Lucas Maidens's blog

It's my last day in the office, so this is likely to be my last post from the warm heart of Africa. Payt and I are just wrapping up reports and preparing presentations for sector team meetings over the weekend. We have profiles drawn up of our agrodealers, reports for EWB, CNFA, and AGRA being polished up, and some cool mindmaps of different market structure, dealing with different sized agrodealers, distribution networks and associations (to be posted when I figure out how to do it!).

After reading Tom's latest post, I decided I needed to write this one. Not to fuel the competition (although that's kind of fun too) but to share some of the differences from my experience. If you haven't already read it in great detail, it's probably best to at least skim his first.

This post is for me to gather my thoughts about my work as well as an effort to get other people (that would mean you!) involved and getting your thoughts.

What's the point?

20 days left in Malawi, and only 12 in the office. The work doesn't all end there, but some things are hard to do from the other side of the world. So here's the basic run-down of what I'm going to be doing for the rest of them. I'm all moved into and settled down in my new home, coming to work at the office 8 o'clock each morning. Payt and I have taken over the conference room. We have electricity and fairly good wireless internet, and only get kicked out for the occasional meeting. From here we're writing a number of reports, profiles and business models.

This post initially stated a while ago, but I was in a pretty disheartened mood, and my thoughts were rather jumbled, so I'm restarting, but thought it would be fun to include what I had, since I think it may get the point across just as well as coherent, logical writing. Here it is:

So this post is really just an update on where I am and what's up in the next few weeks. Hopefully it's only boring to me (I just wrote about five emails about it to various people) and most of you will find it somewhat interesting.

I recently spent a week living in a very rural village. It is called Mtukwa village and is located about 15km away from Bua. The man I was staying with is a very successful farmer. He has managed to buy a truck, and also owns a TV which is hooked up to a car battery and inverter, although we never used it, I think because we didn't get any reception, and I don't think there would have been much on since he doesn't have a satellite dish. He grows maize during the rainy season (October to February) and vegetables for the rest of the year.

So after crudely making a guess at the interest rate I mentioned in my last post, and getting an answer of about 220%, I decided to talk to my source again and find out a bit more about how it worked, and get exact numbers, just in case they were not accurate. Turns out, I there was some miscommunication, and I misunderstood what the different numbers were. For that reason, I have removed that portion from my last post, and will now attempt to rectify things.

Agrodealer. So I've thrown that work around a lot without really giving a good explanation of who agrodealers are, or what they do. Like I've said before, in short, they sell agricultural inputs to small-scale farmers, but there's more than that.

Yes, I know these posts are sparse, and often a bit late, but that's what happens in a place 30km from the closest internet connection. For the last couple weeks, I've been living in Bua Trading Centre. I couldn't find it on Google maps, but it's about two thirds of the way from Lilongwe to the Zambian border, in Mchinji district, just beside the Bua river.