A dedicated micro credit fund for rural Madagascar

‘This project report is a submission to GlobalGiving’s 2017 Fail Forward Contest, where organizations are asked to share a story of when they tried something new that didn’t go as planned and how they learned from it. Enjoy!’

 In 2009 when we started working in Fiarenana, the second village, we met Jean, a highly skilled master gardener. Years earlier another nonprofit sent Jean to agricultural training. Later the nonprofit stopped working in his village and his talents fell dormant.
 
This was a golden opportunity - take advantage of an already highly skilled community member to implement our nascent micro-credit project: introducing new crops with our seed bank. (more).

The concept was straightforward: Zahana hires Jean and pays his gardener’s salary for the first two years. Once established, Jean can start selling seedlings and/or seeds and generate his own income with the fruits of his labor.

Classical market driven micro-credit strategy: provide kick-start funding with the goal of becoming self-sustaining. The payback of our investment for the first two years: seeds and seedlings Jean can give away in his community fostering crop diversification. You calculate 24 months of salary, the cost of the seedlings not available regionally and seeds for new crops and you have a solid little budget item you can work with.

Jean is an amazing master gardener with a fantastic green thumb. He grew tree seedlings in his nursery, introduced new crops (another “fail forward” story: Potatoes - a failure story with a happy end) and distributing seeds to his community with great success. He also took on teaching the schoolchildren gardening skills - a two for one deal.

There was just one slight glitch: reality.

After two years Dr. Ihanta sat down with Jean to discuss his future as a self-financed entrepreneur. It was challenging to get him to meet at all. Jean, after some probing very politely, quietly replied: "I would rather give up being a gardener and go back to full time rice farming than having to charge my friends and neighbors money for seedlings and seeds."

Now we faced a dilemma: stick to the plan and lose the gardener, or admit that our initial assumption was a failure and look for an alternative strategy.

After some deliberation and reflection there was only one sensible option: Zahana has to pay the gardeners salary indefinitely and forget about the idea of an income-generating nursery for the foreseeable future. Jean is still, over 7 years later, a permanent Zahana staff member in the village, like our teachers and their assistants.

Money-wise it was one of the best investments we ever made. Jean has trained Bary, our second master gardener in Fiadanana, the other village. He has taught all schoolchildren of his village gardening skills. Last but not least, without his enthusiasm and endless seedlings, the reforestation project with thousands of trees planted, would have never taken off.

Sometimes it is better not to stick to the plan and admit that your assumption was a failure. We have a growing forest to prove it.

Links:

• Jean our Master Gardener's nursery in the village of Fiarenana