Michael Roberts is Country Director of IDE Cambodia. In May 2010, IDE Cambodia was awarded the first Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value for its innovative Farm Business Advisor (FBA) project, which aims to improve the living standards of the country’s rural population by increasing agricultural productivity and income. Here, he explains some of the ideas and background behind it…

Agriculture in Cambodia is at a very basic level with some of the lowest yields in the region. Consequently even very simple improvements in the quality of inputs or cultivation practices can have a big impact on productivity. Since the mid-1990s, we have been working to help Cambodian farmers increase their incomes. We began by introducing small-plot irrigation devices like foot powered treadle pumps and low-cost drip irrigation systems.

Incomes improved but even when their water constraint was solved, farmers would quickly run into another wall, which would limit profit. We spent a lot of time listening to them and found that to get the maximum benefit from better water control they needed to be able to access a more integrated package of agricultural inputs and advice.

Originally, we used our staff to deliver these services but then we realised that if a few inputs and a little advice could create significant value for small farmers then there must be a viable business in there somewhere. In 2005, we began to train and support a network of small rural entrepreneurs to become Farm Business Advisors (FBAs), selling a range of products and services to help small-scale farmers improve their farming techniques and income.

The surveys we have conducted with FBA clients demonstrate that on average, their income has increased by about USD 150 per year. This is a significant change in areas where cash income in an average household is only about USD 30 per month. The average monthly income for an FBA is currently about USD 60. This has been increasing month by month but is still too low given the amount of work they do. For now, most FBAs are content with this because of the high value that they place on the training that they receive. In the long-term, we estimate that FBAs will be able to make more than USD 200 per month as their client base, range of products, and experience grows.

IDE differs from the traditional NGO model in that we take a market-based approach to all of our projects. We treat people as customers, not beneficiaries. This simple change in perspective has profound implications on how we work. If I have to convince someone to purchase something, then my success is absolutely dependent on listening to them, understanding them, and responding to their highest priority needs.

This also means that we don’t provide direct subsidies to our customers. If we have done a good job of listening to their needs (including that for affordability) then even very poor people will be able to purchase items that improve their well being.

The Nestlé CSV Prize will help us to expand the current project, adding an additional 36 FBAs toward our ultimate goal of more than 500. We will also be leveraging the Prize to attract additional funding from several donor agencies that are planning substantial investment in the agriculture sector in over the next several years.

Once the project reaches the scale of 500+ FBAs, we expect that the franchise enterprise will be able to operate independently without additional donor funding. As we move from a successful pilot into a scale up phase we expect a number of challenges.

For instance, the FBAs have seen a rapid growth in clients over the past dry season. To ensure that most of these become repeat customers, the FBAs must find the right balance between client numbers and the amount of follow-up service that can be provided to ensure that the clients are successful.

Creating Shared Value is the very heart of this project. FBAs work with their farmer clients to increase agricultural production and improve incomes. If the farmers are successful, the FBAs are successful. If the FBAs are successful, the franchise enterprise is successful. The system flourishes only if there is real value being created at the farm level.

— Michael Roberts, Country Director, IDE Cambodia

It might be the closet sociologist in me, but I have always enjoyed billboards.  I figure that you can learn a lot about a society’s values by what people post on billboards.  I still remember Coca Cola billboards from thirty years back with only a logo and four words, “It’s the real thing”.  More recently, the City Bank billboard in Dhaka: “Money never starts an idea.  It is always the idea with starts the money”.  Or the Airtel India ad: “Go wherever.  Do whatever”.  Or the LG (Life’s Good) ad promoting their LCD TV as “The ultimate seduction.”  Or the Kenya ad promoting a well known whiskey with just two words, “Keep walking.”

Billboards are not always stationary.  The outer walls of buses and trucks make great rolling buses.  “India is great”.  “Horn please”.  “Is prosperity the will of God?”  I liked the truck in South Dakota, “Delivering supply chain solutions to the food industry.”  Nobody has time to read a book on a billboard, whether rolling or not, so the phrases go to be short.

My interest in these writings on the wall has also morphed into a quite a collection of graffiti – sometimes defacing in net impact, sometimes amazingly artistic but mostly always, an expression of something.  Wish I read could these wall art expressions better.

So whether I am on Facebook or roaming rural areas of Africa, I am always on the lookout for what the wall messages are.  Driving by a Ethiopian farmsite, I see a large area of red chili peppers drying for further processing, and on the house, some amazing folk art – a flower, the “lion of Judah”, a coffee pot, a horse and a covered house.  I am pretty sure that hungry people do not have time for art work on their houses, and to me it was a little indication that the occupants at least had the resources to adequately feed themselves.  Food secure, in other words.

When I am invited, I also like to visit the interiors of people’s homes because what they post internally also has clues of their aspirations, celebrations and values.  On a wall inside another Ethiopian home, extremely sparse in terms of possessions, utensils and furniture, the chalked words in Amharic (which I couldn’t read) and some in English which I could, “Without God and life” – almost certainly an expression of basic desires.

In another rural Ethiopian home, a larger drawing of a school child – partially colored in.  Family members dressed in a more modern style.  The “lion of Judah” as the symbol of faith.  A corn stalk with leaves and developing cobs, and carefully colored in, the important wicker basket with the characteristic lid designed to host the daily bread – the enjera.  Give us our daily bread.

So I see lots of stuff on billboards and on wall postings and on signboards and on rolling vehicles.  People are not one-dimensional in terms of their values and expressions and things to say.  Still, I am struck by how often, especially in less well to do communities, I see expressions of hope and desire to be food secure – to daily have the means to access the food we need to survive and prosper.  So it feels good to be working for IDE, an organization dedicated to providing income opportunities for the poor – income opportunities which provide access to the food desired and required.

Al Doerksen
August 2010

If IDE employees were forced, by policy, to wear a tattoo of IDE’s most successful technology, it would be a treadle pump. No, we didn’t invent it. It was introduced to us by Gunnar Barnes working for LWS in northern Bangladesh; more than a few people have claimed subsequently to be the inventors but at best, they have been people who have re-developed or refined or re-adapted the pump to a local circumstance.

There are in fact lots of versions. The materials used for the pump and supports are some combination of metal and wood, often bamboo, sometimes plastic, and piston cups which might be leather, plastic or rubber. We have even seen cement versions designed for installations where the soil is saline and corrosive. But they all do the same thing; they lift irrigation water from depths up to 7 meters.

We estimate that around 2 million households in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have purchased and used this handy little suction pump in the past 25 to 30 years. IDE didn’t sell them all. That wasn’t the point. Our goal was to get them sold and working for farmers. So we set up supply chains and encouraged the rise of competition and blessed the birth of new marketing organizations.

The magic of irrigation is that it boosts agriculturally productivity through better nourished crops, and through additional crops in dry seasons of the year. The magic of this productivity means additional food for household consumption or for market distribution or both. In India these days, many users are seeing their net income increase by over $600 annually! The consequence of this is options:  the option to eat better and/or improve housing and/or educate children and/or acquire better health care and/or purchase additional farm assets.

Let’s be a little conservative. Let’s assume that the annual income boost is only $300 per year, and that the pumps are used for a minimum of 3 years. Do the math yourself to get the astonishing number of $1.8 billion in household income created over the years. Not bad for a little machine which costs less than one hundred dollars. We have been promoting the generation of “water streams;” in fact the real results have been “income streams.”

Still, our customers remind us that treadle pumping is hard work. Not as hard as manually lifting & carrying water, but still hard work. Both men and women use these pumps, and so do their children and their parents. They will do the work because of the benefit which results, but still they ask about whether their might be other options? Solar photovoltaic?  Diesel? Electrical?  Solar thermal? We are looking for the answer to that because poverty and food insecurity need to be efficiently and effectively banished! We will find these new technologies.

— Al Doerksen

In 2006, the World Food Program distributed 4 million metric tons of food to 87.8 million poor people in 78 countries. Consider the carbon footprint of growing 4 million tons of food, transporting it to 78 countries, and transporting, housing and feeding the army of experts who supervise its distribution. Now add the carbon footprint required to regularly distribute food and water to regions in chronic deficit, like China’s Yellow River Basin and India’s Deccan Plateau. In Mumbai alone, 79 water tankers made 222 trips daily this year to deliver water to poor people during the dry season. Add to this the carbon footprint of the $100 billion we spend each year in futile massive development projects, and a picture begins to emerge on the impact of poverty on carbon emissions and climate change.

But the impact of poverty on the environment goes far beyond climate change.

Continue reading here for further interesting, and perhaps contentious, connections Paul makes between poverty and “green.”

Priming a treadle pump in Copperbelt, Zambia



What’s wrong with poverty alleviation? Well, nothing really, since there are some one billion or more people below someone’s definition of poverty. Without a doubt, poverty is repugnant and abhorrent, just like starvation and hunger is. It invokes a visceral reaction. The trouble with “poverty alleviation talk” is that it sees the world as 1 billion problem cases, and it is our task to (rid ourselves of the associated shame and guilt of this by setting out to) resolutely solve these billion problems. But it is curious that the beauty industry (probably larger than the aid industry) does not go around promoting programs of “ugliness alleviation.” Surely there must be a billion or more of such to be found too! No, the beauty industry responds to their clients’ aspirations of who they would like to be! The beauty industry does not focus (its promotional efforts) on the deficiencies of their clients but rather appeals to their dreams (I have no view on whether these dreams are legitimate or not). Likewise, IDE’s major program was aptly named “Rural Prosperity Initiative,” not “Rural Poverty Initiative.” We did so because we wanted to work on the “hope” side of our clients’ livelihoods, not the problem case orientation. This is more than nuances or mere words. If you are a poor person and I come to you to alleviate your condition, I have immediately turned that relationship into a somewhat paternalistic one. On the other hand, if you are a poor person, and I come to you to offer an opportunity—a partnership which will chase your aspirations for a better life—that is a fundamentally different approach. So we would rather talk about creating (modest opportunities for) prosperity than poverty….and it is so much more gratifying for all concerned, too.

— Al Doerksen, CEO of IDE

It’s clear that we received so much interest in this initiative as a result of what can be fairly termed a snowball effect occurring in vegetable gardening and small-scale urban farming over the last couple seasons here in the developed world.

On a project level, this year we’re hearing from even more individuals and orgs interested in collaborations with us, whether they be small NGOs in African villages working on entrepreneurship education, foundations in Asia promoting best practices in “Bottom of the Pyramid” BOP design, or larger agricultural concerns looking to give back to the developing countries they source from by supporting more sustainable income generation models we at IDE specialize in.

From this desk, I can definitely say that awareness of, and interest in, our work and model has grown exponentially from last year. The emails and phone calls are streaming in.

So, as a small inspiration for the fast-approaching gardening season here in the US, see below for a few photos from last season showing the grassroots nature of the support for our model of development — from the mountains of Colorado to the Mongolian steppe.

IDE donors at Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago set up an annual exhibit highlighting agricultural work in Africa.

Tim and Mary Taylor's elk proof, IDE drip-irrigated vegetable beds in the Colorado Mountains

Nick Gruber of Produce Denver packs up some harvested crops grown with IDE drip irrigation for his urban CSA.

Produce Denver's James Hale fills an IDE header bag in the front yard of a client who has given over land to their urban CSA.

It seems self-evident that we should care about helping 2.4 billion people raise themselves out of poverty. But really, why should we? Most of us working in the field of development fall into that fortunate few: the richest 10 percent of people in the world. Is it altruism alone that motivates us to care about the fates of billions of individuals whose lives we know relatively little about? For some of us, perhaps. But for most, recent history has made it painfully evident that the fates of all nations are connected. As economic institutions and markets have become ever more globally linked, the peace and security of our nation and of all nations are inextricably interwoven. And the widening gaps between the “haves”and the “have nots” are not simply morally questionable—they also lead to greater violence and instability and further economic stagnation. As President Barack Obama cautioned the world in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, Norway,“Security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive.”

As we slowly recover from the worst economic downturn in nearly a century, we would be wise not to ignore the spectacular opportunities to create jobs and profits and to spur more rapid economic growth by giving birth to dozens of Henry Ford sized new markets that serve 90 percent of the world’s customers. By investing in income-generating enterprises that provide access to basic human needs, we are investing not only in prosperity but also in education, health, and greater global security.

The strategies to get there are surprisingly simple. We need to start by recognizing the enormous market opportunity to create products and services that 90 percent of the world will pay for instead of limiting ourselves to 10 percent of the world’s customers. We need to start treating the poorest of the poor as customers, not as charity cases. We need to listen to those customers to understand their biggest, most pressing needs and build simple, affordable solutions; ones that can be easily maintained and which create profitable businesses for local entrepreneurs. And we need to do so by relying on business models that offer attractive profits to companies and commercial rates of return to investors. Most importantly, we need to galvanize and embrace the self-interest and enterprising spirit inherent in all of us—companies, investors, and poor people.

The most effective way to reach the world’s poorest people and to give them the chance to generate wealth and lift themselves out of poverty is to energize market forces, those same forces that have fueled enormous wealth creation in developed nations for generations.

The time to begin is now.

– Paul Polak, Peggy Reid, and Amy Schefer

I am an avid follower of TED podcasts. Now playing on my iPod is Acumen Fund CEO Jacqueline Novogratz, who, in her June 2009 TED address, cites IDE as an example of “patient capital” – her term for a third way between pure, market-driven capitalism and socially-driven philanthropy.

While her version of IDE’s history leaves a few gaps, her positioning of IDE in this in-between space is largely consistent with the way we view ourselves and the environment in which we operate.

One the one hand, there is a growing chorus of voices (interestingly, many of them from aid-recipient countries) proclaiming the massive failure of international aid to address poverty – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Economists Zambian Dambisa Moyo (‘Dead Aid’), Peruvian Hernando DeSoto (‘The Mystery of Capital’) and American William Easterly have all put forward compelling arguments for the scrapping or complete reformation of our current approach to international aid. Despite spending over a trillion dollars on aid to Africa over the past 60 years, we have seen little real growth, and in many cases even contraction and growing poverty. Aid has too often lined the pockets of corrupt officials, undermined local businesses by flooding markets with free or subsidized products and created a dysfunctional handout culture, where recipients’ ingenuity and creative energies are diverted into gaming naïve programs, rather than creating goods or services of real local value. Whether you believe in reform or wholesale abolition of international aid (if you have a couple of slack hours, check out the [June 2009 Munk Debate] in Toronto on the future of international aid), there is no question that the current system is broken.

On the other hand, while unfettered markets have tremendous power to create wealth – and are doing so for many formerly impoverished populations – they often bypass or ignore particularly vulnerable and poor populations. The truth is that many of the populations we work with – poor, rural families who depend on small parcels of marginal land for their livelihood – live with the reality of market failure. The farmers we serve are incredibly resourceful, hard-working and savvy. However, their communities are a high-risk proposition for most would-be investors and service-providers: poorly served by local communications and transportation infrastructure, subject to a variety of nuisance and exploitative policies and engaged in scattered production of low-volume, low-margin products far from major markets. This is by no means “low-hanging fruit” for businesses looking to fill a niche. At the same time, markets are where poor people already fight for survival. And we like the fact that markets, by definition, treat poor people as customers – listening and responding to their needs and priorities, rather than parachuting in ill-suited ‘solutions’ to grateful ‘beneficiaries’.

Novogratz’ definition of patient capital is investment that is risk-tolerant and long-term, seeking social return in populations – like poor rural households earning less than a dollar-a-day – that are notoriously risk-averse and focused on short-term returns. With the exception of a few, incredibly committed social entrepreneurs, willing (and able) to persevere in difficult environments and forego years of potential returns (like my friend Dan Ball of Forest Fruits Honey in Zambia), patient capital is a rare commodity in the open market. Organizations like Acumen – and IDE – stand in the gap between the social aims (but often limited effectiveness) of philanthropy and the power (but often limited social motivation) of the market.

I am often asked why – if IDE’s products are sold to farmers by local businesses and we emphasize the importance of viewing farmers as customers, not objects of charity – we are organized as a charity, seeking personal donations and grants from governments, companies and foundations. In fact, when Bill Gates visited IDE in India last year, his father asked exactly this question. Like Novogratz, we might describe the answer as patient capital. The money we receive as grants or donations allows us to invest in creating products and services for marginal populations that might be considered too risky or otherwise unattractive to businesses. We are not using the money to give stuff away, but we are able to make investments that might not be possible for a business driven by next quarter’s income statement.

These investments include research and development – designing and bringing to market new or modified products that meet the needs of poor customers, marketing – getting the word out among difficult-to-reach communities, training – helping farmers and local service providers develop the specialized skills they need to succeed, and connecting – linking farmers to better markets for what they can produce (a ‘dating service’ for small farmers and prospective buyers). We have demonstrated that, with these investments, formerly subsistence farmers can move into a thriving cash economy, creating wealth for their families and for a growing local service industry that sustains and drives further growth.

As Novogratz says at the end of her talk, this is how we “…build solutions that start from the perspective of those we are trying to help, rather than what we think that they might need.”