minutes when they collect payments and discuss challenges, as well as holding monthly meetings with each group for one to two hours for training.

One of Opportunity’s team who travelled with us several days was John Magnay, who oversees Opportunity’s agriculture program in five African countries. Having lived in Uganda for the last 35 years John was a wealth of knowledge and offered insightful perspectives.

Africa is home to one billion people, of which 60% are directly involved in agriculture, yet they import some $40 billion per year in food. Most of the farms are tiny—many less than one acre—and grow food for their owners, many of whom live on one to two dollars per day. Few have cash crops that they can sell, and hardly any export produce. Obstacles these farmers face include farm size, mechanization, efficiencies, droughts, and poor seed and fertilizer. Another part of the challenge is that there is no farm bill for Africa and no efficient channel to bring their produce to market.

Zimbabwe proved that when it was home to large modern farms it could feed much of southern Africa, consuming only 20% of what they produced. Now with President Mugabe’s confiscation and division of large farms, this breadbasket of the last century is now importing food like all its neighbors.

Part of the answer on a macro level is for African countries to work together in regions, which they don’t currently do. Governments can’t be stable without agricultural policies and food security for its people. These farmers must get beyond simply feeding their own families to producing surplus for sale.

John estimates that most farmers are producing only 40% of what their land is capable of sustaining. In the five countries where Opportunity loans to farmers, the typical farm is only one to four acres. John’s goal for our agriculture borrowers is that they will increase their yield by 2 ½ times. To do this requires training in basic farming skills and practices (e.g. the spacing of seed, the right seed, correct use of fertilizer, etc.), plus access to quality seed and fertilizer. By making loans to the farmers and financing household food security, these farmers will free up part of their land for cash crops.

The other critical service that these farmers need is access to saving. When they receive their entire year’s income in two installments—immediately following two harvests—it is paramount that they have a safe place to save that income so they can live off it throughout the planting and cultivation seasons.

Further, these small farmers need a place to store their produce so they can sell it when prices are at their peak, rather than at harvest when they get the very least for their labor. Panic selling is typical, and if we can offer the farmers a safe place to save, and a place to store their harvest, we will go a long way to helping them become profitable.

These and many other lessons, given while bouncing along in the back of a bus, gave our group the background we needed to fully appreciate what Opportunity is doing and what we were seeing.

—Mark Lutz, Sr. VP, Global Philanthropy