Rocco Falconer

A year on from my World of Difference Award, I’m settled in Sierra Leone. It’s a Sunday Morning, and I’m doing what I always do on a Sunday morning: having a coffee in Freetown’s most reliable internet spot, looking out over the city and the Ocean.

This time a year ago I was really still finding my feet in Sierra Leone.

But a year on, I think it’s safe to say we’ve achieved quite a lot.

But the bad news first. We wanted, at the beginning of the year, to have finished our first ever Secondary School in Eastern Freetown. We haven’t done that, because we haven’t raised the funds sufficient to do it. We’ve made progress, but we’re not there yet.

We haven’t started exporting soft commodities from Freetown to the world. But we have made progress in finding markets for when we do, and finding a very generous donor who might be prepared to support us doing it.

And then the good news.

We’ve completely updated our Primary School in Freetown. We now have a new building that is purpose built, and a much more conducive learning environment than our old school. It’s somewhere we can be really proud of.

We have expanded our farms from 4 small, cottage industry type farms to 8 more commercial, more professional, and much more profitable farms. And by sharing the benefits of our farms with the villagers, we are actively promoting rural development and keeping money that would otherwise drain on expensive foreign imports within the country.

We have started a factory that can permanently process locally grown cassava into gari, a powdered and dried form of it that is non-perishable and sells for a higher price. This adds value and reduces post-harvest wastage, one of the core problems of farming in Africa.

We have created, marketed and sold ‘Welbodi Gari’, a more nutritious version of the local staple ‘gari’ that consumers prefer.

And above all, we’ve been able to use the developments of our business to underline real, tangible progress for our schools. So we’ve opened a new school for 362 children on the site of one of our farms. And we’ve used visits from our fantastic partner schools – Eleanor Palmer School in Camden, London, and The Hall School, Hampstead, to drive real changes in our teaching methods and practices. So that the education we offer isn’t just ‘daycare’: it’s really helping to create and educate the next generation of African leaders, inspired by our teaching and our innovative business model.

All of these developments are not only about scaling up. That is really the next challenge: to take our industries to the next level, and start to increase the returns we are able to plough into the highest quality of education.

They are also about creating the sorts of enterprises and industries that Sierra Leone – and even Africa – really needs to grow. 80% of the food consumed here is still imported; yet only 15% of farmland is cultivated. Value addition enterprises are few and far between, and unemployment is uncomfortably high.

Small enterprises are the key to future development for Sierra Leone, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. It is enough for our enterprises to be employing people, creating and sustaining value, and starting to turn despair into aspiration.

But more than that, we use our products to enhance nutrition, we use our methods to enhance rural development, and the overall vision of our businesses is to create quality education for children with no other chance to go to school.

Writing that, it makes me very proud to think of what we have achieved over the last year. In many ways, it’s unfair of me to put it on my personal blog: these changes have been driven by our staff here in Sierra Leone – it’s certainly not me ploughing acres of rice land! – and in the UK! I’ve had the great fortune to bounce around between London and Freetown to see the positive impacts we’re having on the ground in Sierra Leone – kids at school, farmers working for themselves and their families, sales teams getting carried away with the nutritional benefits of our ‘Welbodi Gari’ – and in the UK, where our work with advantaged and disadvantaged children alike is opening their eyes to a new world, one of poverty and hardship, but also one of great hope and optimism.

I’m very grateful to the Vodafone Foundation for giving me the chance to see the changes that Planting Promise is making. It’s encouraging, not only because it’s happened, but because it is possible. I’m not sure I’ve made a World of Difference. But I’ve definitely been witness to one, and I hope that now as Planting Promise looks to 2011/12, we can use those lessons, and that inspiration, to do it again.

When I was 10 at the Hall School, Hampstead, I had a French teacher called Mr Smith. From New Zealand, he was famous for odd turns of phrase, like “I may have come down the river in a bubble, but it wasn’t jolly well yesterday!” or “My Eyes aren’t painted on!”

 
I left my school with happy memories, but not really expecting to come into contact with him again.
But over the last year, the Hall School have been incredibly helpful to Planting Promise. They’ve helped with fundraising, got the children engaged in Sierra Leone, and have sent resources to help our schools here.

 
And in January, they offered to send experienced teachers from the Hall to help train our teachers here. Teaching methods in Sierra Leone are very far behind what we regard as second nature in the UK, and our education officer asked specifically for help from UK teachers, in training teachers from all our schools across Sierra Leone.

 
So – imagine my surprise when the Headmaster informed me that one of the teachers volunteering his time and effort to come out was Mr Smith – who I could last remember teaching me how to count to ten in Japanese after we’d finished our French exams!
So now Tim Smith and Grace MacSweeney are here, and are one week into their workshop with our teachers.

 
And perhaps it was because teaching me gave Mr Smith such good experience – but they’re doing BRILLIANTLY!

Siray, our Education Officer, said to me after the 1st day of their workshop: ”People say in Sierra Leone, if you want to hide something from a Sierra Leonean, put it inside a book! But these teachers are finding the right way to encourage learning and it is excellent”.
I know that the teachers have been surprised at just how different the teaching methods are here: but I want them to tell you themselves, and will get them to do a guest blog.
They are plainly having a huge impact. But from a personal point of view – it’s very funny how life swings in roundabouts!
13 years ago, I was in Mr Smith’s classroom learning French. And now, Mr Smith is in one of *our* classrooms, learning Freetown!
When I was 10, Mr Smith was organising my life and giving me permission to take my jumper off in class – but now I’m showing him around Sierra Leone, and explaining to him the nuances of life here.
The student does become the teacher.
But we’re all learning a huge amount from the skills  Tim (or, as I keep wanting to call him, Sir!) and Grace are giving our teachers.
Rocco

I haven’t updated my blog for over a month. If any of you were hanging on for news, I’m sorry!

It’s been a very exciting time, though. In the midst of the Royal Wedding, the 50 Anniversary of Sierra Leone’s independence, speaking to mining companies and increasing the sales from Welbodi Gari, it’s easy to forget to do the blog.

What I want to focus on today is what’s changed in agriculture.

I sometimes feel like Planting Promise has done an extremely accelerated course in the history of agriculture from the dawns of civilisation!

In our first year, we started small farms with hand tools, a high labour requirement, and poor quality seeds. It was done on a shoestring: convincing villagers to give us a patch of land that they would hand-plough, plant and weed.

But it produced something, and the next year we were able to afford the next stage: oxen. With wooden oxen ploughs, we were able to expand our farming areas quite dramatically.

This year, we have more oxen. And, thanks to a very generous donation from the University of Southampton Students in Free Enterprise group, we have been able to purchase a small ‘power tiller’ – a mini-tractor.

The effect of this on our farming is dramatic. What limits our capacity to farm is not having the power to plough any areas of a significant size. Now that we have the power tiller, and a van with which we can transport it across the country, we should be in a better position.

We’ve already started preparing for it: huge areas of land that we lease from villagers, in return for which they get a cut of our profits, and the hope that we’ll be able to provide schools in their villages long into the future, have already been brushed and are awaiting the attack of the power tiller!

It’s incredibly exciting for us. We’ve worked out that at our most costly school, it takes 6 bags of rice to provide our high quality education for one child for one year.

And that’s being very pessimistic with costs and returns.

If our Power Tiller gives us the capacity to generate an extra 2000 bags of rice, then that’s another 333 children we can afford to educate. And if you factor in the profits we make from Welbodi Gari, trading and the internet cafe, that number starts to look very healthy indeed.

Of course, it’s early days. The areas have been brushed, and already some areas have been ploughed and planted. Still there’s germination, weeding, fertilisting (hopefully), harvesting, transporting, processing, bagging, storing and selling to come!

Farming is a more complicated business than throwing seeds in the ground and hoping the best. But as our experience and – more importantly – our hardware grows in size and capacity, we’re  increasing our ability to educate some of the poorest children in the world.

It’s a really exciting time for Planting Promise. And it’s an exciting time, too, for Sierra Leone. Agricultural expansion will be absolutely key to the improved prospects for the country. There seems a much greater chance of the profits from agriculture making a lasting change to the country than there does of anything else.

It is agriculture that brings food security, cash in hand to the bottom percentiles of the society, and prevents money flooding out of the country in a bid to meet basic needs.

With new equipment, Planting Promise will be able to achieve those goods as well as use them to provide the best quality of education for children with no other chance of going to school. It just shows what a big difference small sums can make to charities like ours which are genuinely conscientious about how we spend our money: this investment of £4, 800 will allow us to provide long term education for over 300 children, long into the future.

And with the help of Vodafone, you can now donate via text to Planting Promise!

Just text PPUK11 £5 (or whatever amount you like) to 70700, and make the sort of difference described above.

I live between the UK and Sierra Leone. It’s an odd coincidence that two of the (apparently) biggest events in the national calendars occur within days of each other: The Royal Wedding is on the 29th April, and the 50th Anniversary of Sierra Leonean Independence is the 27th April!

Being at both events probably won’t be possible, and I as yet don’t know where I’ll be on the memorable days!

But Planting Promise is already celebrating the 50 Anniversary in style, here in Sierra Leone. At the National Exhibition, which is designed to showcase the best of Sierra Leone in the month leading up to Independence, Planting Promise proudly has a stand!

Proudly exhibiting Welbodi Gari

Everyone who is anyone in Sierra Leone has a stand at the National Exhibition, and it is fascinating to wander up and down the stalls and look at everything from banks to crafts to the Anti-Corruption Commission.

And in the midst of that, people of course need to eat! So it’s the perfect time to bring to the Nation our nutritious solution: Welbodi Gari, especially now that it has been repackaged.

Welbodi Gari in our new packets

It’s the perfect opportunity for us to launch Welbodi Gari to the Nation, and it helps us be a part of celebrating 50 years of an independent Salone.

We’ll keep you updated with how Welbodi Gari makes its way beyond Freetown and into the provinces of Sierra Leone, to contribute to nutrition as well as creating a large market for Sierra Leonean produced cassava.

Planting Promise is a sustainable enterprise. We create businesses, and use the revenues generated by those businesses to fund free, high quality education for children with no other chance of going to school.

And our businesses aren’t just good at making money. They’re good for the country too. Sierra Leone is hugely under-farmed, yet can’t feed itself: our farms turn wasteland into revenue generators that help poor farmers get some money, as well as helping us get the funds we need to pay for education. It’s a great system, and everybody benefits.

But: we still need to fundraise in a big way to keep Planting Promise as effective and as ambitious as our idea merits. It seems an obvious question to ask why, if the enterprise is meant to be sustainable, do we need to keep returning to donors to ask for funds?

There are 3 simple reasons why we still need money.

1. Because we’re not there yet. This financial year (April 2009 – March 2010), we have made about 50% of the total running costs we incur. Actually, for smallholder farming in Sierra Leone, that’s a huge achievement, and one that we’re very proud of!

But it still means we need to raise the other 50% to keep paying our teachers regularly, on time and in full, to ensure that our te

acher absenteeism remains amazingly low for Sierra Leone.

Next financial year (April 2010 – March 2011), we forecast to make 65% of our running costs. This includes an expansion of our businesses, but also of our schools. So we’re still making progress – but, again, will still need to fill in the shortfall to slowly move our organisation to its final goal: financial sustainability.

2. Because we need to expand. Expansion isn’t just desirable, it’s essential: we run 4 primary schools, but for the children who are leaving our primary schools, they have nowhere to go. Only 19% of children in Sierra Leone have the opportunity to go to Secondary School, and we think that’s shocking.

So we need to build the infrastructure that the country, and Planting Promise, needs, to widen the amount of quality school places we can offer to our students.

And these costs – it costs about £50, 000 to build a 3 storey school building – are simply beyond the potential of our business at the moment. We need to raise this money in the UK.

But there’s still a big difference between our model, and a more traditional model for charity: whereas a traditional charity would build the school then pay for it ad infinitum, we only ask for money to build the school. Once complete, we will gladly accept the full responsibility of paying for it.

3. Because of the high costs we incur, that are not simply ‘running costs’. By running costs, we mean the regular costs of the wages for all our staff and teachers, of our organisation and our schools.

What that cost doesn’t include is the disproportionately expensive fuel to get our management team around all our 12 sites, the high costs of maintaining the vehicles we need for our businesses and our schools, and the rents we pay on our buildings and schools.

We use money we need to raise to pay these expensive overheads. That way, the funds from our businesses can go to where they are desperately needed: in paying the wages of our loyal teachers and our staff. Because when the link between the work of the organsation, and the regular, complete payments to all its teachers and its staff, the dividends that we reap aren’t just financial. They are the most empowering, and most inspirational part of what we do.

So the reality is that whilst our main effort is in creating thriving businesses that can generate the running costs of our schools, the process of getting there is a slow and steady one. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if you, like us, believe in Planting Promise, sometimes you’ve got to wait for the tree to ripen before it bears fruit!

Please donate now at www.plantingpromise.org.uk/donate or at http://www.mycharitypage.com/PlantingPromiseCharity

I think the work Planting Promise is doing in Sierra Leone is really important. Africa, Sierra Leone, does need new answers to complex problems, and I think Planting Promise is one such novel and effective solution: using the profits from business to fund sustainable, quality education.

Which is why I normally try to write serious, informative blogs that give you a good idea what we’re up to out here in Sierra Leone.

But just for today, I’m going to do the opposite. As it’s around the halfway point through my year with Vodafone World of Difference, and perhaps because I’ve been excited by the more jovial tone on our new blog at www.plantingpromise.blogspot.com, I want to show you a more personal side of my life!

So here are just a few of the injuries I have accepted in the line of duty.

The most dramatic was the most recent: I was attacked by dogs and had to be flown back to the UK to have some immunoglobulins injected into my leg!

Immunoglobulins (apparently) are the antibodies your body needs to fight the rabies disease, and all in all I had to have 14 injections and take up to 14mls of the liquid that my doctor helpfully described as ‘like Golden Syrup’.

I was attacked by four dogs, which surrounded me and then attacked, leaving quite a deep wound on my lower right leg. Actually, the risk was quite low: rabies is not a huge problem here and the dogs were domesticated. I thought I had done my bit by squirting my antibacterial hand sanitiser onto the wound as I sped away on the back of a motorbike, trying to get somewhere I could get the wound cleaned!

But the whole saga went on for two days: should I be evacuated, or should I stay in Freetown and hope for the best? Eventually it was decided that although the risk was low, the fact that rabies is incurable meant any risk at all was worth flying home for. So to the airport I went, a bit disgruntled, but looking forward to a clean shower!

In December, whilst walking around Freetown, I had an unfortunate collision with a lorry carrying wood, and earned the below scar, which I thought was quite a cool scar to have:

Though the wound had pretty much healed by the time I got back to the UK and could show it off, there is still a scar that I show anyone who is interested.

A few weeks before that, I got burnt whilst straddling one of the motorbikes that are the most efficient way of getting around Freetown – Freetown traffic is absolutely dire, especially at the moment as new roads are being built and causing huge jams that can last for frustrating hours.

At the time, there was nowhere I could run cold water on the wound, so I was pouring the lukewarm water from my rucksack gently over the area worrying about water I was just wasting, and looking quite strange to passers by.

Luckily, it blistered anyway. And it has made me be very careful about getting on and off motorbikes, so that is something.

And finally, just because I like to leave on a cliffhanger: the final image I will leave in was and remains a mystery to me. A strange patch of reddened and irritated skin appeared on my right shoulder blade, stayed persistently for a week, and then cleared up.

Was it as boring as eczema? Or as exciting as skin conditions can be? I shall never know. Unless, perhaps, you tell me:

So there we are. But a few of the trials and tribulations of working in Sierra Leone!

Usual service will resume next blog, I promise. In the meantime, please like our facebook group at www.facebook.com/pages/Planting-Promise/171152819563346 and check our new blog at plantingpromise.blogspot.com!

All the best,

Rocco

I know it’s been a long while since my last post, and rather a lot has happened! But just now I want to focus on the progress we’ve had raising the quality of education in our schools.

We were very lucky to to be visited by Kate Frood and Sally Hill in November. Kate is the Headteacher of Eleanor Palmer School in Camden, London, and along with Sally who teaches reception, has been  instrumental in guiding us on the path to a better education for our children!

For both Kate and Sally, it was their first time in Africa. I hope they’ll be able to write their own blog about their experiences themselves, but I know they were slightly dismayed by two things. Firstly, the lack of equipment in comparison to the relatively luxurious educational materials we have here in the UK. Secondly, and probably more importantly, by the teaching methods. As Kate said: “it’s not even chalk and talk. It’s just chalk”.

African education is so far removed from the experience that I and others like me had at school! Teaching styles are much less interactive, children are rarely invluded in the act of learning. Reading is not really a part of culture as it is here in the UK, and materials are few and far between.

But on the other hand, the biggest differences between UK and Sierra Leonean education is enthusiasm. It’s very inspiring to see the willingness to learn from pupils crammed into a tiny space, with just the simplest of tatty notebooks and broken pens.

But we’re in the business of seeing difficulties as opportunities, and creating solutions rather than problems! So on the lines of the inspirational guiding principle Kate left us with, we have formed a plan to raise the quality of our education:

“Tell me and I’ll forget, Show me and I’ll remember; Involve me and I’ll understand!”

In the light of this, we have created our vision, and our 1 term, 1 year and 3 year plan.

Our vision, which was created with a lot of help from Eleanor Palmer School, is:

Planting Promise is a school that makes children …

Love to learn, and go on learning!

Planting Promise is a school where teachers…

Bring out the best in their students and create an excellent learning environment!

We’re focussing our 1 term plan on increasing the interaction between students and teachers.

Our number fans are helping to get every child involved in the classroom, and are bringing out the enthusiasm in our classes!

Our objective is to get each teacher using the number fans for at least one lesson a day.

We’re streaming every class in our school. This will mean that there will be a different standard for the differing levels in each class, to make the teaching more catered to the individual needs of the student.

By the summer, we will have dedicated teachers from the UK coming out to run Planting Promise in-house teacher training, to ensure that our schools are amongst the best in Freetown, and are being reliably rewarded for their efforts!

Finally for this term, we’re determined to make books and reading part of the culture of the school. Each child will be given a book to take home and read. And we’re considering getting the reader to summarise the book to the class: this will incentivise the reading, and hopefully also improve the confidence of children.

By the end of the year, we want to be renowned in Sierra Leone as one of the leading providers of education. We want to be so good, that our formidable and remarkable Education Officer, Siray Boston-Mammah, is lecturing at the National Teacher Training College of Sierra Leone, sharing the best practices from our primary education!

And actually, we’re already having results.

Last Wednesday, a week after our Educational Standards meeting in which we decided our 1 term, 1 year, and 3 year plan, I went to visit the Planting Promise International primary School.

The results were amazing, already. I went through every class, seeing work with number fans, and recounting the work they have been up to already this term.

I was flabbergasted with the standard, and what an effect little things like streaming, differentiation, and use of materials and equipment we sent from the UK like books, number fans and maths kits could have.

It just goes to show: little change can make a big difference. And what’s what we’re here to do – making those changes, to bring out the best in Sierra Leone! And when I walk through the classrooms of our school, I feel pretty confident that the best of Sierra Leone is yet to come…

Since I came to Sierra Leone, I’ve been trying to find the best ways to run profitable businesses that address social needs as well as generating profits for our educational projects.

I feel very strongly that the businesses we run must produce something, even though it would be easier to import Western or Chinese goods and sell them at a profit in Sierra Leone.

But that would be a very short term solution: even if we used the profits for education projects, we’d still be taking money out of the country, rather than stimulating home-grown production and growth.

With these ideas – that you have to produce something that will help the country – we have now started a food-processing factory just outside Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.

At our factory, we process cassava – a staple, starchy root vegetable – into  gari, a powdered and dried form of the vegetable that everybody eats. It reduces post-harvest wastage by making a perishable good a non-perishable one; adds value to the product; and offers permanent employment for 20 people.

It’s this sort of business that Planting Promise believes in: adding value to local products, reducing post-harvest wastage in the economy and trying to stop the food market being so dependent on imports.

But we go a step further. The problem with cassava is that it is very starchy, but has almost no other nutritional value.

When it’s eaten so widely, especially by children, the lack of protein and vitamins is alarming.

So we’ve come up with a solution that, like all our solutions, is meant to be sustainable because it is a profitable business, as well as a social good.

The solution is called Welbodi Gari.

Welbodi is the Krio (the local language) word for all round good health. What we do to the normal gari is add nutritional value to make a gari that tastes the same as the normal gari, but is bolstered by vitamins and proteins to make it a better meal for the families that buy the product.

That means we buy local carrots (yes, they are grown here!), cabbages and peppers for the Welbodi Gari (vitamins). And we add protein powder to the Welbodi Gari (protein) to promote healthy growth especially amongst youngsters.

If you’re reading this between 8-5 Monday to Saturday, our factory staff will be producing this Welbodi Gari for sale in the Sierra Leonean market. If we can make the product take off in Sierra Leone – and I’m very optimistic that we can – we will be using business for a series of social ends. It will mean providing employment for our factory workers, and our sales staff. It will generate profits for our model that we can use to fund free education.

And above all, it will achieve that goal of using the market to address the complex needs faced by the country. It might stop money being spent on expensive imports, and make the country able to stand on its own two feet. And we’re getting the idea patented in Sierra Leone so that intellectual property legislation will – for once – serve to benefit an African business rather than weaken it!

But more importantly than any of that, it might help to replace an unhealthy diet with a sustainable and nutritious meal that will bolster growth, concentration in schools, and good health.

That’s why our product is fo yu welbodi – for your health. But ‘yu’ isn’t just ‘you’ who’s eating the Welbodi Gari – the benefits of our product extend much, much further than the person who will be smacking his or her lips after their first delicious meal of Welbodi Gari!

The principle underlying Planting Promise is that the way to deliver lasting change to places like Sierra Leone is through sustainable development, not charity.

To Planting Promise, that means we run farms, food processing and an internet cafe in order to fund our schools.

Our businesses are so much a part of what we do because they support our schools. But also because those businesses are really ends in themselves, and a country won’t really develop unless it has good and effective businesses at its core.

Sierra Leone has a problem in running effective businesses because a whole generation of those with experience in boring yet crucial roles of middle management was lost to the war. Businesses can find it hard to ‘scale up’ because, whilst effectively run as family concerns, it is a challenge to have to rely on others who may not have the skills or vested interests to work as hard for a business as its founders.

That’s why we recently ran a Staff Workshop and training day. On a Saturday morning, every member of our expanded management team trooped up to our new office for a staff workshop. It was an introduction for the office as much as for the staff!

The morning started with a description of the history of Planting Promise since 2008. Eddie Boston-Mammah, the Director (Sierra Leone) and I are so proud of what we achieved, and we wanted to pass on to our staff the same commitment to our staff. We also wanted to show that even when there was nothing by way of resources, the simple fact that we aspired to create the organisation was enough: never never never underestimate what is possible with enthusiasm and effort!

Then we talked about Our Values. By getting every staff member to share these values, we are not only trying to ensure that our businesses are as effective as possible, but also trying to inspire people a little too! We like to think our model is quite inspirational; and I think there is the additional importance of using these values to create stable and lasting businesses that will deliver much more important social, than financial, returns!

Our values are:

1. Pride in our work

2. Reliability

3. Professionalism

4. Progress for the nation

5. Absolute quality of everything we do – from education, to agriculture, to food processing.

After talking through the values, we got each staff member to come to the front and say what value was most important to them. The value people kept hitting on was reliability: it is reliability that is most likely to determine whether a business succeeds or fails! And the sad truth is that business in Sierra Leone, or at least my experiences of it, is so rarely reliable and dependable that if we can deliver it to the market, it’s almost like we’d have a monopoly!

The values went down really well, and we had a very lively discussion about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and how each staff member feels vested in the success of Planting Promise!

In the UK, all companies seem to be harping on about how ‘people are the most important asset’ and I can’t help thinking that it’s very true! And that people are capable of so much more than they seem to be. Trying to give people a platform to use their initiative for the sake of the business, but at the same time  being level headed about the huge risks we expose ourselves to by devolving responsibilities is a real challenge I’m spending a lot of time working on at the moment!

Because part of our effort is about building capacity: it may be that we could fly in better managers or more effective, reliable, proud, progressive people to run the businesses. But the challenge is to build those solid foundations for a developing nation out HERE in Sierra Leone.

Will it have any impact, or just fall into a typical NGO trap of not being able to distinguish between good words and good results?

Well – we’ll see!

After plenty of changeable days mixing baking sun with waterfall-like rains, and every day ending with spectacular lighting storms, the dry season seems to have arrived and settled over Sierra Leone. I’m sitting on the shores of the Atlantic, and can’t see a single cloud. Even the crowds of athletic young men who usually clog the beaches playing Sunday afternoon football think it’s too hot to attempt anything other than a dip in the sea.

That’s great news for our rice, which should now start to ripen up and dry out, reading for harvesting. But it’s bad news for my skin – burning to a deep red no matter how liberally I cover myself in my factor 30! But I hear from my family and friends that the weather in London is awful – so I feel sheepish complaining about too much sun!

Since my last post, we’ve made quite a lot of progress. Planting Promise is now much more than the humble organisation it was! We’ve been on something of a recruitment drive to make sure that the structure of our organisation is fit for the expanding demands of our schools, farms and other projects.

Now, beyond our CEO and Country Director, we’ve got

1. A Logistics Officer (Mr Koroma), who will be responsible for making sure the right crops are in the right place at the right time. It’s actually very demanding to go to head to head with the significant challenges of transport and provide solutions out here in Sierra Leone – so he’s got a job on his hands!

2. An Operations Officer, who will be responsible for ensuring our mini-cassava factory (of which more next post!) is producing the goods we want.

3. An Education officer to ensure that our schools and education projects are providing the highest quality education possible.

4. 3 drivers

5. A dedicated mechanic to make sure our growing fleet of vehicles are on top form.

6. An assistant manager who makes sure our balance sheets are loooking as healthy as we need them to be!

These staff all have a fight on their hands – and time and this blog will tell how they do!

I want to focus in this blog on how we’re thinking about logistics.

Logistics are so crucial to the way we run at the moment. We’re now diversifying our business strategy to take into account some of the major challenges that Sierra Leone faces in its struggle to develop.

One thing really holding agricultural development back is the lack of logistics for farmers. Connecting poor rural farmers with markets and opportunities to sell their produce is one of the only ways to stimulate rural production in the vast fertile lands of Sierra Leone. The absence of such logistics, and the presence of large international supply lines from Thailand, India and China leads to the perverse scenario where 70% of food consumed here is imported – including importing the main staples that the country could easily produce itself.

That’s where Planting Promise comes in. Our recent purchase of a lorry has allowed us to expand what we do in the villages we farm. No, on top of the farms we run, and the schools we operate, we’re offering to purchase the surplus crops the farmers grow, and currently have no use for. We then transport the crops to Freetown, where we take care of selling them. Stimulating demand will stimulate production, as every farmer wants that extra land to be converted into cash. We can bring this economy into the villages, and bring prospects, capital and excitement with it.

And I’m proud and unashamed to say that we make a profit as well through the old merchants tradition of buying cheap and selling dear. If we didn’t make a profit, we’d just be another charity, liable to collapse when the funding runs out. But making a profit, we’re making ourselves truly sustainable, and delivering returns for our projects and profits for the farmers we help. Providing access to markets seems so simple, but when you have poor roads, high fuel costs and the enormous capital costs of vehicles, it’s much more of a challenge than you might think.

Offering this service for our villages is a win for all parties. And it allows us to really deliver on our promises to farmers to radically improve their lives.

That’s one of the things we’ve been working on since my last post. The corollaries to it involve building our brand out here in Sierra Leone. Our new slogan – Eat For Education! – is designed to make us a leading supplier of food to the Freetown market. If we can become market leaders in the provision of food to the hungry and growing population of Freetown, we’ll be able to reduce import dependence, contribute to food security in the country, and use the strong financial returns of such a project to keep covering the costs of our growing education projects. I’ll save the details of how our other projects are expanding for another post.

For now – next time you tuck into a delicious and varied meal – think of some poor logistics officer who has worked hard to make sure that the right vehicles have been zooming around the right places to make sure your meat and two veg arrive in the right condition to the right place! And then spare a thought for Mr Koroma, who will probably be sweating his way through a bad road to make sure that Freetown residents are paying a Sierra Leonean farmer for his labour, rather than a shipping-agency fatcat for his fuel!

All the best,

Rocco

It’s a changeable day in Sierra Leone, that started with scorching sunshine and ending with dull, dark clouds over the Atlantic ocean threatening a torrential downpour!  I’m sitting watching the waves pound onto the beach while writing my first blog.

I’ve been coming to Sierra Leone off and on since 2008, but this is the first time I’ve been able to spend a whole year here working on Planting Promise, the charity I founded when I first came to Sierra Leone.

Over the next year, you’ll be able to chart our progress towards our objectives. I would hugely welcome any comments you may have about the direction, progress and reality of our operations on the ground out here in Sierra Leone.

Planting Promise is more than a charity. We run businesses: farms, food processing units, and an internet café here in Sierra Leone. All the profits we generate fund the running costs of our 4 schools. Our schools offer free education to children with absolutely no other chance of going to school.

When I came to Sierra Leone in Summer 2008, I was struck by two things: on the one hand the desperate need for basic education, health and prospects for thousands of people. On the other hand, I was also struck by the huge potential there was within Sierra Leone for profitability: for money to be made from the incredible resources, like vast tracts of fertile but unfarmed farmland, beautiful beaches, amazing amounts of tropical fruit rotting in the streets, and a population hungry for work and opportunities for bettering themselves.

After meeting Eddie Boston-Mammah, who is now Director of operations out here in Sierra Leone, we set about starting a summer school in central Freetown. We got together a site, without a roof, put a piece of tarpaulin on it to keep the rain off, got teachers, tables, chairs, blackboards: all the most basic elements we needed to start a simple school. Because all the money came from my own pocket, we couldn’t even pay the teachers for the Summer school we were running: I had to say to the teachers that teaching in the summer school was like an interview: if they did well, when the permanent school started running in September, then we’d pay them their first month’s wages at the end of September. I did this to buy myself time to get back to the UK, and find enough money to run the school till then!

The problem was funding. I’ve worked in the Army, Argentina, Chile, Uganda, and Zimbabwe and have always thought that you don’t really help people by making them dependent on foreign support. So I was adamant that our school wasn’t going to be another western dependency.

To answer this problem, Eddie and I flagged down a taxi, and drove out into the provinces of Sierra Leone. We contacted villages with vast amounts of land that they were doing with. We drove into the villages, and had meetings with the village chiefs and hierarchies in the village. We said to them that we would provide them with all the tools and seeds they needed to farm for us, and would pay all the labour and all the costs. Then when it came to harvest-time, we would take the produce, sell it, and give them 22% of the profits we made. The rest of the profits would go to paying the wages of the teachers.

Agriculture needs serious development in Sierra Leone – it’s fertile and well able to feed itself, but it still imports over 50% of the food eaten in the country. So our farms aren’t just means to an end: they’re ends in themselves, bringing wealth, employment and prospects to villages with no other chances.

And as of earlier this year, we’ve also been able to start running schools in 3 of our 6 farming villages.

So now we’re up to 6 farms, and 4 schools. We also have 2 processing units, and an internet café.

That was the situation when I arrived here in Sierra Leone on 27th August.

This is Africa, and our projects are far from perfect. Our productivity on the farms should be much, much higher than it is. We had a problem last year with our harvest of cassava, not getting nearly as much as we had hoped for.

Over the next twelve months, I’m hoping to achieve the following:

-       Build the first ever Planting Promise Secondary School. There are only 3 secondary schools in Sierra Leone that are free, and ours will be the 4th! It’s really hard to find Secondary education in Sierra Leone, so we’re hoping it will make a real difference, as well as deliver on our vision for every child in Sierra Leone to have access to the highest quality of education from Primary through to University level.

-       Find a way to increase the productivity on our farms. They’re strung out across the country, and getting the right yields means working closely with the farmers to find answers to all sorts of problems that face them like a lack of expertise, a lack of equipment, and a shortage of man hours in the depopulated provinces!

-       Institute a more formal way of processing cassava into gari. This turns a perishable into a non-perishable food item, adds value to a staple crop and offers employment for those working to process it. It also gives us a regular income, because we can buy cassava, process it, and sell gari the whole year around and not only when we are harvesting our own produce.

-       Start growing all sorts of different, nutritious crops on our farm near Freetown at Newton. Food security is a big problem in Sierra Leone, and lots of the great grains of Africa have been lost to years of civil war and displacement. We’re going to try to grow them again: beans, cereals and grains that will make a real contribution to the food security problems in Sierra Leone, as well as making some money for us to continue educating more and more children. It’s also good for the soil to be rotated and not over-farmed with a single crop.

-       We’re going to try and add some value to the amazing tropical fruit that just rots in the street here: mangoes, avocadoes, and pineapples will hopefully soon be hitting the streets of the UK, either as mangoes or as produced goods – so if any of you have ideas about people who’d like to buy our ethical and quality fruit please drop me an email!!!

I’ll try to be as honest with you as possible on the blog, and give you a full run down of how far I’m meeting our objectives, and how much I’m delivering on the aspirations and expectations of the people we’re here to help. Next time, I’ll start to share with you my daily life so be ready for stories of mice, traffic, and lots and lots of rice!

All the best

Rocco