Good aid - Great encounters

The last weeks meant a step change in the dairy project. During discussions with Victor, TechnoServe Honduras’ director that has worked in the dairy sector until a few years ago and knows a whole lot of it, the data points have transformed themselves into meaningful stories. It all starts making sense, conclusions are about to be written. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) data already showed in the first weeks of the project that the high prices for the milk producers were an important fact, but a lot of that data was not very accurate. I did already ask myself how FAO could have such complete data of countries from all over the world, when data is all but available in Central-America – well, it turns out they actually didn’t … Instead of blindly following FAO-data, Victor told me to contact people in the neighboring countries to get reliable data.

Luckily the conclusions didn’t change big time, Honduras was losing competitiveness by the year. Its prices for a liter of fresh milk were high compared to neighboring diary-strong countries as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This of course reflects itself in growing imports from those countries of finished products like milk powder and cheeses. Something that had to be changed.
It can seem weird for an NGO to try to do something about high prices for producers. After all, TechnoServe’s goal is to decrease poverty in rural communities. But these high prices are a bubble slowly bursting, local milk processors are already imposing more production quota during the high season and quality fines in order to lower the real price of milk. It is TechnoServe’s job to help the milk producers to be more efficient. That way the producers, while swallowing future price cuts, could still end up with higher profits.
Two weeks ago, I’ve been interviewing the director of the farmers association and we will still get together with the Chairmen of the 2 leading milk processing companies. TechnoServe is taking this seriously, and I’m happy to comply! You can really feel this strategy will not end up in a drawer. It will change the lives of thousands of people living from dairy production.

I thought that meeting captains of industry would be the most amazing encounters during my stay here in Honduras, but it got even better. In January, I met the newly elected president of Honduras, Perfirio “Pepe” Lobo, about whom I’ve already written in some earlier blog posts. If you won’t believe me, proof is shown - myself, Pepe and Melissa (my new fellow volunteer in Honduras). While at the local bank, trying to pay my mobile phone bill, he just came walking down the stairs with a few security guards. I would have been expecting half an army to protect him, but Hondurans told me that president elects (he was only officially inaugurated January 27^th) are easily accessible. That changes though after they are inaugurated, then streets are closed, traffic is stopped and helicopters are spying when he’s in town.
I found myself lucky to be able to present myself, laugh about his comment that he needed a chair to compensate for the difference in height and have a picture taken. Only a few minutes later – when he got into a huge black SUV and, escorted by pick-up trucks filled with machine gun armed soldiers, left the parking lot – I realized what an incredible encounter it was. Almost every newspaper around the world has mentioned his name; he will be the one hopefully ending the political crisis, deciding on what to do with Mel Zelaya and so on. And he was shaking my hand just some moments ago? I was genuinely impressed.

I was way less impressed with one of Belgium’s largest fundraising events, Music For Life. For those non-Belgians: the basic idea is to put some famous radio personalities in a transparent house for one week, have them broadcast non-stop radio, while surviving only on juices and fundraise about 3.6 million EUR for a good cause. Although it is great radio and amazingly well marketed, the ones that chose the good cause got it all wrong…
The idea is to stop malaria in Africa with one of the most effective malaria-prevention methods: impregnated mosquito nets. As such this of course is a worthwhile cause. More than 1 million people die of malaria each year. What shocked me is that Music For Life will buy those mosquito nets and distribute them to the African communities. If you have read some of the earlier blogposts, a bell should be ringing. This is destined to fail big time! It seems as if they haven’t learned anything from the last 50 years of worthless developmental aid.
Let me try to describe what I think that will happen with those nets. It is quite probable that the people on the receiving end will find them a lot more useful as fishing nets or as suspended bags protecting food from wild animals (in the large scheme of things two causes that are probably higher on their need list). And if they would use them properly, these nets don’t have an infinite lifetime. What will the local population do with broken nets? Send them back to Europe for after-sales service?
It is of course easy to critique this initiative. What I would propose doing with the money? Well, keeping in mind the lessons learned from my experience at TechnoServe and books like The Aid Trap, a local mosquito net economy should be pushed. If there are already local companies producing those nets, it should be assessed why they don’t get to the local communities. Are the nets too expensive – and should the company be made more efficient or subsidies be implemented? Or don’t the nets get to the communities – and should the market access strategy be revised? Or do the people don’t believe in the effectiveness of those nets – and should local health workers be trained and dispersed around the country?
It should be thought off like food security, with its 3 axes: food should be affordable, accessible and effective (nutritious). And please, not as an exercise in neo-colonialism with the rich world handing out mosquito nets to the poor Africans…

This job/adventure is slowly changing my view on the world of today. A truly enriching experience!

Roads out of poverty

Travelling from San Pedro Sula, the business capital of Honduras, to Tegucigalpa, the political, should be a piece of cake considering the distance between them (172 km), the road quality (all paved) and the geography (not that mountaineous). But it isn't...

I left my appartment at 8am in the morning and arrived in Tegucigalpa around 5.30pm. The journey started with a ride to El Progreso, a city 30 min south of San Pedro, where I had to meet up with my dairy-project-colleague Pedro. With a 45 min delay in El Progreso (you get used to this after 3 months in Latin-America), we headed out to the south. After 30 min, when we're arriving at the bridge crossing río Cuyamapa, there are 2 large piles of earth blocking the entrance to the bridge. "No worries," says Pedro "this bridge was destroyed during an earthquake 4 months ago, but they constructed a temporary one a few hundred meters downstream." So we drove down to the riverside, took a left and continued for a few hundred meters on a small dirt road. The temporary bridge appeared around the corner - with giant concrete parts of the bridge's deck laying in the riverbed. Not a very reassuring sight...
No bridges left on this piece of road, so we had to head back to San Pedro to take another route crossing the river. We found out afterwards that a truck full of oranges crossed the temporary bridge 3 days before, causing it to partly collapse under the weight. The truck is the one you can still see parked on the bridge. Honduran officials were shouting that the temporary bridge wasn't officialy inaugurated, so they weren't responsible for this roadblock (and economic distaster for the region). What they didn't tell of course is that the temporary bridge had already become the new default option of crossing the river for everything from horse carts to passenger buses.

The rest of the road to Tegucigalpa (or Tegus as the locals call it) was a large string of road works, each limiting the bidirectional traffic to only 1 lane. Take on average 5 min of waiting time per section, multiply that with at least 20, and you kind of get the idea.

Notwithstanding it was quite a pain to get into Tegus, it turned out to be a very useful week. Pedro and I met with Zamorano (probably the best bioengineering university in Latin-America) professors, NGO-people and state officials working in the dairy sector. The last person to interview was a ganadero (dairy farmer), Manuel, whose optimism was striking. After hurricane Mitch passed by in 1998, he was involved in a project that united farmers to set up milk collection centers. In the following years, a cheese processing plant was added to the center and now the business is running well and expanding. In the years to come he'll be working on bringing down the production costs and stabilizing the milk production throughout the year. His story should be an example for a lot of dairy farmers that are struggeling with the current market conditions in Honduras. Speaking with people like Manuel motivates me to continue my quest to write out the strategic plan, as they will be the ones pulling the sector forward in the long term.

On a completely different note, I've discovered another example of developmental aid - the way it should be done (read the November 2nd part of this post if you have no clue what I'm talking about). The Acumen Fund, a US organization, is building local businesses with the funds it acquires - a solution to poverty that lasts. One that helps build business that serve the poor by providing choice, not charity, and dignity, not dependence. The fund has made a very catchy movie about its philosophy. Check it out below to understand a bit better how developmental aid probably won't work, probably could work and probably will work.



Tuesday December 15th. I'm returning to Belgium for the Christmas/NY break. It has been an truly impressive experience until now and I'll be looking forward to writing you more on my (work)life in Honduras in 2010!

Enjoy your holidays!

Wolf in charge of a new start

Mr. Porfirio Lobo is Honduras' hope for a new political start. Although nobody calls him Porfirio here, Pepe is his widely used nickname. A very common practice here in Honduras, most of the Josés you will meet are called Chepe and Eduardos live by Lalo.
But that's not the important part, is it? The good news is: the elections went by without major incidents - and that was not what the world was expecting; the turnout was above 60% - with Mel Zelaya and his resistencia calling for a national boycott of the elections; and Pepe won by a safe margin - with his competing candidate, Elvin Santos, admitting his defeat late Sunday night.

Hondurans are really proud of what happened last Sunday. They knew that the whole world was watching and acted accordingly. Nice to see that an invisible hand can bring an entire country together when it matters.
Now the people are counting down to January 27th, when Pepe will be inaugurated as new president.

Notwithstanding all this victorious news, there is some bad news as well. Regional powerhouses as Brazil and Argentina said they aren't recognizing the elections results because they were held under a de facto government. Both the USA and the EU seem to be in favour of recognizing the elections. Nevertheless, none of all these countries will probably openly admit that they support the elections.
This is something most Hondurans don't understand. But I think I know why the international community acts like this. Just think about why Sepp Blatter (president of the world's football association FIFA) didn't want a replay between France and Ireland after Thierry Henry's hand ball decided the game - although the entire world was shouting that it was unfair. He had to think about the consequences of his actions, that would probably lead to a avalanche of replay requests. Openly supporting the elections could also have far-reaching consequences on other similar situations around the world.

Only the future will tell us if Pepe's government will be recognized by the international community. In the meantime, if you're interested in knowing more about the situation, The Economist wrote an insightful article on the matter. You can read it here.


At TechnoServe, I keep on collecting data on milk, milk powder and cheese trade. Never thought I would be doing this one year ago, but the project is really catching my interest. A lot of Hondurans are dependent on the dairy industry and the closer I get to frame the governing thought of what the strategy should be, the more exciting it gets.
Next week I will travel to Tegucigalpa, Honduras' capital, to interview state officials and professors about several themes in the dairy industry.

Next post as I return from yet another weekend with un Belga here in Honduras - if you're interested in visiting this interesting country in January, let me know for sure!

I promise to talk less politics in my next post... Oh, and lobo - that's Spanish for wolf.

Dry law in wet season

Did I tell you anything in my last post that life in Honduras was back to normal again?

Well, that has changed... It is D-5 to election day. A day that almost all Hondurans have been looking forward to. Because they hope that with their vote, with a new president-elect, things will get back to normal again. But normal has to wait until after the elections, that is for sure. This country is definitely not the boring kind. All public schools have had their last day of school for the next 6 days, the ballot boxes are travelling all across the country in army convoys and some 7,500 soldiers will guard the ballot boxes. As such not so much different from what we are used to, but wait...
...Honduras is being disarmed for the elections. The disarmament started beginning of the week, all guns carried around with a license will be temporarily confiscated and all others, well, probably forever. And believe me, there are a lot of guns in this country. In the province of Colón, Honduras' own piece of Wild West, where my palm oil client was located, people were even publicly carrying guns on their waist...
As from Friday, their is also a Ley Seca (Dry Law) in place. Oh yes, after the curfew, this is another once-in-a-lifetime experience. No alcohol will be sold throughout the election weekend. I wonder what that will give in the bars and disco's around town.

The elections itself seem to go on as planned. The US said it is supporting the polls and a lot of other nations have sent in their observers. Only thing left is to have a safe election day, no boycot and hope for a new start in 2010.

I would almost forget to tell you that the first weeks of the dairy project were really interesting. I have been collecting a lot of facts on the dairy sector in Honduras and Central-America and already did some interviews with farmers and in milk collecting centers. Some parts of the industry strategic plan are already shaping up. Farmgate prices (the price that the farmer gets for his milk) seem to be quite high compared to surrounding countries and guess what, efficiency and productivity quite low. Another element is that Honduran dairy consumption is lower than expected, thus there is some room for improvement - and marketing of course! The last (interesting) finding I will tell you about is the seasonality of dairy production in Honduras. During the wet season there is a surge of up to 50% in milk production, compared to dry season, leading to overproduction and quite some income-loss for the farmers (milk processing plants stop to accept milk when stocks are full).

All in all, some work to do in the sector. I will be spending the next weeks interviewing people all through the value chain and analyzing their answers in order to grasp the reasons behind the sector's main problems.

Will be back with my next post after D-election-day.

Virtual Quietness

It has been all quiet on the western front for the last weeks. Not that Honduras has been flooded by the tropical storms that devastated major part of El Salvador - there was some rain, but nothing frightening. Nor has the political situation exploded with all the deals that have been proposed, but failed to convince both parties - although they were very close to forming a government of national unity last week. It was a taste of virtual quietness because a lot happened since my last post...

October 14th
When the referee blows the final whistle of El Salvador-Honduras, the whole stadium goes quiet in San Salvador. The Salvadoreños because of the 0-1 loss, the catrachos because Costa Rica is winning 1-2 in Washington DC. It is a sad sight on tv, soccer stars kneeling to the ground and fighting their tears. Suddenly the camera turns to some Honduran fanáticos in the stands that start shouting and dancing like crazy. In Honduras, everybody frantically starts switching to the tv channel that is broadcasting USA-Costa Rica. 94th minute - USA scores a last-minute goal that draws the game and sends Honduras straight to South Africa 2010. The entire country goes into a frenzy. They have been waiting 28 years for this, but still...
In Tocoa, where I was staying that night, the streets filled up with everything from bikes to monstruous trucks, relentlessy accelerating and blaring for the 3 hours following the game and competing for the record of how-many-people-can-you-fit-into-one-vehicle. Quite an impressive celebration to be part of!
Some seconds of my video material below to illustrate...

October 17th
Jeroen lands in San Pedro Sula to start our 17-day exploration of northern Central-America. After a brief introduction to my (night)life in San Pedro, we head off to Copán, the town bordering the Copán Ruinas, an impressive Maya site close to the Guatemalan border. We spend a day in and around Copán, a lovely town with narrow cobblestone streets between colourful colonial houses. The visit to the Ruinas the next day shows the glorious past of Copán as one of the largest cities in the Mayan empire.
A long trip in an incredibly small bus with way too many people brings us to Antigua, Guatemala. Antigua is a colonial jewel: beautiful architecture, quiet during daytime (there is even a "no horn"-sign when you enter Antigua), safe at night, several nice spots with really good food - but, lo siento, nothing like Guatemala... Just as Varadero in Cuba and The Islas de la Bahía in Honduras, Antigua appeals (rightfully so) to loads of tourists, but shows very little of the true soul of the country. We climbed Volcán Pacaya, came way to close to a hot lava stream and spent the next day at beautiful Lago de Atitlán, before waking up at 3.55am and taking a shoddy plane to Flores, North Guatemala. From Flores, a bus brought us to Tikal, the most impressive Guatemalan Maya site, located in a giant rain forest. Although less elaborate than Copán, visiting Tikal is a mystic experience. You can walk kilometers in dense jungle before seeing the next Maya temple taken over by nature's forces.
The next day we crossed the border with Belize, and entered - after fighting off corrupt (Guatemalan) immigration officials - a completely different world. "Go slow," is exactly what this tiny English-Creole-Spanish speaking country is breathing. Caye Caulker turned out to be our host city for the next 2 days, a perfect spot for some magnificent dives, of which the Blue Hole is probably the most amazing one. At ~43m (140 ft) deep, you see a weird underwater scenery of enormous stalactites - the remnants of a what was once a giant cave. On the way up, the 5 min "safety" stop (decompression stop at 5m depth) got a whole new meaning as we were surrounded by several reef sharks... We left Caye Caulker for a 3-day sailing trip along the mesoamerican reef, spending the days snorkeling and spearfishing and nights on postcard-worthy palm islands - always keeping the go slow adage in mind of course.
After a fun karaoke night in Placencia, we took the ferry to Puerto Cortez, Honduras. Before heading back to San Pedro, we spent the day climbing (and jumping of) rocks and rafting in the Rio Cangrejal near Pico Bonito.
And yes, we took some other pictures as well - you can find them here.

November 2nd
Back to real life at TechnoServe - well, real life... I'm living a dream for most of my time here.
The team spends the week finalizing the presentation of the strategic plan for the palm oil cooperatives and I finally have some time to recuperate physically (and mentally) from the intense weeks.
It is a kind of special week though - for once a week without political tensions, curfew, World Cup qualification games or the likes. I did read a really interesting interview though: "The Aid Trap", with the dean of the Columbia Business School that just wrote a book on that subject. He talks about why developmental aid not channeled to local businesses isn't working. It made me think about what I'm doing here. I have always been (and still am) very sceptical about volunteering work and charity organisations. And then suddenly I quit a (great) job at McKinsey to start volunteering?! Why?
Well, I think TechnoServe is doing the right thing with developmental aid. We're not building water pumps, giving money to the poor or handing out presents to uneducated kids. TechnoServe is consulting local agricultural businesses on how to improve the quality of their product and services, on how to get rid of profit shaving middlemen, in short: on how to make more profits. We're actually giving brain power to help structure business plans - and we only "give" to businesses that are interested in growing and are able to support us with some of their own people. And the poor health situation, the shacks they live in, the lack of clean water? Well, that's where they invest their own profits in!

November 9th
The big day for my project. We present the final version of the strategic plan to the CEO and the board of the palm oil processing plant. They were really happy with the results and are motivated to take on the challenges ahead. In the meantime, TechnoServe has received enough funding to support the execution of the strategic plan for the next 3 years (if necessary extension to 5 years)! Incredible feeling, because the final goal of the plan is to almost double the collective income of the ~500 socios (cooperativistas that collectively own the company and palm fruit plantations) and their families - and believe me, in absolute terms, this is quite a bit less impressive... They will succeed by improving the quality of the harvested palm fruit, fully utilizing the current processing capacity of the plant by improving the productivity of the plantations, and the additional (very profitable) processing of the palm fruit pit.

And myself, I feel really happy with the strategic plan, the reactions on its details and with me presenting the whole thing in Spanish without using too many lifelines! Next challenge: preparing an industry strategic plan for the dairy sector in Honduras.

I'll keep you up to date!

Hondurans' second religion

Saturday, October 10th, 8pm. Life as usual stops in Honduras. All mental energy is focused on only one thing: soccer. This must have been one of the first days here without a word about politics. Honduras is playing against the USA with a chance to qualify itself for the 2010 world championships in South-Africa, this would be for the first time in 28 years. Every Honduran goes crazy for this game. And I'm lucky enough to be part of this.

Well, lucky, I started to see the consequences of my entrance ticket when I arrived at the Olympic stadium in San Pedro Sula. In between the enormous waiting lines, a gringo walks by in the jersey of Onyewu (a player on the US team) with his Honduran girlfriend, and is almost lynched by the Honduran fans that notice his presence. They are shouting: "Culero, culero" (just google "culero translation" for more information), and throwing whatever beverage they have in their hands towards his face. I quickly borrowed a Honduras jersey from Chepe, one of my Honduran friends here, and switched it for my other T-shirt I was wearing. Although my home in Belgium is a lot further away from the US than that of any Honduran, my white skin and blonde hair make me gringo. As from now on, I'm a (casi-)catracho, as the Hondurans call themselves. The US fan was by the way the only gringo I've seen in the stadium, there was not even one US flag.

But what an amazing experience, the stadium is filled to the top with 40,000 crazy catrachos, the waiting time between entering the stadium and the beginning of the game is 6 hours, the beer is cheap and the weather (after a tropical drash around 2pm) is great. I'm not a big soccer fan as some of you may know, but this had nothing to do with soccer, this was a religious experience.

A pity they lost the game (2-3), after a missed penalty, but Honduras still has chances to qualify. Tomorrow night at 8pm they play in San Salvador against El Salvador's national team. If they win and Costa Rica doesn't win against the USA, Honduras has a direct entry ticket to South-Africa, if not, they will have to play against (probably) Uruguay to secure the last ticket of the Americas. Life as usual will stop again...

In between crazy soccer games, the strategic plan for the palm oil cooperatives has come to the final stage. This week the presentation should be finished, ojalá (latin version of inshallah)... Last week there were some interesting proceedings.

One of the imminent problems of the palm fruit cooperatives is that since their creation in 1982, the cooperativistas have hardly thought about succession. More than half of them are older than 65 already and as palm fruit harvesting is a quite intensive process, time is running out. There are a lot of factors to consider (demographical, sociological, financial to name a few), so we decided to organize a focus group with sociologists, other consultants and some of the cooperativistas. Interesting ideas were brought up, but there doesn't seem to be a one-fits-all solution for their succession planning (or what did you think?).

Now I'm looking into the palm oil export market in Central America. Our client is quite a small fish in the pond and the 2 dominating industry players have a tight grip on the local market. If they want to grow, they will have to look outside of Honduras.

It will probably take a bit more time for the next post on my blog as Jeroen, one of my Belgian friends, is arriving on Thursday for a something-more-than-2-weeks visit. There is a lot on the menu: exploring touristic Honduras, crossing Guatemala and diving in Belize. I hope to tell you where to plan your next holiday to...

Palm fruit in supermarket looting

Everything seems to have calmed down in Honduras. Not that I experienced what tv images have shown you a few days ago (rather the sight of an empty street next to the hotel), but the uproar in the capital has its consequences on life here.

The 2 full days of curfew last week were followed by a break on Wednesday. Between 10am and 5pm people got out on the streets again. Protests and clashes with police you'd think? Well, not really, rather a rush to supermarkets and gas stations, possibly some arguments with fellow shoppers... The sight of a supermarket flooded with people looking for the last condiments in all but empty racks is quite impressive. You couldn't imagine how long the lines were for check-out.

From Thursday to yesterday (Tuesday) the curfew was installed again, but only at night time. As anything after dark here is considered night time, this meant starting at 6pm. It was one of the first Friday night's at home in a long time. And I hope it will be one of the last one's as well...

I'm enjoying this back-to-more-or-less-normal week. There are only 2,5 weeks left to finish the strategic plan for the palm oil company and its producing cooperatives, and still quite some work to do. The project is a completely different world than what I was used to just a few weeks ago... Not easier though. Francisco, my other colleague on this project, is now visiting all the cooperatives to get an idea about their living conditions. Questions as "Can you read and write?", "Which material is the roof of your house made of?" and "Do you save any money?". It gives an idea about the goals of this project. We try to improve their living conditions by helping them in the planning process of the next months and years of palm fruit harvesting and finding funding for necessary investments in fertilizers and drainage systems. Also the strategic plan for the palm oil processing plant (where the cooperatives are delivering to) is part of the project. And that strategic plan is, well, not such a different world after all... PowerPoint presentations, executive summaries and the pyramid principle seem to work as well here as anywhere in the world.

By the way, for those who wonder what palm fruit looks like, this is an image of a palm fruit bunch. The crude oil that comes out of the fruit itself is sterilized, refined (removal of impurities, color and odor) and fractionated to become vegetal oil, to be used to... fry Belgian fries for example!?