Nuru International started working in Kuria, Kenya in 2008. To further scale, develop and proof the Nuru Model in a context outside of Kenya, Nuru International started a country expansion initiative. In 2011, Nuru International carried out the bulk of the country selection process, including studies, scouting visits, and deliberation of a country scaling proposal. In 2012, after consolidating the Ethiopia expansion proposal, plans were further developed, and administrative and physical groundwork was carried out. In January 2013, the first Scout Team was onboarded and subsequently trained for their deployment to Boreda, Ethiopia in February 2013.

The goal of Scout Team, the first team of Nuru International staffers in Ethiopia, centers on co-creating the Agriculture Program model together with local Nuru Ethiopia staff. The final product produced by the end of Scout Team – the program proposal – and the process for co-creating that proposal merit further exploration.

By the end of Scout Team, international and local staff together strive to build a proposal for the Agriculture Program in Ethiopia that addresses the need of hunger in an impactful, sustainable, and scalable way. This entails first studying and understanding the need of hunger in local communities. Then, local and international staff will work together to develop a goal, scope, activities, rollout and budget that address the need of hunger with agricultural solutions. By compiling these pieces and more into a cohesive proposal, Nuru Ethiopia and Nuru International staff will have an Agriculture Program model to be then implemented together with communities.

The process of program co-creation – or working in a meaningful partnership with locals to understand problems and then propose and implement solutions – is fundamental to the work of Nuru International. Scout Team centers on training local staff, facilitating work sessions, and also learning from local staff to achieve the common objective of building the Agriculture Program model. Local staff develop strong leadership abilities while at the same time they actively learn-by-doing, alongside their Nuru International counterparts.  This process empowers Ethiopian staff to best analyze local needs and then propose and implement solutions.

Scout Team is a first in many ways for Nuru International. It is the first country project for Nuru beyond Kenya. The product of Scout Team – the Agriculture Program proposal – will be Nuru Ethiopia’s first co-created impact program. It will be later followed by other impact programs of Community Economic Development, Healthcare, and Education. Agriculture Program co-creation in Ethiopia is piloting the way that Nuru International plans to develop programs in all new countries of operation.

Highly competent teams of Nuru International and Nuru Ethiopia staff are ready for the big challenges that come before them. It is in this context that I introduce Douglas La Rose, Nuru International’s Agriculture Program Facilitator for Ethiopia. In the field, he is accompanied by incredibly talented Nuru Ethiopia staff that work in Agriculture, Monitoring and Evaluation, and Leadership Programs, and in Nuru Ethiopia’s Administration. Nuru International field staff for Ethiopia include Team Leader (and CEO) Jake Harriman, Leadership Program Facilitator Barry Mattson, and Monitoring and Evaluation Program Facilitator Kristin Lindell.

Douglas is an anthropologist and agriculturalist who has been working in rural Africa since 2005. He received his M.A. in Applied Anthropology from San Diego State University in 2011 after conducting an extensive quantitative and qualitative research project on agricultural adaptations to environmental change in the Volta Region of Ghana. Douglas has extensive experience in agriculture, having managed an agroforestry project in Ghana that focuses on sustainable cocoa, plantain, banana, and palm nut production.  Douglas has also written and published numerous articles on agriculture, climate change, and environmental anthropology. Douglas was an agroforestry Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana from 2005-2007.

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The subject of this post is Nuru International’s approach to environmental sustainability in the Agriculture Program. Nuru International often discusses sustainability in terms of projects running on local finances (Financial Sustainability) and local leadership (Leadership Sustainability). While these values are fundamental to the way projects operate, there are other qualifiers of sustainability. Nuru International has a long-term commitment to partner with communities in developing countries to build and implement programs that are triple bottom line sustainable – socially, economically, and environmentally. The focus topic here is how sustainable agricultural solutions benefit the environment.

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program contributes to a productive and healthy environment:

1) Farm intensification prevents negative environmental consequences

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program partners with local communities to address the need of hunger in a sustainable way. In Kenya, the Agriculture Program seeks to eliminate episodic hunger by increasing crop yields. Besides increasing crop outputs, hunger could also theoretically be eliminated through food aid, population control, or bringing more land under production. Contrasting Nuru International’s approach to alternative approaches helps to highlight how the Agriculture Program benefits the environment.

Food aid can create dependency and is not locally self-sustaining. Nuru International’s Agriculture Program works with local farmers to intensify production on farm plots. When agriculturalists produce more of their own food, they avoid becoming dependent on unnecessary food handouts.

Population controls, although they would decrease hunger long-term, are not effective in the near-term, and can have disastrous environmental, economic and social consequences. In Kenya, hunger-driven rural-urban migration shifts the population from hard-pressed rural areas to over-populated urban areas. This has contributed to the growth of the world’s largest slums outside of Nairobi, with dire environmental and social consequences. When farmers have productive livelihoods in their traditional home place, they make sustainable use of local natural resources, contribute to the national economy under their own stead, and avoid becoming urban slum-dwellers.

Increasing the land under crop production would also be a possible way to address hunger. In Kenya, however, this would often mean invading natural lands, or coming into social conflict with other landholders. In Kuria, Kenya, agricultural land expansion threatens world famous natural reserves like the Masai Mara and can bring about inter-tribal conflict and even violence. On the contrary, when farmers can make sustainable use of their local natural resources, they avoid encroaching on areas of natural and cultural heritage. By avoiding deforestation, the Agriculture Program offsets potential greenhouse gas emissions, stabilizes climate, and helps halt desertification and land degradation.

The Agricultural Program ameliorates multiple negative consequences to the environment by offering farmers the choice to engage in their own sustainable agricultural livelihoods.

2) Implementation of appropriate farming technologies produces more crops in an environmentally friendly way

The Agriculture Program in Kenya works to increase crop yields of maize with input loans of hybrid maize seeds and conventional fertilizers. These are accompanied by technical training and extension to use the inputs in a responsible way that contributes to long-term environmental and soil health.

Nuru Kenya loans farmers hybrid maize seed which is bred and treated to be pest and disease resistant, high yielding, and to exhibit exemplary growth characteristics. Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program does not use genetically modified seed. Locally grown hybrid maize seed has the best characteristics to reliably produce maize that efficiently uses water and is well adapted to local soils and climate conditions. The grain produced by this maize is for human consumption and is consumed by Kenyans on a daily basis in the form of stiff dough (ugali).

The input loan also includes conventional fertilizers. These ensure that farmers can produce enough food to address their own family’s hunger. Farmers even produce enough maize to sell surplus yield for a profit and be better prepared for potential economic shocks (like purchasing medicine during a disease outbreak). Farmers apply a relatively small amount of conventional fertilizer, only what is minimally necessary for proper crop development.

When space is limited and a hungry population relies on subsistence agriculture, crop yields are, in part, a function of nutrient availability. Nuru Kenya promotes the use of composting, fallowing land, rotational cropping (for cover, forage or food), and applying animal manure to fields. Conventional fertilizers help address the shortcomings of organic fertilizers, as there are limits to strictly organic production in remote rural agrarian communities.

Producing organic nutrients takes a relatively long time and large area for a limited quantity. Decomposition of organic materials is slow, and ultimately is very dilute in key macronutrients – nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Where land is limited and hungry rural people need to produce crops to live, fallowing land and rotational cropping are not options that completely address nutrient needs. Manure also fails to provide a complete fertilizer solution because livestock are too few to produce the amount of manure that would be required. An added challenge to organic fertilizers is that they’re bulky and heavy. For calorie-deprived farmers, especially in an agricultural system powered by physical labor and not by machines, the labor-intensive application of organic fertilizer is difficult.

The Agriculture Program promotes organic production strategies – composting, rotational cropping, fallowing, and manure application, to name a few – as wholly complementary to the use of conventional fertilizers. Promoting all these concepts properly requires the right training and supervision.

Nuru International adopts a responsible and local-lead approach to training and supervising farmers. Staff are recruited locally, trained in technical topics, and then regularly train and advise farmers on how to:

• Pick a plot – not on slopes or near sensitive riparian areas
• Prepare the land well
• Plant correctly 
• Apply fertilizer properly (Teaspoon dosages are hand delivered to each maize hole at the proper depths and spacing)

Proper land selection, preparation, planting and fertilizer application means that the fertilizer stays on the farm and is used by the plant, instead of running off.

3) Sustainable agricultural systems offer good choices to farmers

In Kuria, Kenya, most farmers have switched to maize farming for food and surplus with Nuru Kenya, from a past of farming tobacco for international corporations.  The switch from maize to tobacco has significantly contributed to the environment, soil and human health.

Tobacco is a non-food cash crop that has known toxic and carcinogenic properties, to both its growers (see green tobacco sickness) and its users. Tobacco farming causes soil erosion, requires large amounts of expensive chemicals to keep the leaves healthy, and needs exorbitant amounts of firewood to dry the tobacco.

When tobacco companies came to Kuria, Kenya, lush tropical forest covered large swaths of landscape. A few decades later, no natural forest remained in Kuria, having been burnt as fuel to dry tobacco. If farmers continue to produce tobacco in massive quantities, the resulting deforestation will further push into surrounding regions, negatively impacting forests and wildlife biodiversity.

Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program has gotten thousands of farmers to switch from tobacco to maize. In addition to being a crop that Kenyan farmers can use to feed their families and sell for profit, maize production also avoids the need to deforest more land. In fact, with the switch to intensified plots of maize and decreased pressure on fuel (wood) reserves, forests are now able to make a comeback in Kuria, Kenya.

Future Outlook of Sustainability in Agriculture

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program looks beyond today’s needs, beyond the here and now, to anticipate long-term solutions to ending hunger in the developing world. Today, Nuru International is helping to end hunger in Kenya. Over the next year, Nuru International will work to build lasting agricultural solutions to end hunger and poverty in Ethiopia. Over the next decade local people in these and other developing countries will implement solutions on their own, solutions that they originally built together with Nuru International. Their progeny, the next generation of rural farmers, will grow up with a more equitable balance of economic prosperity, social welfare, and environmental protection. Their work will bring about lasting, local-based solutions for generations to come.

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Chacha, a farmer in Kuria West, Kenya, has a family of five. His main livelihood is subsistence farming from two acres of land. He mainly plants his farm to maize, from seed saved from the previous harvest. He uses some manure and green waste to fertilize his plot, but it’s not nearly enough for proper crop development. He manages the plot casually, broadcasting seed instead of laborious tilling, weeding infrequently, and resultantly he gets a poor harvest.

Chacha’s family experiences regular food deficits from February to May. This “hunger season” is the hardest time of the year for them. During the hunger season, Chacha’s food stores have run low or out completely from the last long rains harvest the previous August. Chacha is almost always exhausted, and rarely feels full. This same time of year is when Chacha has to plant his farm – a capital and labor intensive activity. So just when Chacha could most use labor (energy from food) and capital to invest in farming is when he is least able to do so.

Chacha sees one of his better off neighbors planting with oxen and with hoes, but he doesn’t have the money to rent oxen nor does he have the energy to plant with hoes.  So he casts the seed over the land with minimal preparation. Chacha sees his better off neighbors fertilizing and weeding, but he doesn’t have the money for fertilizer. He spends some time weeding, but he tires quickly. The maize plants may succumb to disease anyways, as they are thin and lack nutrients, and Chacha didn’t invest that much to begin with. Instead of meticulously weeding, he manages his crops casually.

Unfortunately, Chacha’s yield doesn’t pay off much at the end of the season. He didn’t invest very much money into his crops, and he doesn’t have a surplus to sell after harvest. He’ll save some seed to use next year. He invested some labor in his crops, expending precious energy reserves when he was hungriest, and he got a small yield which will help tide over his family for another year.

In this example, Chacha was barely making ends meet from year to year. Chacha’s crop management was casual. He made a low investment and got a low return. When an economic shock, like a drought, crop disease or family sickness comes along, it exacts a heavy toll on Chacha and his highly vulnerable family.

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program helps change the equation for farmers like Chacha by offering them choices where few existed before. So where Chacha saw casual crop management as a reasonable strategy for his situation, there is a lost opportunity for Chacha to begin to lift himself and his family out of extreme poverty.

The Nuru Kenya Agriculture Program comes to Chacha’s area, and Chacha chooses to participate. Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program offers Chacha the opportunity to take a loan for farm inputs of fertilizers and improved hybrid seed. Chacha attends technical trainings, and learns how to work his farm more effectively. By investing more capital and labor during land preparation, he spends less time weeding later. Chacha quickly sees the results of his investment in the form of strong maize plants. He becomes more willing to invest his precious energy reserves in maintaining his now bountiful crops.

At the season’s end, the reward of Chacha’s investment pays off with more than double the yields he used to get. He now has surplus maize to sell and repays his loan. He has enough food in his stores for the entire next year. Now his family won’t have to endure another tough hunger season.

When it comes time for the following long rains cropping season, Chacha is even more resilient to economic shocks and better prepared to invest in his land. He can take a loan, even on his whole two acres. He has the energy to work his land, and does so willingly now that he has the opportunity.

This story reveals how Nuru International’s Agriculture Program works in Kenya to implement a program where local people, equipped with the right tools and knowledge, lift themselves out of extreme poverty by first addressing the basic need of hunger.

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Nuru International’s Agriculture Program is growing, with a robust program under Nuru Kenya and a nascent program under Nuru Ethiopia. In Nuru Kenya, the Agriculture Program is serving thousands of new and returning farmers with training, extension, and loans for maize (corn) farming in an expanded area of operations for 2013 long rains season. In Ethiopia, the Agriculture Program Model will be co-created between Nuru International and Nuru Ethiopia staff through a pilot process of designing impact programs. The role of the Nuru International Agriculture Program staff is to train, facilitate and work closely with Nuru Kenya and Nuru Ethiopia staff during all phases of program development and implementation until local staff is fully able to implement the program on their own over time.

Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program had a highly successful 2012 long rains season, with 2,783 farmers more than doubling their maize yields (123% increase) over baseline. Repayment on the loan product of basic farm inputs (fertilizer and maize seed) reached 96.8% by the end of 2012. This success generated momentum in terms of the impact, scalability and sustainability of field operations, activities which never really come to a halt. As the long rains start up again around January, input loans are being distributed to farmers by Nuru Kenya Agriculture staff. Farms are being paced, prepared, planted, fertilized, weeded, and otherwise tended to by thousands of returning and new farmers in Kuria West. As the Nuru Kenya Agriculture Program continues to grow in the Kuria West District of Kenya, the challenge is to help produce high yields for Nuru Kenya’s farmers, to reach new beneficiaries in surrounding areas, and to sustain operations with high loan repayment and continuous development of local leadership.

Nuru Ethiopia’s Agriculture Program is beginning in 2013 where Nuru International will be working to co-create the Agriculture Program Model in Boreda, Ethiopia in conjunction with Nuru Ethiopia staff. Through the process of co-creation, Nuru International and Nuru Ethiopia staff will address the core need of hunger. From this broad mandate, and through months of trainings, exercises, and analyses, the staff will work to elaborate the Agriculture Program Model for its subsequent implementation in Ethiopia. This pilot process of designing a program model will inform how Nuru International and Nuru Ethiopia work together even further down the road to address needs beyond hunger, including economic shocks, needless disease and death, and access to education.

The challenge of addressing the need of hunger amidst extreme poverty requires a multifaceted approach focused on impact, sustainability and scalability. Nuru International’s Agriculture Program will work in 2013 to innovate past challenges of working with remote rural communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. In Kenya, the staff there will be focusing on making a sustained and scalable impact under increasingly local-based leadership. In Ethiopia, the Agriculture Program will be the first of Nuru Ethiopia’s program models to be co-created through the novel process that Nuru International is implementing hand-in-hand with Nuru Ethiopia staff. Together, these manifestations of the Agriculture Program are focused on meeting the need of hunger and helping communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

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Recently, I was posed a question: How does indigenous knowledge fit into Nuru International’s Agriculture Program?

With such a vibrant history in our current countries of operation, Kenya and now Ethiopia, Nuru International’s Agriculture Program leverages the vast sum of knowledge accumulated by local people to create and implement sustainable and scalable agriculture interventions for local communities to make impact on their own.

To explore this topic, I break down the relevant parts using the Nuru Kenya Agriculture Program as an example.

First, a foundational question: What is indigenous, traditional or local knowledge?  These terms – often used interchangeably – describe a body of knowledge, know-how, and practices developed and maintained by peoples about their history of interaction with the natural environment.  In development work and academics, indigenous knowledge has become increasingly valued to understand, interact with, and implement projects in communities.

Indigenous knowledge is integral to Nuru International’s work to promote sustainable and scalable projects that communities eventually run by themselves. Nuru International staff generally come from outside the country and/or region. Indigenous knowledge helps them build trust with local counterparts, interpret the environment through the eyes of local people, and, ultimately, to create and implement programs with partner communities. On the contrary, if Nuru International staff lacked an intimate understanding of indigenous knowledge, they would have no common ground with local people.

Respect and understanding of indigenous knowledge, however, does not obviate a role for what we might call outside, modern, or Western knowledge. Nuru International staff bring a wealth of knowledge from Western universities, work in developing countries, and their life experiences.  There isn’t necessarily a very clear dichotomy here, and that’s the point. The Nuru International development model relies on synergizing modern and indigenous knowledge to create and implement robust solutions. The Agriculture Program in Kenya exemplifies this well.

Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program employs farm input loans, trainings, extension, group work, and loan repayment to help farmers increase crop yields of maize (corn) in a sustainable way. While there is a robust indigenous knowledge base around farming generally in Kenya, mistaken and missing information on modern farming techniques poses a challenge to optimizing agricultural yields.  The concern is to understand and bridge this information gap to increase yields, and thus help communities grow themselves out of extreme poverty.

The information gap is most pronounced in the use of modern farm inputs, which the Nuru Kenya Agriculture Program provides on loan. Many farmers don’t know how to correctly use synthetic fertilizers (missing knowledge). Other farmers mistakenly believe that more is better, and spread the fertilizer around their field (mistaken knowledge). Decomposed animal dung – a traditional fertilizer – works well when liberally spread over a field. Synthetic fertilizers, however, must be applied in a particular way to maize to maximize fertilizer uptake, minimize run-off and avoid root damage. Nuru Kenya staff correct missing and mistaken knowledge by training farmers on efficient and proper farm input use.

Local knowledge forms the basis upon which more rigorous guidance is applied to help farmers. For instance, farmers know that they need to space plants apart to allow them to grow well, but Nuru Kenya staff teach the more robust technique of planting with a string along a particular spacing of 30 cm by 75 cm for optimal maize yields. For other core farming skills such as site selection, ground preparation, weeding, and harvesting, Nuru Kenya staff similarly complement the basis of traditional agriculture knowledge with modern farming knowledge.

Other forms of traditional knowledge are used as is in the Nuru Kenya Agriculture model. For example, farmers organize themselves into groups with their neighbors to work and learn together. This group structure is deeply rooted in the traditionally collectivist society of Kenya.

Still other forms of traditional knowledge are actually amended entirely by the Nuru Kenya Agriculture Program. For example, the Agriculture Program introduces a modern conception of loans, which challenges the traditional custom of gift-giving. However, this change from gifts to loans has been well accepted in the Kenya project to become a foundational block of financial sustainability.

Indigenous knowledge is fundamental to Nuru International’s work in Kenya, Ethiopia, and beyond.  Nuru International relies on traditional knowledge where it helps offer quality choices and build agency for local communities. However, indigenous knowledge is not infallible. Correcting and complementing mistaken or missing knowledge is a valuable function for an international development organization to play. Sometimes, outside ideas challenge traditional conceptions. This is beneficial where the process intimately involves local communities and the outcome helps communities. Nuru International’s poverty alleviation interventions involve coming together with local people, on the basis of mutual respect and trust, to create and implement programs to better rural livelihoods and free communities from extreme poverty.

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These quality solutions criteria – impact, sustainability, and scalability – define the work we do at Nuru. Impact means we achieve our goal in a measurable and significant way. However, making impact to significantly improve livelihoods must also be sustainable – financially and organizationally – to keep producing impact over the long term. Layered on impact and sustainability is scalability, keeping programs simple and easily replicable to spread worldwide under the guidance of local leaders.

To consider the Agriculture Program’s work and areas for innovation, it helps to categorize program interventions. According to the technical compendium Proven Successes in Agricultural Development, agriculture programs typically fall under one of several categories:

1)    Intensifying staple food production

2)    Expanding the role of markets

3)    Improving food quality and human nutrition

4)    Integrating people and the environment

5)    Reforming economy-wide policies

6)    Diversifying out of major cereals

1,2)  Nuru’s work falls primarily under the first two categories of staple food production and market access.

• In Kenya, Nuru Agriculture has worked primarily with maize, which is a staple crop for household consumption.
• Nuru’s agribusiness division helps farmers with market access, both in obtaining fertilizers and seeds on loan and at a competitive price and in selling surplus maize to Nuru’s maize trading business.
• These two areas are the principle focus of Nuru’s Agriculture program and together help achieve our overarching goal of ending extreme poverty in remote, rural areas by creating a sustainable economic base in those communities.

3,4)  Nuru’s agriculture work creates impact on the third and fourth categories – human nutrition and environment.

• The maize yields of Nuru farmers provide enough food for the caloric requirements of the household for the year.
• However, maize alone does not supply many important macro and micro-nutrients. Nuru’s healthcare program has helped fill this gap, for example by providing access to the nutritional supplement moringa leaf.
• Nuru’s agriculture program helps care for the environment by promoting proper crop management through crop rotation, site selection, and adequate fertilizer use.

5)  Nuru’s Agriculture Program has not yet worked in economy-wide policy reform.

• Nuru’s projects are principally grassroots and community-based.
• Nuru Agriculture actively collaborates with the Government of Kenya – Ministry of Agriculture insofar as community work partnerships, but we have not worked in policy development or reform.

6)  Nuru has not worked on crop diversification outside of major cereals.

• Since our focus has been on the staple crop maize, we have not yet expanded our focus to other non-cereals high value cash crops.
• Consideration of non-cereals cash crops remains for future research.

The future development of the agriculture model could grow to consider many different topics including farmer organization in cooperative structures, vegetable gardens for household nutrition, high value cash crops, macro-economic policy reform, agroforestry applications, and organic farming.

The constantly changing world and the future of Nuru scaling to different countries demands that Nuru’s agriculture model is flexible to include different types of interventions. These interventions must fit local needs and circumstances, which in turn determine program goals and fit into Nuru’s integrated model of development. At every step program interventions must fulfill a rigorous evaluation of quality solutions criteria – impact, scalability and sustainability. Ultimately, local leaders will run programs using quality solutions criteria to innovate past challenges on their own.  At present we are working with maize in Kenya, while we constantly adapt and research for the challenges of tomorrow.

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Nuru staffs itself from the ground up to the top leadership with local Kenyan staff.  International staff works to support Kenyan staff, with the emphasis on a gradual shift towards independence from international support.  The end goal is a financially and organizationally sustainable and scalable NGO – Nuru Kenya.  The vehicle driving towards this goal, in today’s example, is the leadership’s program lessons on roles and responsibilities.

The Agriculture Program staff, which I serve as counterpart, have taken full advantage of their recent leadership lessons to together create a plan to better serve farmers.  We have worked together to draw out some problems and inefficiencies.  We have created new roles within the program to better achieve the goal of increasing crop yields for extremely poor farmers.  For example, when faced with an over-burdened upper leadership, the staff has suggested splitting up roles so that certain staff can focus on the field while others perform critical office and support functions.  Together, local and international staff created a staff structure, as well as the particulars of roles and responsibilities for the new positions that we set forth.

This approach differs radically from other organizations.  Many organizations have complex program models where highly educated, highly paid foreign staffers coordinate all the particulars of operations, leaving local staff to implement small and simple tasks.  Other organizations attempt to impose a model upon local staff, which works well until a challenge arises and local staff has no authority or knowledge to adapt to that challenge.  Still other programs are very simple and remain quite small with little aspiration to grow, and thus achieve some measure of sustainability without scalability.

Nuru has the aim of achieving both sustainability and scalability, which are often incongruous and seldom achieved in tandem anywhere in the development world.  Nuru pursues this challenge through a hybrid model that combines the best of what many other NGOs are doing.  Local staff is involved in the grassroots operations, but also in the highest leadership positions.  Capable international staffers provide support to local staff, but exit criteria are clear and progress towards those criteria is steady.  Local staff and international staff work together intimately, yet international staff work on rotations to avoid dependence on any particular individual.  Local staff is paid salaries at Kenyan wage rates, and international fellows support the Kenyans on a volunteer basis.  Nuru is full of such contrasts that ultimately define what makes the model different.

Despite all the contrasts, in working methods, models and cultures, the principle of co-creation, or working together, guides our work and builds up our local staff’s ability to scale operations and confront challenges.  Co-creating a new organizational structure means that Nuru Agriculture will be able to achieve its goal this year, and has helped build capacity so that years from now local staff can aptly solve the bigger problems independently.  Ultimately, the critical thinking and leadership skills of local staff are instrumental for them to achieve their goal of ending extreme poverty in their communities in a sustainable and scalable way.

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The loan concept hinges on three elements: 1) the extreme poor have no or very little access to credit, 2) much less at reasonable interest rates, and 3) have a difficult time finding reasonable supplies and prices of inputs at local markets.

1) Nuru’s target audience consists of those subsistence farmers that do not have enough food to eat during certain months of the year (the hunger season).  They have no savings and few assets besides land, making access to traditional loan products prohibitive.  Nuru Agriculture offers an innovative loan product that specifically targets the extreme poor with a small loan of roughly USD$70.  This provides the capitol to spur income generating activities amongst smallholder Kenyan agriculturalists.

2) Moreover, many traditional loan products to farmers are designed for time periods and at interest rates – often more than 30% – that have the farmer losing money over a field season.  Various reasons compel high interest rates, including the high risk of loan clients (few assets, savings, and limited income potential), volatile price fluctuations, and in some cases simply motivated by the desire to generate profit.  Nuru Agriculture counters the high risk of first time loan clients by training the farmers on loan and farming concepts, employing group loan repayment, and working closely with farmers to establish a strong relationship that ensures their success in the field which helps repay the loan.  Nuru counters price fluctuations by purchasing and storing inputs when prices are low at wholesale.  Nuru Agriculture considers profit generation as an essential activity for economic sustainability, but balances this with concerns of social welfare and accessibility to loan products.

3) Shortfalls in seed and fertilizer supply, paired with consequent elevated prices due to scarcity of commodities, are yearly occurrences in much of Kenya during the December-January planting season.  Nuru Agriculture counters this by buying fertilizers and seeds when prices are low and supplies are high, and then passes on the savings and benefits of a secure supply of inputs to the farmer.

Nuru Agriculture ensures that the main components of its loan program meet the needs of smallholder farmers in financial terms.  Considering the agricultural aspects in the input loan package, however, is essential to meet farmer needs for improved seed and fertilizer.

This year Nuru Agriculture is distributing roughly 36 metric tons of improved maize seed and some 360 metric tons of fertilizers.

The maize seed we offer are those cultivars most demanded by farmers in the area, consisting of different drought and disease resistant hybrid varieties developed and certified for use in Kenya.  We stock particular varieties as they meet the needs of farmers in each area: water-tolerant, fast-growing varieties to give farmers in flood prone areas a quick turnaround; drought-tolerant, longer-season, higher yielding varieties to benefit those areas with a longer period of consistent rains; and everything else in between.  At this time we do not offer genetically modified (GM) seeds, have not developed our own certified seeds, nor do we provide options for open pollinated variety (OPV) seed.  We are currently in research and development of other seed sources and types.

Nuru Agriculture provides two types of fertilizers, one appropriate for use at the time of planting and the other used during early crop establishment as a top-dressing.  Fertilizer use provides the boost in nutrients that crops need to grow optimally.  We are currently researching organic fertilizers to evaluate their feasibility to substantially increase maize output.

Agriculture input loans are one part of the equation proposed by Nuru Agriculture to significantly increase crop yields.  Nuru Agriculture recognizes and respects the hard work and perseverance demonstrated by Nuru staff and farmers to work the land together in a sustainable way for rural livelihoods and the environment.

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In the November Ag blog, we learned about farmer empowerment through base education – an event from which over 3,000 farmers graduated (with 2,000 of these farmers brand new to Nuru).  At base education, farmers learn the basic theoretical tenets of Nuru.  Afterwards, farmers attend a series of practical and timely technical trainings, beginning with ground preparation, pacing, planting, and gapping.  These farm management basics, plus the essential farm input loans, take farmers from yields of three bags of maize per acre to fifteen and twenty sacks of maize per acre.

The technical training series diverges from traditional agriculture extension in ways that help it adapt to the cultural and societal context.  During base education farmer groups were organized by the same members who comprise them.  The group learns farming best practices together, works the land together, and pays the loans together.  This group concept plays off Kenyan culture.

Groups form support networks within the community and draw out community members to serve as trainers and leaders.  The agriculture program staff, themselves farmers from the same rural communities, teach the group chairman, who in turn pass on the knowledge to the members of their groups.  This training of trainers encourages a type of grassroots development as community members learn from their neighbors, who themselves eventually become the next leaders and Nuru staffers.

The agriculture team also employs best management practices such as demonstration-based learning, appropriate language and technology, and close supervision of farm activities following trainings.  While Nuru International supports local and traditional knowledge, the agriculture program teaches modern farming practices based in principles of ease of implementation, proven science, and sustainability (especially for the natural and economic environment).  Importantly, maize agriculture is relatively new in Kuria, Kenya, and has been largely unsuccessful because of lack of agriculture inputs and traditional farming methods.  Nuru promotes a more intensive investment and care for the land and crops, with the aim of eliminating the period during which people go hungry (the hunger season).

Traditionally, ground preparation was not planned for optimal crop establishment.  In some areas, steep or very rocky sites were chosen and cleared, with resulting erosion.  In other areas, there was too much shade or soil was too compact for proper crop development.  Nuru teaches farmers to choose flat, sunny areas with live and dead barriers to prevent soil erosion.  Tillage and composting with animal and green manures are also promoted, and burning is discouraged.  These practices strike the balance between environmental concerns, and proper crop development.

Farmers traditionally used inexact plant spacing and fertilizer amounts, resulting in wasted land and inputs.  During pacing training, farmers learn to measure their land by walking the length and width, each pace having been measured to equal a number of meters.  These measurements are essential to ensure that farmers use the correct plant spacing and fertilization rates on their plots.

The Nuru planting method ensures proper spacing for nutrients and sunlight, freedom from competition from other vegetation, and appropriate development of grains.  Planting training teaches farmers to use the appropriate amount of fertilizer and one maize seed per hole, each hole having been precisely spaced at 25 cm by 75 cm.  This new teaching differs drastically from traditional practice, where farmers would broadcast seeds randomly, or use a stick to poke a hole in the soil and pour in a few seeds (dippling).  The spacing was highly irregular, resulting in a field with patches of overly dense and other overly sparse areas.

Planting practices also did not provide the jump start of fertilizer that maize requires in the highly weathered soils of Kuria, Kenya.  Compounding the problem, two or more maize seeds competed with the same meager supply of nutrients, and farmers, thinking more is better, would let all of them grow with resultant poor production.  The last technical training is gapping, during which farmers learn to replant in any areas where seeds did not germinate correctly.  Nuru teaches planting methods that correct the problems found with traditional crop establishment methods.

Together, the technical training series forms the basis of proper maize production, setting farmers on the path to food security and income generation.

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Each of Nuru’s program models – agriculture, community economic development (CED), water and sanitation, healthcare, and education – are built on the foundations of sustainability and scalability. Agriculture leads and drives the other Nuru programs.  Farmers become Nuru members through a series of trainings and participation in agriculture loans, thereby increasing their crop yields. At the harvest date, farmers have enough food for subsistence and sale, improving their basic living standards and generating income.

The other Nuru programs follow up on and integrate with the agriculture program to bring a holistic community and household development. For example, the CED Program facilitates farmers to form savings groups so that their extra income is stored safely as cash to be used in case of an emergency or, better yet, for investment in other income generating activities. The healthcare, water and sanitation, and education programs similarly integrate with the agriculture program. The involvement of farmers in other Nuru programs starts with mobilization and agriculture training.

Farmer mobilization and training commences with a general farmer meeting – the first introduction to Nuru – followed by base education and a series of specific technical trainings.

While it would seem that farmer trainings should immediately start in on technical topic areas in agriculture, Nuru has found that farmers should first be trained on a set of principles encapsulated in what is termed “base education” training. The two-day course covers life skills and broader concepts for farmer participation in Nuru programs. Nuru Agriculture equips and trains farmers to increase maize yields; Nuru as a whole aims to empower individuals to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty.

Base education is far from a simple list of procedural rules, but rather through base education farmers come to understand how and why the actions that Nuru promotes will lead them out of extreme poverty. Nuru facilitates farmer empowerment, so that farmers use knowledge and tools to assume an active and responsible role in changing their lives, instead of taking a back seat to poverty alleviation.

Base education achieves its impact of mobilizing and empowering extremely poor farmers through an agenda of five topic areas.

• Service Leadership: Teaches farmers to become advocates that serve their communities as humble stewards of their natural and human resources.  Nuru uses small farmer groups as functional work units who assign their own chairmen, the aspiring local service-minded leaders.
• Tools & Knowledge: Informs farmers of the importance of implements and trainings to achieve goals. Specifically, farmers learn the importance of inputs (seed and fertilizer) and agriculture trainings to achieve the goal of increased crop yields.
• Groups & Hard Work: Encourages farmers to use their neighbors and communities as an interdependent support network that can achieve goals through hard work and effort. Nuru uses groups as a culturally appropriate mechanism because Kenyan society is traditionally collectivist (tuko pamoja – we are together – is a Swahili-language adage popular in Kenya). Groups work together to learn and reinforce agriculture knowledge, labor the land together to plant and weed on time, and repay their loans together.
• Credit & Loans: Informs farmers that agriculture loans from Nuru are not gifts, but rather are meant to be repaid. Nuru uses both positive reinforcement and analysis of consequences to encourage loan repayment – farmers understand that if they do not repay their loan there will not be funds for loan issue to their fellow community members, to their groups, or even for themselves in future years.
• Savings: Farmers learn through role plays and group discussion that planning and saving cash for the future is an important part of their household and community livelihood.

Upon successful graduation from base education training, the participants are inscribed as Nuru members and provided access to small agriculture loans and trainings for maize production on one acre. The loan product offers improved maize seed and quality fertilizers in a timely fashion and at an accessible price. The agriculture technical trainings include everything from land preparation and planting, to weeding and fertilizing, to harvesting and grains processing – all of which are central to achieving increased crop yield.

Nuru issues small loans and imparts technical agriculture skills to thousands of farmers yearly, enabling them to excel at maize farming. Base education, and the life skills and programmatic components it teaches, empowers farmers with the knowledge and tools to sustainably lift themselves out of poverty. Together, technical agriculture skills, high quality agriculture inputs, and base education are the first steps towards the Nuru vision of holistic community development. Tuko pamoja! (We are together!)

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