In May 2022, volunteer Daniel Lavin was Winrock’s first volunteer to travel from the US to West Africa for the Farmer-to-Farmer program in over 2 years. Dan traveled to Senegal to assist the Fass Jom Association in Financial Farm Management. He, along with country staff, trained a group of mostly women on managing their farming practices so they could take part in the development of their community and improve living conditions. Fass Jom Association’s goal is to establish a modern micro-enterprise capable of generating sufficient income and creating sustainable and economically profitable activities for its members.

Why did you want to volunteer?

For the last few decades, my focus has been on my children and my work.  My kids have moved on and my work requires much less time.  I continually recall memories of my service in the Peace Corps and wished there was a way to get involved with international development.  When I learned about Farmer-to-Farmer and specifically saw that their mission was to teach, I knew I had to get involved.  I’ve been working independently in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Kenya, but hoped to find organizations that had greater reach to other countries and connections to communities seeking to empower themselves.  In the United States, even big “efforts” seem to have little effect.  When serving with Farmer 2 Farmer, even small “efforts” seem to have a big effect.   The appreciation from the host organizations, from the in-country staff, and from all those I come in contact with feeds the soul.

What was the highlight of being back in the field?

One big highlight from my experience in Senegal was a response from one of the students, a Muslim woman who surprised even herself.  Our focus was on teaching financial literacy, giving the students a chance to learn how to analyze business concepts and make educated decisions to improve profitability.  This woman returned to the training with a “spring in her step,” anxious to update the others.  She had returned home to educate her husband on the concepts of tracking revenue, identifying labor and material costs, comparing financial models, and creating a budget.  Even though he ran the family business, they both realized that her new skills would serve them both and help improve their financial situation.  It wasn’t our aim to create a cultural “shift,” but the result was amazing.  The other students applauded with delight.

What advice would you give a new volunteer?

The most important skills you can bring are flexibility, respect, creativity, and humility.  The more you can encourage active participation, questions instead of answers, and the willingness to “pivot,” the more likely you are to achieve success. Don’t try and solve all problems prior to your arrival; you really need to see the issues in context and listen to the host prior to making even the most basic suggestions.

How do you feel that your volunteer assignment has contributed to creating a shared understanding across different cultures through person-to-person interactions?

As I grow older, I realize how little I know, but I maintain the willingness to learn.  I believe I contribute to a shared understanding from culture to culture by having everyone become a student and a teacher.  We all have something to share, and a lot to learn.

What, if anything, has surprised you on your assignments?

The world has become very small.  In 1988 it took me 54 hours to travel to Sierra Leone.  Letters took three months to arrive, and phone calls were reserved for emergencies.  World events meant little unless you were able to hear a faint BBC broadcast.  Now, travel takes half the time.  Emails are instantaneous, pictures and videos can be shared in real-time, and news reaches even the most remote villages.  This new reality allows me to participate in amazing communities, and share events with friends and family all over the world.  When the assignment ended, friendships built are maintained.

How does your experience affect your worldview?

Americans often think that development means “how do we make the world more like us?”  That is NOT my worldview.  Everyone lives with different challenges, unique cultural approaches, and solutions that make the world interesting.  I feel fortunate that I get to witness such differences, and then share these experiences.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps, and 59 years later we take this week to celebrate all the ways Peace Corps has made a difference at home and abroad.  Since 1961, more than 240,000 Americans have served our country and the global community as Peace Corps Volunteers, living and working alongside local leaders to catalyze change. Under USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer Program, Winrock has partnered with the National Peace Corps Association to tap into this network of Peace Corps alums in order to field highly skilled and experienced volunteers to West Africa. In addition, Winrock has also created connections with the Peace Corps in Guinea and Senegal to facilitate training and technical assistance. Peace Corps Volunteers and their counterparts are then able to bring the knowledge and skills they learn back to their communities, increasing the spread and impact of Farmer-to-Farmer Volunteers. In honor of Peace Corps Week, we thank all volunteers, past and present, each time you give your expertise and time you help build the future! 

“We females eat what is left.” That was just one of the many tough issues discussed on ways to reduce malnutrition during the first Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) partnership assignment between Winrock and the Peace Corps/Guinea. By all accounts, this strategy of F2F volunteers working with Peace Corps Volunteers and their volunteer counterparts in a practical skills workshop was a success.

The objective of the trip, titled Training of Trainers (TOT) in Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture and Behavior Change, required integration between multiple disciplines. The assignment challenged me to put the experience I had gained on linking agricultural resources to solving nutritional problems for the past 40 years.  The undertaking necessitated using an approach which would be a dance between the art of communication and the science of agriculture, food and nutrition.

My main task was to facilitate a TOT workshop with Peace Corps Volunteers and local volunteer counterparts from their community on how to use behavioral change communications (BCC) to help households make their agricultural investments more nutrition-sensitive (NSA) as well as more specific in order to close their identified dietary gaps.

The challenge I faced was clear in the preparation stage. Unlike some other African countries, there is little written about Guinea, especially its agriculture and nutrition situation, and this made designing a quality program even more tricky as the trainees were not experienced outreach professionals in either agriculture, nutrition or behavioral change communications.  Moreover, for most of the local participants, this was their very first experience attending a workshop so far from home. These many challenges resulted in multiple emails with draft documents going back and forth between me and the Peace Corps staff (host) as well as with Winrock/ Guinea staff.

After arriving in Guinea and holding initial briefings with F2F Winrock and Peace Corps management staff in Conakry, I proceeded with 12 people in a single-vehicle for 125 miles — an 8-hour drive — to Mamou. The road, if one could call it that, was certainly one for the record books. I nicknamed it the “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” road adventure.

The venue for the workshop was Guinea’s forestry center, Ecole Nationale des Agents Techniques des Eaux et Forets (ENATEF), just outside of Mamou City. The site was wonderful as the center was surrounded by forest with all its diverse vegetation and sounds. Its magnificent diversity served as a living laboratory for the practicum exercises.

One of the big workshop communication challenges faced right off the bat was the need to work in five languages at the same time: English, French, Malinke, Pulaar and Soussou.  Fortunately, we had with us Peace Corps staff who spoke at least one of the three local languages. Having worked in similar multiple language situations throughout my career, the workshop was designed from the start to have lots of small group work so that the participants could carry on in their language group, thus reducing the time needed for multiple translations.

Since the term “Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture” is still evolving within the global community of practice, the group decided to operationalize NSA according to their local situation. They essentially agreed that it meant practical actions that could be taken throughout a crop’s cycle to enhance and or preserve the nutrient quality of that crop.

As the workshop took shape, a distinct trend was emerging.  Some Peace Corps Volunteers were keen to learn about the technical aspects of growing certain crops, especially the ones they were introducing to their community as part of their 2-year assignment: orange-fleshed sweet potato and moringa, while their Guinean counterparts seemed more interested in exploring effective way to communicate specific behavioral changes that need to be made so that home food systems are nutrient- and nutrition-sensitive.

It became clear that while technical improvements and solutions were identified by the group for improving crop production and post-production as well as dietary intake issues, culture seems to trump every technical subject — hence the importance of identifying strategic BCC messages for each issue.

Through group discussions, a few Peace Corps Volunteers began to understand that in order to have a few “quick wins” and build credibility with their community during their two-year assignment, they should look at ways to enhance post-harvest through improvements in existing practices. Their emphasis on the introduction and acceptance of new crops by subsistence households, while important, takes longer than their assignment time.

There were four key themes that came up continuously:

• Start with what households were doing right with their food system. The good news is that households already grow a wide variety of crops consisting of a large diversity of calorie- and nutrient-dense crops and their main meal is complete as it consists of a starch (usually rice) with a sauce (oil, legume and a dark green leafy vegetable). One of the key challenges mentioned by the participants was not so much technical issues but their cultural traditions around who eats what and in what order.
• Identify gaps in their cropping system, usually more vegetable protein (peas, beans, legumes) and in their household meals, especially for the most at risk nutritionally (mothers and young children)
• Identify local solutions based on existing knowledge, skills and resources. If it is not available at the local market, forget it as a “solution.”
• Identify a range of locally acceptable behavioral change methods that a household can do with minimal disruption to their existing food consumption pattern.

By the end of the five-day exercise, the workshop participants had designed their own location-specific illustrated communication materials for use with their community as well as a clear roadmap of activities for closing dietary gaps from existing crops. Clearly, they valued the experiential learning approach and could see that their malnutrition issues were solvable by tweaking the use of the resources they have now.

A bonus from the training was the Peace Corps staff indicated that their own capacity had been built as a result of this exercise, especially regarding behavioral change messaging. One long term outcome of this assignment is that the Peace Corps staff will be presenting this NSA/BCC workshop to its Peace Corps Volunteers going forward.

In sum, it was my pleasure to work with this group of volunteers who live in hardship conditions and yet showed so much dedicated to finding solutions together.

To read about a Peace Corps Volunteers experience you can go here:

https://winrock.org/volunteer_blog/voices-from-the-field/

Greetings from our Farmer-to-Farmer team here in the USA! Our U.S.-based team is incredibly grateful for our dedicated country staff, skilled volunteers and welcoming program hosts across the globe, without whom our work providing solutions for some of the world’s most complex social, agricultural, and environmental issues would not be possible. Enjoy this account of an international team coming together, along with country hosts, to continue our path forward in achieving our mission. Thank you! 

In November 2019, Winrock International organized a Farmer-to-Farmer Regional Meeting to reflect on the past year of implementation and plan for the upcoming year. This meeting, which took place in Senegal, marked my first time traveling to West Africa, and the greater African continent. The opportunity to participate in this meeting came because I work alongside colleagues in both our West African offices as well as our stateside offices in planning for, recruiting, and mobilizing U.S. volunteers to bring technical assistance to projects across West Africa through the USAID Farmer-to-Farmer Program. Though I have been working on the project since January, this marked my first opportunity to begin meeting our country staff who work on the project.

In Senegal, we were joined by our entire Senegal team, as well as all our country directors from Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Nigeria. As we came together to discuss successes, challenges, and plans for the coming year, we shared laughter, meals, and more about ourselves with each other. As we discussed the program, the key themes for working together were flexibility, communication, and partnership. While this project is international, the same themes that make work successful on a local scale are also the keys to working with an international team. Having extensive time face to face with the country staff made all the difference in helping to more clearly understand their daily context on the ground in the countries we are working in. It also helped to build relationships with my colleagues – as being face to face for a week provides opportunities weekly or biweekly meetings by phone or video do not. Our week together in Senegal was full of learning – both in sessions in a meeting room and in field visits with hosts we have and continue to work with. In our meetings together we had sessions led by each of us that ranged from growing local partnerships to increasing our recruitment of experts as volunteers. During our field visits, we learned how our host organizations have grown and adapted their work as a result of volunteer assignments and recommendations and learned about continuing needs to be addressed by future volunteers. We visited several vocational training centers in Guinea that utilize our volunteers to train their staff and students, but more widely to increase technical knowledge and skills for their communities as a whole.

Following my time in Senegal, I traveled to Guinea with my colleague from the National Peace Corps Association, a sub-awardee under Winrock’s Farmer-to-Farmer project, and we spent 4 days with the Guinea office planning for the year, building relationships, and visiting hosts. Returning home and reflecting on my time in West Africa I am grateful for the hospitality of our country staff in both Senegal and Guinea, as well as our hosts who we visited in both countries. I am grateful to have better relationships with country staff, as well as more context for on the ground logistics in West Africa, which will help me to be a better recruiter and mobilizer for U.S. volunteers to assist with projects across West Africa as part of the program. I am excited for what the year ahead holds.

On Tuesday, October 22, 2019, two USAID representatives, Erin Baize and Kevin Fath, accompanied me on a visit to the Katibougou Farmers’ Cooperative (BFC). We met with the cooperative’s president, Mr. Amadou Diaby and four of their members (3 women and 1 man). The cooperative president took us on a tour of his farm and then conducted a briefing on the cooperative’s activities, achievements, constraints, and perspectives for growth. During the briefing, he told us that his first encounter with the USAID-funded Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) program was when a farmer that he met in the market of a nearby village told him about the program. The farmer gave him a contact number to call the F2F country director to request for technical assistance. Shortly after, in September 2010, the cooperative received its first F2F volunteer, who trained them on organizational capacity building. Subsequently, the cooperative members received training from both Mali Agricultural Value Enhancement Network (MAVEN) F2F project and Common Pastures’ Sustaining Flocks, Farms, and Families project (F3P) F2F programs:

1. Improving Small Ruminant Herd Management Through Appropriate Bookkeeping with Women’s Cooperative “Sigi Tè Mogo Son” of Katibougou in September 2011
2. Improved Small Ruminant Health & Management in Koulikoro – Use of Solar Stove to Reduce Deforestation in June 2015
3. Improved Small Ruminant Nutrition through Local Forage Trees
4. Facilitate the Intercropping of Legume Forage Trees on Small Farms and Establishment of a Demonstration Site in April 2015

The cooperative president explained that before F2F support, he was farming dwarf goats and his herd was a total of 25, including 20 females. He was milking his animals twice a day and could only collect 3 liters of milk per day, just enough for his family’s consumption. Thanks to a program donation, in 2017 the cooperative received one improved breed Sahelian buck and was trained on animal reproduction and crossbreeding. Today, all the cooperative members are rearing goats that have at least one offspring from the improved goat.  In addition, Mr. Diaby sold or gave away for free 50 improved offspring to neighboring farmers. It should be noted that Common Pastures F3P provided the cooperative with equipment including community pharmacy of veterinary drugs and supplies, precision balance, Burdizzo Castration Device, hooves pliers, laminated tables of eye score (FAMACHA), body condition scoring tool, and 500 plants of forage trees of three species including Leucaena, Gliricidia and Moringa.

Mr. Diaby confirmed that he is illiterate and therefore to earn his living he relies on agricultural activities, especially goat farming because of its rapid growth, easy farming, and quick marketability. By attending F2F training and applying techniques learned, Mr. Diaby has had the following improvements and successes:

1. To date, he hasn’t any dwarf goats in his herd and thanks to the breeding program, his goats’ milk yield increased from 3 liters per day to 8-10 liters; that means he is able to sell 5-7 liters of milk at approximately $1.40 per liter. That is an income of  $7 per day or $210 per month;
2. There is a lot of demands for the improved goat he can’t yet fully meet. From 25 goats, his herd increased to more than 100 goats; and from $20 per head for adult goat, he is selling a newborn at $20 and for more when they are grown;
3. Before cooperative members did not provide colostrum to newborns and now they are early fed with it and kids death decreased significantly;
4. As prevention is better than cure, all the cooperative members are assessing their herd daily in order to take care of the little concerns are able to then call for the veterinarian for the bigger concerns;
5. The best improvement from this year is that he has been able to separate the males and females and synchronize the crossbreeding. His latest group of 54 newborns (26 males and 28 females) are all a month old and can be reared easily; and
6. Lastly, he is not primarily farming goats for meat, but instead producing and selling improved goats for crossbreeding. When selling his improved goats to farmers, he always takes the time to provide advice on best practices of care and growth. Sometimes he even visits the customer on his/her farm to motivate them further towards progress.

He also said, “My vision for the future is to convert my improved goat production into a real business by fencing my farm, enlarging my well for more water, continuing to improve my breeding, synchronizing births, building a larger shelter for goats to prevent hoof diseases and collecting manure for my crop field. Of course, I will also continue learning from F2F volunteers, other partners and farmers as knowledge doesn’t have an end.”

F2F training is still in demand. During the meeting, the women cooperative members asked for training for poultry farming and vegetable growing.

At the end of the meeting, Kevin asked Mr. Diaby if he tracked newborn deaths. Mr. Diaby responded, “With certainty. Before this [newborn death] was a major issue but I found the solution of early vaccination of newborns even a day old in addition to good feeding and close assessment helps prevent this; I remember the volunteer Scott Haskell recommendation: Stop – Look – Listen.”

After expressing their sincere thanks to cooperative members for their availability, Erin, Kevin, and I  went back to Katibougou Village where we shared and enjoyed a lunch consisting of “Tô” a cooked local millet in hard pasta and okra sauce. It was very nice to share a meal and these experiences with our USAID colleagues and enjoyed hosting Erin in Mali.

For about 5 years, the USAID Value Chains for Rural Development (VC-RD) project, implemented by Winrock International, has been supporting the melon value chain in Myanmar along with grantee Myanmar Fruit, Flower, and Vegetable Producer and Exporter Association (MFVP). In 2016 and 2017, VC-RD and MFVP hosted various melon production volunteers, including Dr. Timothy Coolong, to assess the melon value chain and train melon farmers. These volunteers found significant issues affecting the melon value chain: Bacteria Fruit Blotch (BFB) disease and high postharvest losses at the packaging and handling stage.

MFVP decided that exposure to best practices from US farmers would be beneficial for Myanmar farmers. In October 2017, MFVP members and avocado farmers successfully learned from California avocado producers and decided to replicate that fruitful experience for melon farmers by organizing the Myanmar Melon Mission to the US. To get advice on how to proceed, Winrock staff contacted Dr. Tim Coolong, past volunteer and Associate Professor at the University of Georgia-Extension. Dr. Coolong kindly offered to help plan and reach out to his contacts in the US melon industry. Southern Georgia was selected as the primary visit site since this region is the largest producer of watermelons in the US. The visit was planned for mid-June, as this is the prime watermelon harvesting and shipping season, in advance of the July 4^th holiday when US watermelon consumption is at its highest.

Ten representatives participated in the Myanmar Melon Mission to the US. The group included MFVP’s General Secretary, six members of the Myanmar Melon Producer and Exporter Association, two members of the Myanmar Fruit Commodity Center, and one VC-RD staff. The main objectives of the trip were to observe best practices implemented by US melon farmers, from farm to market, highlighting pest and disease control and packaging at the farm level.

Given the participation of members of the Myanmar Melon Producer and Exporter Association, the group was also interested in learning about the role of a producer association. On the first day of the tour, the group visited the National Watermelon Promotion Board. Representatives of the Board presented their organization’s history and structure for the sustainability of the watermelon industry in the US. The group met with the Board’s Communications and Marketing Director and learned about marketing and the importance of increasing consumer demand for watermelon through promotion, research, and educational programs.

The following days were dedicated to field visits to learn about production, shipping, and disease control of melons. The group met with several nationally recognized family farms such as Border Melons East and Lewis Taylor Farms. The group observed the best examples of farm to packaging in Southern Georgia. Their stringent adherence to Food and Drug Administration safety measures was an excellent example to showcase to the Myanmar melon producers.

The group also visited the University of Georgia-Tifton campus. Dr. Bhabesh Dutta, Assistant Professor, and Extension Vegetable Disease Specialist gave a lecture on melon diseases. Dr. Dutta pointed out how critical it is to remain diligent in the pursuit of disease control for all melons grown and shipped.

Two Myanmar melon farmers with the watermelon queen in Georgia

The group concluded their Georgia visit with a trip to the Watermelon Festival in Cordele. Here they were introduced to a traditional, Americana small-town celebration in all its glory! They were treated to live music, a watermelon eating contest, arts and crafts, local food, and free watermelon! They met the festival’s Watermelon Queen and saw hot air balloons and antique cars. Before departing the US, the group will also attend the California Watermelon Festival.

The Myanmar melon group at the University of Georgia

Mr. Zaw Min, Chairman of Financing of the Myanmar Melon Producer and Exporters Association, felt the examples of packaging and shipping would greatly benefit the group when they returned home to Myanmar. The group noted that they learned a lot and are excited to return to Myanmar and begin implementing those practices and disseminating them to their peers.

The Myanmar Melon Mission would not have been possible without Dr. Tim Coolong’s support with planning. Thank you!