It is no surprise that the first Sustainable Development Goal is about ending poverty. People who are poor are forced to battle hunger, limited access to healthcare, education, infrastructure and sufficient energy supply. In addition, the effects of climate change and environmental degradation hit the poor the hardest. In a way, eradicating poverty is a precondition to sustainable development.

How do we achieve a world without poverty? That is the billion-dollar question for all development partners.

More than 70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for a living. Evidence suggests that “smart” rural development, aimed at improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, can quickly reduce poverty. Development interventions targeting small scale farmers often include scaling up access to better farming technologies, supporting product development and improving access to market as well as reducing harvest and post-harvest losses.

Tracking of the SDG1 indicates that global poverty is declining, but not fast enough. The latest estimations show that over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day, 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger and 1.1. billion people live without electricity. So, the poverty eradication quest is far from being complete.

So, are the returns on our development investments sufficient and are development efforts working effectively?

Paradoxically enough, the development sector often operates in isolation with the communities who are the recipients of interventions. This means that the efforts, needs and desires of these different actors are not well coordinated and synchronised. Furthermore, separate operation tends to encourage a top down policy design, which often misses crucial contextual nuances that influence how individual and community factors influence human behaviour.

Might we have to re-consider the way development interventions are designed and delivered?

Research by the Behaviour and Choice Initiative at SEI indicates that the success of development interventions can potentially be higher if behavioural drivers of the recipients receive more attention. Deep understanding of the context and insights into the needs, behaviour and choices of people can offer us a more sophisticated way to design development interventions and their implementation.

These are the conclusions of a study on harvest and post-harvest losses in the mango value chain conducted in Hola, Kenya. The project was part of the YieldWise initiative, rolled out by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2016, and was conducted in collaboration with UN Women, Jomo Kenyatta University and Expedition Mondial, a service design consultancy.

The YieldWise initiative focuses on fruits, vegetables and staple crops in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. Harvest and post-harvest losses in all the three countries are high – half of the produce is lost before reaching the market. This puts a heavy burden on farmers since much of their invested time, resources and hard work are lost without almost any returns or benefits.

To help the farmers this project aimed to understand how small-scale mango growers in Kenya can reduce their harvest and post-harvest losses by using simple technologies that can be deployed on farms.

Mango is a high value crop with international and domestic market potential in Kenya. The underlying assumption of the study was that reducing the losses of mango during harvest and before it gets to the market will increase income of farmers and, therefore, improve their livelihoods and reduce poverty.

Expectations

In the field

This approach revealed that there is no such thing as mango farms; just farms that happen to have mangos. Most of the farms around Hola are small scale with a wide range of crops, mango being just one of them. On a rough estimate, farmers in Hola don’t get more than 20% of their income from selling mangos.

The main revelation came from observing behaviour of various actors in the mango supply chain. On the farms around Hola mangoes aren’t the primary commercial product and access to market is poor. So, most of the fruits – around 90% – are sold for processing and delivered to Nairobi or Mombasa for juicing and pulping, several hundred kilometers away from Hola.

Essentially, what matters for the majority of mango farmers in Hola, is the quantity of mangoes – the more mangoes farmers sell, the more profitable it is for them. In contrast, the technologies on offer were designed mainly to improve the quality of the fruits. Hence, such low adoption rates.

If you are a small-scale farmer in Hola, it is nearly impossible to sell on the export market, where the quality of the fruit matters. The infrastructure is too far away, the roads are too bumpy and, ultimately, there’s not enough profit to be made. So, farmers have little incentive to invest in quality-improving technologies, without large investments in road and cold chain infrastructure. The exception is fertilisers and fruit-fly traps because these increase the volume of produce.

Development with a human face?

Image credits

All photos and illustrations are courtesy of SEI. The customer journey map is developed and designed by Expedition Mondial and SEI.