CED Program Manager, Vivian Lu, talks with Moherai Joseph, Agriculture Field Manager, after the recent harvest. Joseph shows how the new method of shelling maize is better than what they did in the past.

I walked hurriedly through the muddy field trying to keep up.  I was doing my weekly field visits with Andrew, two of his Field Managers, and Gugwa, one of his Field Officers.  I love these days of trekking through the ten-foot high maize to check in on the progress of the farmers and listen to the challenges they are facing or just happily listen to a farmer gushing with pride as she shows off her maize to us.  On this particular day though, as I swept aside the big leafy maize winding our way through shamba (farm) after shamba of tall maize, I was deep in thought and unusually quiet.  Normally, I used these days to try and engage Andrew and the Field Officers in conversation in an attempt to learn more Kiswahili or Kikuria from them (they are incredibly patient teachers), but today I had grown silent as I got lost in my own thoughts.  

Throughout the past weeks, I had been contemplating a radical new move in strategy for the project – as a test to measure progress in our leadership sustainability.  I will be leaving the project in mid-July, and I hadn’t hired an agriculture program manager to replace me.  Our typical model is to rotate our western staff out every seven months to prevent dependency from forming, in the Nuru Kenya community leaders and on individual personalities on the western team.  These Program mangers (western staff) act as mentors and advisers to our Nuru Kenya counterparts and guide the overall strategy of the project toward exit at year five.  Program managers do a one month turnover with new program mangers coming into the project to maintain continuity, but the Kenyan team forms the main consistency and face of the project to the community – further empowering them toward a sustainable exit.

All program mangers had been identified and hired except for agriculture.  The agriculture program here in Kuria is the furthest along of the five programs in our track toward sustainability, so I had decided to try a somewhat risky experiment.  I decided that we would “gap” the agriculture program on the western staff side for a period of nine months – leaving a Kenyan fully in charge of strategy, operations, and scaling of the project.  This is a very critical time in our project because we are about to go from serving 900 farmers to serving approximately 1,700 farmers in this next rainy season – plus we are scaling to entirely new divisions outside our normal operating area.  If we can prove successful in this 9 month experiment during this crucial phase of our development, we will be well on our way toward leadership sustainability of the project.  Andrew will be the key to the success or failure of that experiment.

Andrew Sinda is the leader of the agriculture program for Nuru Kenya.  He has grown to become a selfless leader respected widely throughout our area of operations.  He inspires motivation and hard work in all the farmers he leads.  He is a humble, quiet servant leader who is welcomed everywhere he goes.  The farmers trust him with everything they have and they trust him with their future hopes and dreams for their families.  Why?  Because he cares for them and he has earned that trust.  Andrew doesn’t sit behind a desk dictating the fate of the 900 farm families he currently leads.  He is in the field constantly…leading every day by example.  He inspires his farmers and all who work under him to achieve levels of performance they didn’t think previously possible.  I have grown to really respect and trust Andrew as well.  He teaches me lessons in the field every week, and he doesn’t even know it – not just about Kiswahili – but about leadership.

I was nervous about this new experiment in leadership for the project, but I knew that if anyone could do it, Andrew could.  He dropped behind a bit leaving Gugwa to talk with the Field Managers about the shambas we were approaching.  “Mr. Jake,” he said.  “You are somehow quiet today.”  This guy doesn’t miss anything.  “I know,” I said as I shook myself out of my contemplative state.  I knew it was time to tell him.  “Andrew, you know I am leaving in July, right?”  “Yes.  You have told me.  Who will be coming to replace you this time?” he asked.  “Well…that’s just it,” I said.  “No one is coming.  I have been meaning to tell you, Andrew.”  I took a deep breath.  “You will be the next program manager for the agriculture program.  No mzungu (white dude) is coming to lead the ag program with this next team.”  I stopped walking and looked at his face to gauge his reaction.  “Ahhh, OK,” he said thoughtfully as he looked down.  He looked back up at me.  “But I am fearing you to go.”  My heart sank a bit.  “He’s worried that he isn’t ready.  It must be an overwhelmingly heavy feeling to know that he will be leading this without any help,” I thought.  I began to worry about my decision.  Maybe I had been a bit too aggressive in our strategy.  “It’s going to be all right Andrew.  You are more than capable of handling this project.  You have the tools you need, and I know that you will do well.  The farmers trust you and you are ready,” I said.  Andrew looked at me with his bright smiling eyes that I suddenly noticed were full of confidence.  “You are not understanding me,” he said.  “In truth, we will be fine.  We are ready.  You have trained us, and we will not let you down.”  He paused.  “I am only fearing because you are my family and my friend and I will miss you.”  He smiled, turned and disappeared into the maize ahead of us to link up with the others chatting with the next farmer up ahead.  “And I you, my friend,” I thought.  “And I you.”

Last week I told you a story about a Nuru leader that has me excited. Andrew is just one person among many potential leaders. In order to make it possible for communities to become entirely self-sustaining within five years, we focus on two areas of finances and leadership. This week I am going to mention a little about both, but more specifically how Chelsea Barabas is going to be developing the leadership curriculum. 

Financial Sustainability.  

We are trying to achieve financial sustainability by pursuing revenue generation projects in all five areas of development: agriculture, watsan, health, education, and community economic development.  These models include interest income from agriculture loans, agribusiness revenues from maize trading and speculation, a well buy-in program, micro-lending, transaction fees from mobile banking services, etc.  I am excited to report that some of these initiatives are already starting to bear fruit in the Kuria project.  We measure and track our movement toward financial sustainability of the project by monitoring something we call the sustainability ratio: revenues generated by the project divided by expenses of the project.  A sustainability ratio of 100% means that the project is financially sustainable.  I have projected that by the by the end of 2010, our sustainability ratio will be close to 35%!  I am very excited about these early results.

Leadership Sustainability.

I am passionate about leadership.  Most of my adult life has been about leadership, and learning to understand its importance in achieving lofty goals/missions/results in any field.  I am what I call a life learner in leadership because the more I learn, the more I realize that I have a long, long way to go.  I have learned many lessons – most of them the hard way by messing up – about effective leadership, and I have tried to apply these lessons as I have grown as a leader.  At Nuru, training and equipping service minded leaders in our partner communities is fundamentally the most important piece of our model, and we are very serious about this task.  Recently, we started a project lead by Chelsea Barabas (one of our international program managers) to codify our leadership emphasis by creating the leadership curriculum by which we train all Nuru leaders – international and domestic.  This leadership curriculum will include a plan to identify and screen for effective leaders in a project and then train and equip them to own and then grow their programs throughout the five years of the project and beyond.  It is an aggressive project that Chelsea will be tackling over the next 9 months that includes in-depth research into other organizations and corporation and a close look at (through research and interviews) effective leaders of all shapes and sizes from all sectors.  She will be studying what the best of the best say about how to become and how to train effective leaders.

Thanks for reading. More project updates to come soon.

Join Nuru CEO Jake Harriman and Agriculture Field Staff in this field video update as they inspect the shambas (fields) of Nuru farmers' maize.

“Habari umeamuka?” Evans said…as he said every morning at 5:45am.  I was tired and had just finished the pathetic little workout that I do these days to try and maintain some level of physical fitness.  I unlocked the gate and shook Evans’ hand.  “Tutaonana jioni,” (see you tonight) I said.  He smiled and headed out the gate.  Ironically, Evans (our nighttime security guard) knows almost as little Swahili as I do.  His mother tongue is Kisii, and he is much more comfortable with that – or sometimes even English.  I am always amazed at our friends’ ability here to learn 3 or 4 languages fairly well while I try to understand about 1.3 languages at best – routinely struggling through a conversation by piecing together phrases of languages that I have tried (and failed) to learn.  I work on my Swahili with everyone here, but with Evans, sometimes I need to check with Philip for accuracy.  “Habari umeamuka…”  Evans said these words to me every single morning as I went about the daily “changing of the guard” that involved Evans himself, a trained security guard, turning his post over to Thomas, the next-door neighbor who is one of the leading craftsman in the area for poison-tipped arrows.  For whatever reason, Evans’ words stuck with me this morning as I headed back into the house in the dark to carry on with the morning.  “Habari umeamuka?” literally means something along the lines of “how was your awakening?”  This was Evans’ friendly attempt each morning to greet me and ask me how I had slept.  “How was your awakening…” I paused as I started to duck inside.  I turned and watched the sun begin coloring the sky and chasing away remaining stars that greeted me each morning as I watched under the spectacular Kenyan sky.  For the first time, I began to internalize the words Evans spoke to me every morning and ponder on how they seemed to be so fitting to me of our world here now.

Awakening.  Nuru has been a journey of awakening in my life.  For many people, the understanding of the absolute crisis that our friends here and millions of others around the world suffer under every single day isn’t that difficult to reach.  Once they see a glimpse of it, they see that the injustice of another human being just like them suffering horribly from completely preventable, unnecessary causes just isn’t right.  Not only is it not right, but they feel compelled to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.  Not me.  I would classify myself as a hard-headed, world-class idiot.  I had been exposed to the issues of extreme poverty most of my life, but I would consistently turn a blind eye and say, “That’s somebody else’s problem.  Those people aren’t like me.”  I was so wrong.  Heaven and earth would have to move to awaken me from my indifference and heartless apathy…and they did.

Combat changes things in an individual and writes stories in your heart that cannot be unwritten.  The stories I lived and witnessed revealed a whole new world to me that I had refused to look at up to that point in my life.  Stories of desperation born out of a basic lack of choice and opportunity…two words I had taken for granted every day.  I saw mothers, fathers, and yes, children – making decisions to end life (usually their own) in the hopes that they could somehow save or give hope to the lives of those they loved so dearly.  Desperation colliding with indifference breeds violent, irrational decisions.  A haze in my head began to clear as I began to see a disturbing connection between the actions taken by those we were fighting and the motivation behind those actions.  This reality was beaten into me time and time again until finally, I came to realize that perhaps one way to fight the enemy we waged war against was to attack the foundation of the movement.  Take away the desperation, and you take away the mass recruiting population and army of individuals desperately seeking choice.  Extreme poverty did not create terrorism and insurgency, but it was certainly the fuel that was enabling the movement of hatred to grow in numbers and power at such an alarming rate.  This awakening propelled me to leave my old life and attempt to begin eroding that foundation that I saw just beneath the surface of the “enemy.”

Now let me tell you about a much braver awakening than the awakening that happened within me.  An awakening of a potential and fire within some of the most incredible human beings I have ever encountered…the extreme poor.  I have learned so many lessons these last 7 years of my life – from the day I crossed the Kuwait/Iraq border in March 2003 up until today – lessons that have taught me about bravery, selfless compassion, and perseverance in the face of absolutely insurmountable odds.  Lessons that taught me what the faces of love, courage and sacrifice really look like.  Who were my teachers?  The extremely poor.  I have been so humbled to learn from and come alongside this incredible class of individuals.  These guys are braver, more resourceful, and in most cases more intelligent than I will ever be.  They have survived through experiences and conditions in life that I would have completely folded under.  It is these lessons that have shaped Nuru’s work and the way we view the extreme poor.  The poor are not helpless children that must be coddled and pampered or led along by the hand toward a better life because they are just too ignorant or incapable to get there on their own.  No.  In contrast, the poor possess an incredible mountain of untapped potential and fire that, if realized, will revolutionize the way we interact as global citizens in our world today.  Suddenly, there would be 1 billion new customers in the global marketplace.  Imagine millions of educated, trained individuals searching for the cure for malaria or the cure for cancer; designing better public transit systems in overcrowded cities; becoming the entrepreneurs that will act as competitors for the West in the global marketplace – pushing innovation and design to the next level; and forming a whole new class of brilliant young leaders to create political systems and governance that push toward peace and global collaboration.  We are so quick to discount the poor, but within their ranks lies the next Jonas Salk, Albert Einstein, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Martin Luther King , and Kofi Annan.  Why do we think they are so different?

I have seen this awakening here in Kuria, Kenya.  I have seen the power that can result when one person regains his sense of dignity and self worth and really begins to see that there is hope and that the world does not have to be a helpless string of pathetic choices…who will eat tonight – my oldest 14 year old son or my youngest 2 year old daughter?  Do I spend the money I have saved for tomorrow’s meal on transport to get my infant dying of malaria to the nearest clinic or watch the other children crying of hunger all night for another night.  These are not fun pictures.  These are not fun choices to make.  In fact, these are not choices at all.  Things are different here now, though.  I have seen a woman go from this desperate situation of no choices to now feeding her children every night of the week and paying for her oldest to go to secondary school.  I have seen leaders rise up in their community and bring hope and a clear path to a better life to thousands of their own people.  I have seen a people owning the solutions to their own problems and gaining speed and vision to grow those solutions to impact an entire nation.

Awakenings are powerful.  Awakenings can change individuals.  Awakenings can change communities. Awakenings can change countries.  Awakenings can change our world – but they don’t just happen. Individuals from all walks of life – people like me, you, and my brave friends here like Philip and Milka and Eliza and Chacha – must allow ourselves to take a step in that direction.  The first step of any awakening for all of us – no matter where we start from – is just to open our eyes…and see.

In order to make our projects truly sustainable, Nuru works with the community to create innovative revenue generation models that will eventually be able to meet all the expenses of the project – making the community truly financially self-sufficient.  Many times, these ideas come from our Kenyan team.  Philip and his team are incredibly resourceful and are very good at identifying gaps in the market – essentially identifying opportunities for arbitrage.  This has been perhaps most apparent in the agriculture program.

For those of you not familiar with Nuru’s initial agriculture project here in Kuria, we loan farmers high quality seed and fertilizer and then train them on how to use it properly to dramatically increase their maize yields.  That loan gets repaid at harvest.  There are a lot of ways to recover the loan.  We have learned from other organizations like our partner, One Acre Fund, lessons learned from various repayment schemes.  Farmers can repay in cash or they can repay in maize.  Last season, we had our farmers repay in maize.  At harvest, we went out into the markets and got the going price for maize to establish what we call the “strike price” for that week.  We used the strike price to calculate the number of kg’s it would take for a given farmer to repay her loan, and then the farmer would bring that amount of maize to a Nuru buying station to repay the loan.

Last season as I was working at one of the stations with Philip, I noticed him staring off into the distance with a sort of excited look; an expression I have become accustomed to at this point.  I knew he had something brewing.  “What brilliant idea are you coming up with this time, Chairman?” I asked.  He looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You know…many of these farmers are asking us to buy their maize for them – all their maize – not just the maize for the loan repayment.”  “Yeah I know,” I said.  “But as you know, we don’t have any way to store that much maize, and besides, we need to focus on loan repayment.  We are not a maize buyer.  There are plenty of them out there.”  “That’s just my point,” Philip said.  “There are tons of buyers out there – scalping our farmers by buying their maize at a ridiculously low price and then making a lot of money by selling it in the urban markets that are too far away for farmers to transport their maize to.”  I knew he was right.  Middle men would buy a farmer’s maize near their farm for 5Ksh/kg and then sell it to buyers from Nairobi for 17-18Ksh/kg.  Why in the world would a farmer put up with this??  Well, for a farmer to get her maize to the market, she has to carry it one bag at a time (each bag weighs approximately 200lbs) for 1-2 hours to the nearest market where she could get a fair price because she cannot afford the transportation that the middle man can afford.

“Well Chairman,” I said.  “What do you suggest?”  “We need to build a granary,” he said.  “A very big one right in the center of our villages out here.  Farmers can come and sell their maize to us at a fair price.  They can sell all their maize to us – not just what is required for the loan repayment, and we could store it all in the granary.  We could then use it to make money for Nuru.”  His eyes brightened as he got rolling with his idea.  “We could buy at a price slightly lower than market price in Tanzania and other local markets and then sell to those markets – still serving our farmers while making a profit – essentially acting as a maize trader, but providing fair prices for the farmers.  In addition, we could keep some of the maize they sell to us – maybe 50%-75% - in the granary and wait to sell it in May or June.  After the harvest is finished and the farmers have sold all of their maize, the market price of maize will begin rising until it meets peak levels in May and June just before the next harvest when maize supplies are low in urban markets.  We then sell the remainder of our maize at a price 20%-30% higher than we could get during harvest season to those markets.  We could capture all that value and dump it back into the project to help subsidize the other programs that are not making as much money.”

I stood there dumbfounded.  “But why hasn’t anyone else done this?” I asked.  “These maize traders around here are too small,” he said.  “Until now, no one has come into the deep interior with the ability to mobilize enough resources to construct a granary of that size to capitalize on these inefficiencies in the market.”  I was blown away.  It was so simple, but it was genius.  We performed some more market research, I consulted with a few outside experts, and then we began the work of planning and constructing the Nyametaburo granary.  Philip and his team pitched the idea to the farmers, and they were totally on board. More and more, the farmers have demonstrated a desire to really own the Nuru project.  They believe that they can do this…they can end extreme poverty in their villages.  Each family contributed 100Ksh toward the project.  

Seven months later, I found myself reflecting thoughtfully on that conversation I had with the Chairman as I looked at the 200 tons of maize now sitting in our granary ready for sale.  There have certainly been many challenges along the way in the maize trading business (drying the maize to prevent bacteria growth, ensuring pests don’t destroy it, price fluctuations in the market, transportation and other logistics issues of buying stations, miscommunications with farmers, etc.), but this June, Philip’s idea that he created that day as he struggled to serve his people more effectively could, in just one season fraught with  all the challenges of our inexperience, turn into $10,000-$15,000 profit that will push the Kuria project forward as we strive for financial self-sufficiency.  Philip and his team continue to simply amaze me as I learn from them.  They are teaching me every day that this dream and this vision is simply about an awakening…it is about awaking the power of the poor.

Nuru CEO and Agriculture Program Manager Jake Harriman gives up update from the floor of Nuru's brand new granary. The first maize of the short rain season has just been harvested!

An update from CEO/Agriculture Program Manager Jake Harriman on the construction of the new granary in Kuria.

The success of Nuru's Agriculture Loan Program (300% maize increase) created the need for a large location for the farmers to store their surplus grain. Working in partnership with the community (they provide the labor, Nuru provides the materials), together we broke ground on a brand new granary.  Get a further update from Nuru CDC Chairman Philip Mohochi.

The success of Nuru's Agriculture Loan Program (300% maize increase) created the need for a large location for the farmers to store their surplus grain. Working in partnership with the community (they provide the labor, Nuru provides the materials), together we broke ground on a brand new granary. Get the update from FT 3 and James Magaigwa, Agricultural Field Manager.

It’s amazing how providing access to simple information and resources can dramatically improve the lives of the extremely poor. In February, Nuru issued farmers in the Nyametaburo and Nyangiti communities a loan of maize seed and fertilizer. Why? Their soil was so depleted of nitrogen and phosphates (critical to crop growth and sustenance) that the people could not produce enough food to feed their families.

By training the people to prepare and plant their fields using innovative farming techniques, providing high quality fertilizer to replenish the soil and as well as excellent maize seed, our farmers are anticipating higher yields than at any period in recent history. For the first time in years farmers are going to be able to feed their children for the entire crop cycle! As you can see in the above picture, the increase produced by empowerment is nothing short of astonishing. These incredible results will go a long way towards building trust between Nuru and other community members now eager to join Nuru’s program.

In this work, one of the most important lessons that I have learned is that those suffering from extreme poverty are just like you and me in so many ways - they feel, they dream, they seek to improve the lives of their families, they laugh, and they mourn. They are incredibly intelligent and resourceful – always thinking of innovative new ways to meet the needs of their families. These brave souls have survived things that I never could have, and have come out on the other side stronger and more determined than before.

When it comes right down to it, the real reason that these folks lack choices in life – why they are unable to throw off the chains of extreme poverty – is that they lack access to basic information and resources needed to step on the first rung of the ladder of success. Providing tools to empower the people of Kuria to lift themselves out of extreme poverty is what Nuru does.

When I left their fields in late March, these farmers were just beside themselves with a happiness they had not known in years. It wasn’t just an empty happiness that comes from a handout – it was a deep happiness that comes from the realization that they are changing their lives forever.

Nuru's farm loan program is a critical foothold program for us here in the community. The farm loan program involves Nuru purchasing high quality inputs (fertilizer and seed) so that famers can dramatically increase their crop yields (400%-500%). At harvest, the farmers repay the loan and have plenty left over to feed their families for the next season (families currently go hungry for half of the season). Lastly, they reinvest in next year's inputs without the loan.

Sounds simple, right?  Guess again. The saga of our purchasing, transporting and distributing the farm loan inputs is a saga of epic proportions. To read the whole story, check out the full blog post at http://fightgoliath.blogspot.com/. For the short story, read on…

We have 450 farmers in the program...that's a lot of freakin inputs to buy up front. I had budgeted for a price point slightly above market rate in 2007. When we discovered that there was a huge spike in prices, though, we found ourselves way underfunded for the program. The government offered a subsidy, but because of a government scandal involving some MPs buying up all the subsidized fertilizer, there was a ripple effect around the country and distribution sites began experiencing shortages. There were even instances were riots broke out just north of us because groups of farmers had paid for fertilizer, but when they arrived to pick it up to plant this season, it was gone.

Because of these shortages, scandals, etc., the national NCPB branch in Nairobi was trying to get ANY excuse to cancel large orders of fertilizer. When we placed our order in November, we had to submit massive amounts of paperwork documenting every farmer in the program and the amounts they would be receiving. We also had to obtain a letter from the Ministry of Agriculture stating that we were, indeed, serving farmers in the Kuria District, and not just buying the fertilizer to sell across the border in Tanzania. It took me A LONG time and NUMEROUS meetings with the ministry to get that letter.

After the 4th or 5th meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture (mind you, I have to walk an hour to get to this place every time), I received a handwritten letter approving the purchase of our inputs. I took the letter to the NCPB and they finally allowed us to place the order - assuring me that the order would be in mid-December. We wrote a check for the equivalent of $50,000 to put a down payment on the inputs and place the order.

After MANY meetings and phone calls, we finally got the fertilizer into the local branch of the NCPB and they cashed our check on Feb 3. Still no sign of the seed, though, so I made the decision to cancel with NCPB seed order and source a private supplier in a town 3 hours north. Jumping through massive hoops, we were able to source the seed directly with the manufacturer and get it into a holding location in the community on the 4th...ready for issue on the 5th.

Morning of Feb 5...chaos. Our trucks showed up to pull the inputs out first thing in the morning at 7:00am. NCPB would not release the fertilizer! They said that the national NCPB branch in Nairobi had ordered them to not issue our fertilizer to us. I was already on location at one of the issue points in Taragwiti village. James, one of our Nuru Field Officers tried to get a hold of me to let me know what was going on, but I was in a serious cell phone dead spot in the village. He sent a runner to get word to me. When I received the message, I was FURIOUS. Nairobi was claiming that we didn't have the proper paperwork in. I immediately called the national branch. They informed me that they had canceled the order because the letter I had submitted in November WASN'T ON THE RIGHT LETTERHEAD! Are you kidding me?????  It was now 9:30am. The farmers had shown up at 9:00am ready to go. We had to go into crisis action mode.

After convincing the national branch manager to let us send him another letter on proper letterhead, Philip (our CDC Chairmen) running around to find a fax machine in the nearest village, and the national manager driving 45 minutes to SEE THE AUTHORIZATION FAX WITH HIS OWN EYES, the fertilizer was released and could be loaded onto trucks for delivery in Kuria.

After several other unbelievable setbacks, including one of the trucks breaking down, all the farmers received their inputs. They began planting last week and the rains arrived right on schedule.  It was a true miracle that the farmers received their inputs on time.  Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong - even after detailed contingency planning. I was so proud of the way that the Kenyan staff went into action as everything was falling apart. I am becoming more and more confident that they will be able to completely take over and run this project very soon - and lead their people out of extreme poverty forever.

Well, I hear that the sky is pretty much falling back home. With the investment banking industry going the way of the dodo, the Dow Jones fluctuating wildly, consumer confidence tanking, and rising food and energy prices, the current administration and the Fed seem to be left scratching their heads in utter confusion and frustration. Many Americans have been left with a growing uneasy feeling of insecurity as they watch helplessly while what once seemed to be immovable icons of security collapse like a house of cards. Security…that basic feeling that makes you feel like tomorrow is going to be OK – that everything will just work itself out – because, well…it just always does right?

I want you to look inside of yourself right now and just sit in that feeling of insecurity for a second. That feeling really sucks doesn’t it? Now imagine waking up and feeling that awful, gut-wrenching feeling…every day. Imagine that your insecurity stems – not from the question of whether or not you will be able to afford that second car or that sweet apartment you’ve been looking at in the city – but from whether or not you will be able to survive this next day. Imagine looking over at your children still asleep and praying that you will be able to scrape together enough shillings to be able to feed them just one meal to give them the strength to hang on another day.

Maize (corn) is the staple food for much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Almost every farmer here in Kenya grows maize to feed his/her family. There are two crop seasons that correspond to the two rainy seasons. Every March, farmers plant their one or two acres in maize – hoping to be able to grow enough maize to last their families until the next rainy season in August when the can plant again.

But there’s a problem. The soil has been farmed for so long without crop rotation that it has become drastically lacking in nitrogen and other nutrients necessary for high yields. Luckily, by simply including properly utilized fertilizer as part of the planting and maintenance procedure for their crops, farmers can dramatically increase their crop yields from 2-4 bags of maize per acre to 13-15 bags/acre! An increase in crop yields such as this can mean the difference between a family losing some of their children to starvation and being able to afford to send those same children to a private secondary school where they can receive a high quality education. The solution seems so hopeful and simple. Enter the global food crisis…

The UN World Food Program stated that rapidly rising food prices has drastically increased the world’s hungry – up almost 18% since 2005. The food crisis is causing a drastic increase in the demand for maize (a good thing) while simultaneously causing the prices of the inputs needed by the farmers (fertilizer and topdressing) to absolutely skyrocket (a very bad thing). Because of this, our farmers can’t afford to buy the fertilizer they so desperately need to be able to prevent the coming hunger season.

Our plan is to make a loan to the farmers in the form of high quality inputs (seed, fertilizer, and topdressing) to empower them to bust through that seemingly impossible barrier to entry. This simple concept will radically change the lives of approximately 500 farm families – impacting over 2,500 individuals in our pilot community in just one short year. The increase in yield will allow the farmers to pay back the loan and have enough maize for consumption to last the entire season. In addition, the surplus can be saved to purchase the inputs next season without a loan and pay for school and medical fees – making them truly self-sufficient.

Unfortunately, the barrier has risen to become an obstacle for even us to purchase the inputs – more than doubling the cost of the agriculture program to $50,000 more than we budgeted. We need to order this fertilizer NOW for these families in order to give them some hope of experiencing that elusive feeling that we call security. Right now as you read this, one investment packet of inputs for a family farming one acre of maize now costs approximately $120 – the equivalent of one third of one of these farmer’s annual income – but that number will be irrelevant when you wake up tomorrow. You can I can make a difference right now that will have a tangible, life-changing impact on real lives…real faces that I see and talk with every day here.

If this story has struck a chord with you today, I encourage you to get involved RIGHT NOW. I know that our nation is in the grip of a powerful fear right now, I ask you today to set that aside and consider the opportunity you have to make an immediate impact to bring security to another family on the other side of the world, or whom life and death is a real concern. God bless you.