PARTNERSHIP WITH FARMERS, FRoM HollyWood To GoMA
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY
PARTNERSHIP WITH FARMERS, From Hollywood to Goma Eastern Congo Initiative By Emily Chertoff
102
VOL UME 7 • 2014
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY
Can an American movie star’s non-profit organisation partner with local coffee and cocoa producers to help jump start the economy of the eastern DRC? That is exactly what Ben Affleck is trying to do.
I
Images: © ECI
n 2010, actor and director Ben Affleck founded Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI) , a small Non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a big mission: to help a fertile, promising, but warparalysed region get back on its feet. Today, peace looks possible but the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) economy needs a lot of help. Luckily, this tinsel-touched organisation with a humble approach may have the formula for the region’s farmers. “We’re at about 1,600 to 1,500 metres altitude right here. Perfect climate for Arabica coffee, perfect climate for a variety of crops,” says Harper McConnell. McConnell is not casing the climate as a coffee connoisseur, nor is she a buyer for a specialty food maker. She is a programme director ECI and she is speaking on the phone from Goma, a city that a few months ago was under the control of armed rebels. The perfectly situated terrain she is talking about is in the DRC and like most of the country’s farmland, it is underused. US-based ECI is helping the Congolese to grow coffee and cocoa. As agricultural work, it presents some unusual challenges. Talking about a coffee-processing facility, McConnell takes a step back from discussing public-private dialogue to call that particular project – a dry-mill that will prepare Congolese beans for export – an “anomaly”. The foreign company that is funding it, she notes, was until very recently “building a million-dollar investment while the M23 was just 20 kilometres away.” Of all the remarkable elements of this situation, one surely is the organisation that has brought McConnell to Goma. ECI was started by Oscar-winning actor and director Ben Affleck, one of Hollywood’s
best-known actors and filmmakers. Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts but was inspired to get involved in the eastern DRC when he read a footnote in a book about Sudan, which mentioned the war-torn region. Affleck has shown a real commitment to the DRC. In the three years since he co-founded ECI with Whitney Williams, its CEO, the non-profit has worked in a number of sectors, from economic growth to health, to improve the quality of life for people in the region. It also advocates on their behalf in Washington, DC, reflecting the fact that, for DRC, foreign aid is a substantial source of revenue. It received $165 million in humanitarian funding from the US in 2013. Funding the Farmers For an organisation of its small size, ECI is involved in numerous programmes. In addition to managing coffee and cocoa farmers, programme director McConnell also works with a programme that helps female farmers bring produce to market – ECI funds and supports organisations that work with ex-child-soldiers and the mothers of young children. It has con-
ducted a large survey for USAID, the US government’s development arm, and has partnered with Harvard University to produce a report on reintegrating former combatants into their communities. Its ability to work in many different areas comes down to savvy, and sustainable, strategy. Rather than coming in and building programmes from scratch, it partners with existing community-based organisations to help build their capacity,” says Williams. “Our focus is entirely on improving quality and quantity of investment in the Eastern Congo and specifically to invest in Congolese. We believe that Congolese solutions are for the best and are the best, and we know the Congolese can solve their own problems.” The coffee and cocoa efforts exemplify this approach. ECI’s role is to “bring in strategies for really smart and effective investment in agronomy, and some technical assistance,” while getting American executives to “look at [the DRC] as a place of possibility and opportunity.” The non-profit’s coffee programmes offer substantial loans to fund the purchase of specialty equipment, for example to a handful of coffee cooperatives comprised of farmers who work together to process and sell their products. Individual cocoa farmers have received training that has improved the quality of their cocoa for export. Asked whether there are advantages to offering loans over grants, McConnell said: “We want the cooperative to have an investment in the project. It becomes theirs – something that they really believe
Harvesting cocoa pods
www.venturesafrica.com
103
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY Workers sorting coffee beans
in and something that they want – rather than just a project that’s imposed upon them, and they’re going to take it because it’s free.” On this view, one of the advantages of a public-private partnership is that it provides the private owner with a genuine motivation for doing business and a more realistic understanding of what it takes. Both are likely to come in handy as the DRC’s economy recovers. At the same time, ECI loans do allow the farmers to avoid the sometimes-controversial microcredit institutions that can be found throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. “Microfinance institutions offer, for example, two to three percent interest rates per month. That’s a compound annual rate of 25 to 36 percent per year,” McConnell notes. In countries with poor financial infrastructures, these high-rate loans are sometimes the only funding sources small entrepreneurs have access to. “If you’re trying to offer farmers loans over a two-month period that hold them over through the harvest season, that’s fine,” McConnell says. “But if you’re talking about an infrastructure investment for a cooperative, for example a washing sta-
tion [for coffee beans], that’s a minimum $30,000 investment that has to be structured over several years. And so of course [a microloan] is not going to be financially viable [in that case].” As an organisation with a humanitarian mandate, ECI makes a point of partnering with social lenders, exporters, traders, and other stakeholders to offer loans to the coffee cooperatives at reasonable rates. It has helped the Congolese cooperatives to purchase several of these washing stations, which McConnell says are instrumental in producing many types of high-quality coffee. That high quality then makes the Congolese coffee more appealing to buyers in the US. So do the Fair Trade and organic certifications that the ECI has helped the coffee farmers procure. Passing on Knowledge As McConnell talks about ECI’s efforts to raise the quality of more cocoa produced in the Congo (they are currently working on a four-year improvement project with 6,000 farmers, she says) it becomes clear that Congolese agricultural products are not a charity purchase for American companies. And neither is the exotic origin of the cocoa and coffee just a marketing ploy, although some American businesses do advertise input origins and labour certifications to cultivate a reputation for social responsibility. Theo Chocolate, a boutique chocolate manufacturer based in Seattle, partners with ECI to produce
bar chocolate made with cocoa from Congolese cooperatives. The resulting product sells at high-end American grocery stores like Whole Foods for $5 per unit. At that price, quality must be up to scratch, regardless of the story attached to the product’s origins. Luckily, says Williams, when ECI’s partners at Theo came to look at the cocoa they were buying, the crop was a terrific organic crop and there wasn’t a lot of improvement that needed to happen. The issue is scale: getting more farmers producing cocoa at that level. Starbucks executive, Dave Olsen, an ECI board member, mentions receiving samples of the country’s coffee – one from Williams, who brought it back in her suitcase – and brewing them up for Affleck, Williams and other colleagues. “Really terrific coffee is being produced in that geography,” he says, with a “compelling and important” story behind it. He adds, though, that “it hasn’t taken on the form of a reliable-looking source of good quality coffee.” His goal and the goal of ECI is to turn Congo into a “year-in, year-out” supplier. “The challenges more often are around getting the product grown, getting it washed, and exporting it in time to keep the quality,” Williams says. To get more farmers producing export-level cocoa, McConnell talks about expanding available data on the eastern DRC’s farms and training young Congolese to do the same in the future. She cites “a huge household survey” ECI did in one region that has helped it target its efforts. ECI’s partner in the survey was a local university where ECI funds scholarships. Under its auspices the students there have learnt data collection and survey techniques, and been trained in GPS mapping. A focus on knowledge transfer is built into ECI’s operational model. “We don’t have the budget of UN organisations or large international NGOs,” says McConnell. “For the cooperatives we’re working with now, [our goal] is to build their capacity, so that in two or three years they’re fully functioning.” That way, he says, they are able to run with it and the organisation is able to move on and work with other cooperatives. Hand-holding over many years is not part of the plan.
Affleck testifies before the US Congress on the DRC
104
VOL UME 7 • 2014
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY In the longer term, McConnell says, ECI views itself as a “catalyst for investment”. Rather than getting the DRC hooked on infusions of foreign cash – a notorious problem surrounding many UN missions, for example – it is looking to build value chains. Giving private firms real reasons to buy inputs from the DRC is one way to grow the country’s economy in the long term. It is an efficient approach to tackling a big problem for a non-profit without astronomical resources. Bringing in Business But while the quality of some agricultural products may be improving, there are other challenges to farmers in the DRC, most notably the violence that has periodically engulfed this large, central-African nation ever since King Leopold of Belgium colonised its territory in the late 19th century. Agribusinesses suffer much more in this climate of insecurity because they are less accustomed to high-risk, high-security operations than mining firms. One of the biggest challenges a DRC farmer faces, is convincing a company to accept the hassles of buying food products from an unstable country when other options are available. Here, ECI helps to do what McConnell calls “risk mitigation,” sourcing enough funding and enough potential buyers so that the burden of uncertainty is distributed. “Companies know there’s quality coffee here but they’re hesitant because it’s a bit of a volatile climate,” she says. When it comes to convincing US buyers, it no doubt also helps that the founder of ECI is a well-regarded celebrity, respected enough to command face time with top-drawer politicians and executives. Still, ECI is looking for cooperation from Congolese officials. Crispin Baderha, a programme quality manager at ECI, feels that the DRC’s leaders are capable of improving the country’s business environment but adds that these changes will take some time. Corruption and poor management, among other issues, will have to be addressed for that figure to markedly change. Baderha says ECI has run into cases of farmers paying more tax then they owe, including illegal ones that have not officially been levied by the government. “The potential here is enormous and the government recognises that as well,” McConnell says of the country’s small but scrappy agricultural sector. She
notes that currently, only 2 percent of the country’s arable land is being farmed. When it comes to the economy, both government and private businesses could operate more efficiently, but they have to talk before that can happen. At times each side also seems to be feeling its way, something that sustained skills cultivation could fix. As Paul Fagan, ECI’s executive director, says of DRC officials: “You find there are people who really want to do their jobs. They just don’t know how to do it.” A New Era for Businesses in the DRC? The ECI may get still more government involvement in its initiatives if Kinshasa is finally able to shift its focus from fighting rebel groups. That day may be close at hand. In early November 2013, the M23 militia announced that it would lay down its weapons, a move that could finally begin to end the country’s most recent armed conflict. While public opinion in donor countries like the US has been divided over the significance of the move, McConnell and Baderha both say they believe it will help the farmers that ECI serves. McConnell mentions the possibility of ECI expanding its operations: “The region M23 was holding is also a region where coffee grows. In terms of making further investment in North Kivu, that opens up a whole new opportunity with cooperatives and farmers.” Baderha is quick to emphasise that the government must follow up the M23 announcement with smart policy choices. The key, he says, is “a strong and well-implemented security-sector reform,” targeting bad management in the army, the justice system and the country’s police
forces. “A strong programme to integrate or train the demobilised soldiers, whether from M23 or from other armed groups, would be another factor that will ensure sustainable peace in the region.” With greater stability, the DRC may actually wind up receiving more funding from donor countries like the US. As with private businesses, governments like to see results with their investments. Affleck has been notably effective at drawing the attention of US lawmakers to the challenges in the DRC – even testifying in the US Congress. When it comes to keeping Americans – even politicians – informed and aware, a celebrity is an ideal messenger. “He’s been able to cut through a lot of the hurdles that a lot of advocates have trouble with,” acknowledges Fagan. When Affleck and the other ECI board members talk about the situation in the DRC, Baderha says they are not just using information that they get from the media – information that may not be timely or correct – they have talked to the people and seen the region themselves. ECI may have famous founders but for everyone involved, it is all about taking a supporting role. The real stars should be the local farmers who know eastern DRC best.
www.venturesafrica.com
105
PARTNERSHIP WITH FARMERS, From Hollywood to Goma Eastern Congo Initiative By Emily Chertoff
102
VOL UME 7 • 2014
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY
Can an American movie star’s non-profit organisation partner with local coffee and cocoa producers to help jump start the economy of the eastern DRC? That is exactly what Ben Affleck is trying to do.
I
Images: © ECI
n 2010, actor and director Ben Affleck founded Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI) , a small Non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a big mission: to help a fertile, promising, but warparalysed region get back on its feet. Today, peace looks possible but the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) economy needs a lot of help. Luckily, this tinsel-touched organisation with a humble approach may have the formula for the region’s farmers. “We’re at about 1,600 to 1,500 metres altitude right here. Perfect climate for Arabica coffee, perfect climate for a variety of crops,” says Harper McConnell. McConnell is not casing the climate as a coffee connoisseur, nor is she a buyer for a specialty food maker. She is a programme director ECI and she is speaking on the phone from Goma, a city that a few months ago was under the control of armed rebels. The perfectly situated terrain she is talking about is in the DRC and like most of the country’s farmland, it is underused. US-based ECI is helping the Congolese to grow coffee and cocoa. As agricultural work, it presents some unusual challenges. Talking about a coffee-processing facility, McConnell takes a step back from discussing public-private dialogue to call that particular project – a dry-mill that will prepare Congolese beans for export – an “anomaly”. The foreign company that is funding it, she notes, was until very recently “building a million-dollar investment while the M23 was just 20 kilometres away.” Of all the remarkable elements of this situation, one surely is the organisation that has brought McConnell to Goma. ECI was started by Oscar-winning actor and director Ben Affleck, one of Hollywood’s
best-known actors and filmmakers. Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts but was inspired to get involved in the eastern DRC when he read a footnote in a book about Sudan, which mentioned the war-torn region. Affleck has shown a real commitment to the DRC. In the three years since he co-founded ECI with Whitney Williams, its CEO, the non-profit has worked in a number of sectors, from economic growth to health, to improve the quality of life for people in the region. It also advocates on their behalf in Washington, DC, reflecting the fact that, for DRC, foreign aid is a substantial source of revenue. It received $165 million in humanitarian funding from the US in 2013. Funding the Farmers For an organisation of its small size, ECI is involved in numerous programmes. In addition to managing coffee and cocoa farmers, programme director McConnell also works with a programme that helps female farmers bring produce to market – ECI funds and supports organisations that work with ex-child-soldiers and the mothers of young children. It has con-
ducted a large survey for USAID, the US government’s development arm, and has partnered with Harvard University to produce a report on reintegrating former combatants into their communities. Its ability to work in many different areas comes down to savvy, and sustainable, strategy. Rather than coming in and building programmes from scratch, it partners with existing community-based organisations to help build their capacity,” says Williams. “Our focus is entirely on improving quality and quantity of investment in the Eastern Congo and specifically to invest in Congolese. We believe that Congolese solutions are for the best and are the best, and we know the Congolese can solve their own problems.” The coffee and cocoa efforts exemplify this approach. ECI’s role is to “bring in strategies for really smart and effective investment in agronomy, and some technical assistance,” while getting American executives to “look at [the DRC] as a place of possibility and opportunity.” The non-profit’s coffee programmes offer substantial loans to fund the purchase of specialty equipment, for example to a handful of coffee cooperatives comprised of farmers who work together to process and sell their products. Individual cocoa farmers have received training that has improved the quality of their cocoa for export. Asked whether there are advantages to offering loans over grants, McConnell said: “We want the cooperative to have an investment in the project. It becomes theirs – something that they really believe
Harvesting cocoa pods
www.venturesafrica.com
103
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY Workers sorting coffee beans
in and something that they want – rather than just a project that’s imposed upon them, and they’re going to take it because it’s free.” On this view, one of the advantages of a public-private partnership is that it provides the private owner with a genuine motivation for doing business and a more realistic understanding of what it takes. Both are likely to come in handy as the DRC’s economy recovers. At the same time, ECI loans do allow the farmers to avoid the sometimes-controversial microcredit institutions that can be found throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. “Microfinance institutions offer, for example, two to three percent interest rates per month. That’s a compound annual rate of 25 to 36 percent per year,” McConnell notes. In countries with poor financial infrastructures, these high-rate loans are sometimes the only funding sources small entrepreneurs have access to. “If you’re trying to offer farmers loans over a two-month period that hold them over through the harvest season, that’s fine,” McConnell says. “But if you’re talking about an infrastructure investment for a cooperative, for example a washing sta-
tion [for coffee beans], that’s a minimum $30,000 investment that has to be structured over several years. And so of course [a microloan] is not going to be financially viable [in that case].” As an organisation with a humanitarian mandate, ECI makes a point of partnering with social lenders, exporters, traders, and other stakeholders to offer loans to the coffee cooperatives at reasonable rates. It has helped the Congolese cooperatives to purchase several of these washing stations, which McConnell says are instrumental in producing many types of high-quality coffee. That high quality then makes the Congolese coffee more appealing to buyers in the US. So do the Fair Trade and organic certifications that the ECI has helped the coffee farmers procure. Passing on Knowledge As McConnell talks about ECI’s efforts to raise the quality of more cocoa produced in the Congo (they are currently working on a four-year improvement project with 6,000 farmers, she says) it becomes clear that Congolese agricultural products are not a charity purchase for American companies. And neither is the exotic origin of the cocoa and coffee just a marketing ploy, although some American businesses do advertise input origins and labour certifications to cultivate a reputation for social responsibility. Theo Chocolate, a boutique chocolate manufacturer based in Seattle, partners with ECI to produce
bar chocolate made with cocoa from Congolese cooperatives. The resulting product sells at high-end American grocery stores like Whole Foods for $5 per unit. At that price, quality must be up to scratch, regardless of the story attached to the product’s origins. Luckily, says Williams, when ECI’s partners at Theo came to look at the cocoa they were buying, the crop was a terrific organic crop and there wasn’t a lot of improvement that needed to happen. The issue is scale: getting more farmers producing cocoa at that level. Starbucks executive, Dave Olsen, an ECI board member, mentions receiving samples of the country’s coffee – one from Williams, who brought it back in her suitcase – and brewing them up for Affleck, Williams and other colleagues. “Really terrific coffee is being produced in that geography,” he says, with a “compelling and important” story behind it. He adds, though, that “it hasn’t taken on the form of a reliable-looking source of good quality coffee.” His goal and the goal of ECI is to turn Congo into a “year-in, year-out” supplier. “The challenges more often are around getting the product grown, getting it washed, and exporting it in time to keep the quality,” Williams says. To get more farmers producing export-level cocoa, McConnell talks about expanding available data on the eastern DRC’s farms and training young Congolese to do the same in the future. She cites “a huge household survey” ECI did in one region that has helped it target its efforts. ECI’s partner in the survey was a local university where ECI funds scholarships. Under its auspices the students there have learnt data collection and survey techniques, and been trained in GPS mapping. A focus on knowledge transfer is built into ECI’s operational model. “We don’t have the budget of UN organisations or large international NGOs,” says McConnell. “For the cooperatives we’re working with now, [our goal] is to build their capacity, so that in two or three years they’re fully functioning.” That way, he says, they are able to run with it and the organisation is able to move on and work with other cooperatives. Hand-holding over many years is not part of the plan.
Affleck testifies before the US Congress on the DRC
104
VOL UME 7 • 2014
LIFESTYLE & TECHNOLOGY In the longer term, McConnell says, ECI views itself as a “catalyst for investment”. Rather than getting the DRC hooked on infusions of foreign cash – a notorious problem surrounding many UN missions, for example – it is looking to build value chains. Giving private firms real reasons to buy inputs from the DRC is one way to grow the country’s economy in the long term. It is an efficient approach to tackling a big problem for a non-profit without astronomical resources. Bringing in Business But while the quality of some agricultural products may be improving, there are other challenges to farmers in the DRC, most notably the violence that has periodically engulfed this large, central-African nation ever since King Leopold of Belgium colonised its territory in the late 19th century. Agribusinesses suffer much more in this climate of insecurity because they are less accustomed to high-risk, high-security operations than mining firms. One of the biggest challenges a DRC farmer faces, is convincing a company to accept the hassles of buying food products from an unstable country when other options are available. Here, ECI helps to do what McConnell calls “risk mitigation,” sourcing enough funding and enough potential buyers so that the burden of uncertainty is distributed. “Companies know there’s quality coffee here but they’re hesitant because it’s a bit of a volatile climate,” she says. When it comes to convincing US buyers, it no doubt also helps that the founder of ECI is a well-regarded celebrity, respected enough to command face time with top-drawer politicians and executives. Still, ECI is looking for cooperation from Congolese officials. Crispin Baderha, a programme quality manager at ECI, feels that the DRC’s leaders are capable of improving the country’s business environment but adds that these changes will take some time. Corruption and poor management, among other issues, will have to be addressed for that figure to markedly change. Baderha says ECI has run into cases of farmers paying more tax then they owe, including illegal ones that have not officially been levied by the government. “The potential here is enormous and the government recognises that as well,” McConnell says of the country’s small but scrappy agricultural sector. She
notes that currently, only 2 percent of the country’s arable land is being farmed. When it comes to the economy, both government and private businesses could operate more efficiently, but they have to talk before that can happen. At times each side also seems to be feeling its way, something that sustained skills cultivation could fix. As Paul Fagan, ECI’s executive director, says of DRC officials: “You find there are people who really want to do their jobs. They just don’t know how to do it.” A New Era for Businesses in the DRC? The ECI may get still more government involvement in its initiatives if Kinshasa is finally able to shift its focus from fighting rebel groups. That day may be close at hand. In early November 2013, the M23 militia announced that it would lay down its weapons, a move that could finally begin to end the country’s most recent armed conflict. While public opinion in donor countries like the US has been divided over the significance of the move, McConnell and Baderha both say they believe it will help the farmers that ECI serves. McConnell mentions the possibility of ECI expanding its operations: “The region M23 was holding is also a region where coffee grows. In terms of making further investment in North Kivu, that opens up a whole new opportunity with cooperatives and farmers.” Baderha is quick to emphasise that the government must follow up the M23 announcement with smart policy choices. The key, he says, is “a strong and well-implemented security-sector reform,” targeting bad management in the army, the justice system and the country’s police
forces. “A strong programme to integrate or train the demobilised soldiers, whether from M23 or from other armed groups, would be another factor that will ensure sustainable peace in the region.” With greater stability, the DRC may actually wind up receiving more funding from donor countries like the US. As with private businesses, governments like to see results with their investments. Affleck has been notably effective at drawing the attention of US lawmakers to the challenges in the DRC – even testifying in the US Congress. When it comes to keeping Americans – even politicians – informed and aware, a celebrity is an ideal messenger. “He’s been able to cut through a lot of the hurdles that a lot of advocates have trouble with,” acknowledges Fagan. When Affleck and the other ECI board members talk about the situation in the DRC, Baderha says they are not just using information that they get from the media – information that may not be timely or correct – they have talked to the people and seen the region themselves. ECI may have famous founders but for everyone involved, it is all about taking a supporting role. The real stars should be the local farmers who know eastern DRC best.
www.venturesafrica.com
105
