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HOMA BAY
EWING GRINDER PILOT PROJECT, 2009-10
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By Kathleen Graham, Africa Committee Volunteer
 Beneath enormous African skies the rolling mountainsides
of far Western Kenya
are lush green with the spring rains.
Tribes of farmers who eke out a living far off the tourist track
anxiously watch the crops they planted in February - will the rain be enough,
erasing droughts of recent years; or too much, drowning the beautifully
emerging fields of maize, soya beans, sorghum, and ground nuts? As I move around the area where a year ago I
introduced Ewing grinders I am struck that these farmers' concern for the
impact of weather on their livelihood echoes precisely that of Minnesota farmers. And there all notion of shared typicality
ends.
Homa Bay farmers till and weed and harvest
by hand. They furrow their brows when
asked about the last harvest, uniformly noting that adequate moisture is not
enough, as they cannot afford fertilizer, the crop could be much better. Their homes have neither electricity nor
indoor plumbing, and most have packed dirt floors. Water is carried in jerry cans from boreholes
or rivers kilometers away. The daily
diet consists of the staple ugali, a baked corn flour concoction that supplies
calories but inadequate nutrition. And
as if I needed further confirmation that life here is radically different from
whence I came, retired teacher and training participant Fred Aloo introduces me
to his family of twelve children and two wives, before we travel to meet his
neighbor and this group's coordinator, John Oyaya Ogutu, who has thirty
children with his four wives.
I ignored the temptation to indulge my curiosity and delve
into the fascinating back stories and instead focused on the reason I was
lurching for hours over unpaved roads and paths in a vehicle loaned by the venerable
crop research organization ICRISAT. A
year earlier I had accepted the invitation of ICRISAT'S resident Nairobi manager Richard Jones, to collaborate with a PhD
agronomist from Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, Nasambu Okoko, to train representatives of
several farmers' groups chosen by Nasambu how to use the Ewing
grinder. I had six Ewing grinders,
purchased by family and friends, stored in Kenya. Richard and Nasambu were interested in adding
value to the ground nut crop they had partnered to introduce to farmers' groups
in the Kisii/Homa Bay area. A pilot
project, to test the usefulness and acceptability of the grinder, and the
potential for adding value to a bare crop, was born.
At the 2009 two-day training each participant learned to
disassemble, assemble, and clean the Ewing
grinders. Each took a turn processing
local crops - g-nuts, sorghum, finger millet, cow peas and "green gram,"
learning to adjust the burrs so the final product would be just the
right
texture for local taste. And each
participant was tested - could s/he stand up and teach the teachers what
s/he
had learned?? All passed, some barely. Would they be able to
convey a few key Ewing principles to their farmer members?
I had returned for the real test. How have the six grinders that were loaned to
the participants' groups been used?
Armed with a questionnaire that seeks answers to questions suggested by
a dozen people over five years, each day I traveled 40, 50 even 70 kilometers
off the paved road that runs from Homa
Bay on the swampy shores of Lake Victoria to Kisii in the highlands, to drone through
my evaluation form. I had no idea how remote their farms and groups actually
were.
Richard, Nasambu and I had readily agreed on desired
outcomes. We were most interested in 1)
improved nutrition, bolstering the ubiquitous daily starch with nuts and more
nutritious grains and 2) income generation, either through product sales or
service grinding. We can document both
outcomes, in at least some and sometimes all families, of all groups who had a
representative attend the training workshop. In one group of 24, the Koga
Farmers' Self Help Group, in addition to the two men who act as
leader/coordinators, eight of the "mothers" (twenty of the group members are
women with children) are making nut paste and selling it. They use the profit
for school fees for their children.
Each of the six groups is different, in terms of crops
processed and rules for grinder use. Koga processes just ground nuts, and a
little soy. Most other groups have
experimented widely, with soy, sorghum, finger millet, green gram, the "new"
crop grain amaranth, and even dried butternut squash and broken rice. Because the quantities of these "designer"
flours are so small, they could not interest the commercial posho (corn) mills
to process them, so the friendly-sized Ewing
allows them to experiment with new ingredients.
Another difference - while Koga pays those who crank the grinder and
those who carry the paste to market, at the Hekima Widows and Orphans Self Help
Group, they organize volunteers to do all the roasting and cranking, and the
group applies the profits to projects they devise, for example. to support
local orphans.
For a ten year veteran of Ewing grinder work in East Africa, what is so impressive about this trip is the
consistency of grinder use among the groups and the quality of maintenance of
the grinders. Never have all the
grinders been so well cleaned, so well-cared for, so respected. The growing dependency of the groups on the
grinders is actually a little unnerving.
What if a part fails, like the group that sorrowfully produced a
deformed helix? What will happen to the
growing nut paste business or the millet flour service grinding if the grinder
is down for days or weeks?
The other joy of the trip is the visible pride with which
group members present the "new" foods they have discovered, beyond the popular
nut paste. As a result of having the
grinder available, and the communal interactions it has fostered, several
groups make a nutritious porridge, using sorghum, finger millet, cassava,
amaranth, soya beans, and a small amount of nut paste, flavored with citrus
juice and sugar; others a soya beverage;
"finger rolls" from sorghum and millet; and cakes, a totally new
item. The warm cake we were proudly
served by St. Florence SHG, which looked like a light gingerbread, had soya,
grain amaranth, and g-nut paste.
Nasambu Okoko was so excited by the food
experiments we saw that she vowed to create recipes and share them among the
other farmers' groups with whom she works.
Moving forward, these groups are now offered the opportunity to buy the
grinders, for a discounted price, and that money will be used to furnish more
grinders for more area farmers. CTI will
establish a "parts depot" at Mrs. Okoko's office. And by next year it is planned that all the
groups will be asked to keep the detailed records to reflect volume, income and
profit that some groups already have.
Small but significant inroads for 120 families off the end
of the tarmac! Replicate?? Volunteer!
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Second Annual Benefit Dinner a Huge
Success
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| CTI
held its second annual benefit dinner on April 23,
2010 at The Metropolitan in Golden
Valley. Nearly 300 guests were introduced to the
wonderful work CTI does through testimonials by Sam Usem, a CTI
volunteer who
visited Haiti after the
January earthquake; LeAnn Taylor, who recently returned from a second
trip
to El
Salvador; and Bill Schafer, a food scientist who traveled to Tanzania
and Malawi to assist with CTI's McKnight funded project in southern
Africa. The evening was hosted by Vineeta
Sawkar, of KSTP, and we enjoyed a performance by Barinya, an African
drumming
group. If you would be interested in hosting a table at next
year's benefit and
inviting your friends to learn more about CTI please contact Nancy.
Nancy@CompatibleTechnology.org
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CTI volunteers from the Battelle Institute recognized
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| Recently, three engineers who have been co-developing CTI's
pearl millet post harvest technology were recognized as Volunteers of the Year
by the Battelle Institute.
Successful Proof of Concept trails were completed in Mali; CTI volunteers and
Battelle engineers are completing minor design changes and will be shipping
close to production ready units back to the Sahel region of Africa
in time for the coming harvest of pearl millet and sorghum.
CTI volunteers Receive Outstanding Volunteerism Award
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CTI Board Expands
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Over the
past twelve months, under the leadership of Nominating Committee Chairperson
Kathy Junek, the CTI Board of Directors has expanded by some 33%. We are pleased
to welcome the following new members this year: Ron Christenson, Retired Chief
Technology officer, Cargill; Indra Mehrotra, Director of Science and
Communications, General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition; Jack
Truong, VP and General Manager, 3M's Construction and Home Improvement Division;
Jorge Fernandez, formerly President of Pentair Water Division; Cathie Hartnett,
Broadcaster and Chair of CTI's Development Committee; Ron Price, Senior Program
Officer, Local Initiatives Support Corporation; and Adonis Neblett, attorney at
Fredrickson & Byron. We thank all the members of CTI's Board for their
active support and commitment to CTI. You can see the complete list of board
members on our website.
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