Hello again from Tanzania! Time for a quick update on what has been a fast paced last couple of weeks with the MASAVA project. I have been jumping around the county between Babati, Arusha and Dar es Salaam. Dar was an especially interesting time as I was able to meet the MEDA team that has been so helpful in getting me up and running. I spent the rest of the week receiving training on the innovative eVoucher platform that the project is using to track the distribution and sales of Vitamin A fortified sunflower oil. Vitamin A deficiency can cause serious problems such as blindness and birth defects; however, because sunflower oil is used in most cooking, fortified oil adds nutrition to any food!

Jambo! (Hello),

My name is Daniel Simonson, and I am the new Gender/Business analyst intern for the MASAVA (Mafuta ya Asili ya Alizeti yenye Vitamini A, which translates to “Natural Sunflower Oil Fortified with Vitamin A”) project based in Babati, Tanzania. I just completed my first week, and I finally have a little time to catch you, the supporters of MEDA, up on the ins and outs of life as an intern.

Part Two of a Two-Part Series about our new FEATs Project in Ghana.

 High quality tree seedlings have a significant impact on trade success and economic growth. With funding provided by the Government of Canada through Global Affairs Canada, MEDA has partnered with international tree nursery company, Tree Global, to produce and supply high quality cocoa, shea, cashew, and rubber tree seedlings to Ghanaian farmers.

MEDA’s goal for the project is to improve the economic well-being of 100,000 male and female farmers in these four tree crop industries over a span of 6 years. With an emphasis on women and youth, MEDA hopes to distribute 21,000,000 seedlings over the life of the project. Since 2015, the project’s seedling supply partner (Tree Global) has been using leading edge growing technology aimed at producing high quality seedlings that grow faster, have higher survival rates, earlier maturity and increased yields than conventional seedlings. MEDA has deployed iFormBuilder, an electronic data collection tool to collect seedling performance metrics for analysis in partnership with selected academic and research institutions. The results of this analysis would contribute to the project’s policy work and would be disseminated at selected fora.

As part of the project, MEDA is working to facilitate the development of a sustainable seedling distribution network by supporting local businesses and entrepreneurs with matching grants to establish seedling distribution centres called Community Distribution Nurseries or CDNs to get these high quality seedlings into the hands of farmers. Using an inclusive market systems development approach, MEDA is also partnering with key stakeholders including government agencies and industry groups, for example the Ghana Cocoa Board, Global Shea Alliance and African Cashew Alliance to name a few, to make the project successful and sustainable. Through partnerships with major international companies such as Mondelez – makers of Oreo, Toblerone and Cadbury - MEDA is helping farmers to gain access to high quality seedlings and to thus increase their productivity and incomes for years to come. Building the capacity of farmers is vital to their sustainable economic growth and well-being. Incentive programs such as discount coupons offered by the project to farmers, enable them to procure and plant high quality seedlings. Supplementary training on good agronomic and environmental practices as well as business skills equips farmers with the knowledge they need to make their business flourish.


With tree seedling production in Ghana residing at the apex of West African trade and sustainable economies for individuals and communities, MEDA continues to prioritize this work as part of our larger mission to provide business solutions to poverty. So the next time you are wandering the aisles for your favorite chocolate bar or shopping for new tires, remember the farmers in Ghana working to provide better livelihoods for their families and the shared prosperity that occurs when trade, sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship succeed.

Part One of a Two-Part Series on our new FEATS Project in Ghana. 

Roaming the aisles of the grocery store, one might not expect to find a chocolate bar or shea lotion sitting next to a collection of crisp apples. However, these products unsuspectingly originate from fruit trees just like their apple relatives. Residing on the West African coast, Ghana’s tropical climate allows for cocoa, shea, rubber and cashew trees to thrive, creating an essential export for the country and providing market opportunities for farmers.

One Month…Wow! It is hard to believe that I have already been here that long. I arrived at the end of May and started my six-month internship with MEDA where I am working with one of their partner organizations MiCredito, a microfinance institution. I am inspired by the way that MiCredito develops working relationships with small scale entrepreneurs to provide financial services and a more promising future. I am very grateful and blessed to have this experience. I feel blessed to experience a different culture and to learn how micro-finance initiatives are empowering individuals and businesses.

In my final year of university, I took a mandatory course on business sustainability. As a business major, I found this course was quite boring because of its slow pace. However, our final project influenced me in such a tremendous way that I eventually decided to join MEDA’s work as an intern at its Myanmar office.

CLM+: Haiti
Chemen Lavi Miyò (Pathway to A better life)

For most Haitian women, the marketplace is a familiar environment for buying and selling goods. However, for women living in extreme poverty, some basic livelihood factors must be addressed before they have the confidence and ability to engage in the economy successfully.

Haiti’s inequality is not a simple distinction between the rich and the poor, but a large and growing gap between the lives people lead in urban areas and those of its rural population, where 70% of rural households are considered chronically poor.

Implementing Keyhole Gardens to Improve Food Security for Women in Ghana

When the tropical storms subside and the dust begins to gather, farmers in Ghana become concerned about how to sustain their gardens. With water scarce during the dry season, water retention becomes a challenge. MEDA targeted its keyhole garden project towards women because women produce 70% of Ghana’s food crops. As a result, they have a direct connection with expanding crop cultivation and providing their families with sufficient nutritional needs. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project’s goal was to extend the growing season for female farmers.

Agro-entrepreneurs. An intriguing word for those like myself entering the business world and being enthralled by realities of nonstop work-education. So far today, I have been talking to 12 agro-entrepreneurs on the four-hour bus ride through stark Sahel countryside in northern Ghana, and I have come upon a meaning for this word. For these women, today, and everyday, it means: leader remade. Meet the GROW women: 12 Lead-Farmers who represent over 20,000 women agro-entrepreneurs who have chosen to remake their gruelling hours tilling the fields to work to their benefit - and in the process, revolutionize the idea of the women business leader.

I feel bonded to these remarkable business leaders through our collaborations on the GROW project. The acronym stands for Greater Rural Opportunities for Women and today we ride to the city of Tamale for the 2016 Annual Pre-Season Conference: a semi-annual business expo for agro-entrepreneurs, equipment suppliers, soybean processors, and financial backers. As we pass anthills the height of single-storey buildings, my thoughts keep returning to how best to do something I have not yet attempted and which just so happens to be my prime task of the day: marketing for agro-entrepreneurs.

From 2008 to 2014, MEDA implemented the YouthInvest project in Morocco and Egypt.  During that time, we reached over 63,000 youth with financial and non-financial services, and built the capacity of our partner staff to provide skills training and financial products to youth.

But this is not the whole story.

There are approximately 1.3 billion young people in the world between the ages of 15 and 24, and one in five live in Africa. This is the largest cohort of youth the world has ever seen. To be a force for positive change, these young people need opportunities that will help them thrive - access to training, education, jobs and financial services. And yet, youth are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. They also are 33% less likely to have a bank account, and 40% less likely to have saved formally than adults. MEDA is supporting young people around the world with increased access to sustainable economic opportunities.

My name is Steve Hogberg and I’m a week into my Enterprise Development Internship here at MEDA. I’m from Ottawa, Canada and as this is my first field mission, I find myself happy to be back in West Africa and meeting all the MEDA GROW staff in Ghana – including my fellow collaborators, Janelle and Sarah. So far I’ve travelled to Accra (the coastal capital), and Tamale and Wa in the northern parts of the country. My mission here is to work on expanding market linkages for women soy agro-entrepreneurs throughout the region. Right now I’m learning a lot about all the components of the soy bean Value Chain (or the production process from growing to processing to selling). My goal is to establish strong market linkages for women entrepreneurs to grow and sell their product at a reasonable price long after the GROW Project has ended.

Before I left for Ghana, obviously everyone wanted to know more about the program I would be working with: what its objectives are, the people it works with and generally how it’s doing. While I had to be pretty vague because I didn’t really know many of the details at the time, this blog is my attempt to explain the program after two-and-a-half months here (can’t believe it’s already two months!).

“I never thought that these kind of days would come for me and my daughter. I never thought weaving would change our lives like this!” – Werkinesh Wade

MEDA launched its first project in Ethiopia in December 2010, Ethiopians Driving Growth through Trade and Entrepreneurship (EDGET), a rice and textile value chain project funded by Global Affairs Canada. The project aimed to increase incomes for 10,000 men and women farmers and textile producers in three regions of Ethiopia: Amhara, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region, and Addis Ababa. EDGET, which means ‘progress’ in the Amharic language, concentrated on integrating smallholder rice farmers and textile artisans into high value markets through increased market linkages and enhanced productivity.

With 2015 behind us and a new year on the horizon, what have we learned and where can we focus in 2016? In September 2015, the McKinsey Global institute launched a report that provided hard data to show the scale of the global economic deficit caused by gender inequality. The key finding is now often quoted: if women’s participation in the economy was on par with men’s it would add $28 trillion to the annual global GDP by 2025. This is a clarion call to action but the path is much harder to navigate. To achieve gender parity globally would require huge investments in societal and political will and resources. It would require sweeping attitudinal changes toward a valuation of women’s work (productive and unpaid) and significant leaps in investments by governments in agriculture, industry and service sectors. Serious attention would need to be paid to what the McKinsey Institute calls the enablers of economic opportunity: reproductive rights for women, physical security, legal protection and political voice amongst others.

Reducing barriers is critical but so is creating opportunities for women to participate equitably in the economy alongside men. Fortunately, this appears to be a strategy that is gaining momentum. There is increasing recognition that in the pursuit of gender equality, collaboration between private sector actors, governments and civil society can create wins on all sides. Last year, the United Nations intentionally reinvigorated the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) launched in 2010 to promote gender equality in the workplace, marketplace and community. Under the mantra, Equality Means Business, the WEPs aim to mobilize corporations around the business case for gender equality. The principles are:

I had the great privilege of seeing writer and journalist Nina Munk deliver a keynote address at the recent International Forum, put on by WUSC and CECI. I’d read her book – The Idealist – last year and found it very thought provoking, and – perhaps surprisingly, for a book on foreign aid – a genuine page-turner.

Nina Munk delivers keynote address at the WUSC - CECI International Forum

On Friday January 22, MEDA is very pleased to be participating in the International Forum, hosted by WUSC and CECI. The theme of the forum is ‘Inclusive Economies, Inclusive Societies: Collaborative Action for Youth and Women.’ We will be presenting a case study on our approach to financial inclusion for youth. This blog gives a preview of what we will be discussing at the event. Hope to see you there!

What is financial inclusion and why is it important?

Financial inclusion means having access to a range of suitable, affordable services, including savings (formal and informal), loans and financial education. Access to youth-appropriate savings and loan products helps young people plan for their future. Youth-friendly financial services can lead to many positive outcomes, including heightened ability to manage money, build assets and improved opportunities for entrepreneurship. And yet, less than 5% of youth (ages 15-24) worldwide are currently being reached by financial services.

I had the privilege of working on the E-FACE (Ethiopians Fighting Against Child Exploitation) project during its last year of implementation, during which time I was able to research and consolidate information on the project and how it worked with youth in Ethiopia. The project worked with both youth and adults to address the issue of exploitative labour.

This blog shares a summary of the findings and lessons from the E-FACE project’s pilot intervention to build youth entrepreneurship among rural communities in Gamo Gofa and Wolaita districts in Southern Ethiopia. The full case study can be found on MEDA’s YEO website.

The Youth Agricultural Sales Agent (YASA) program provided 250 young people (138 male, 112 female), aged 14 to 17 years, with business skills training to increase their knowledge of markets, as well as life skills training to improve their confidence and communication. The technical and entrepreneurial skills provided by the training program were complemented with start-up kits to transition the youth from exploitative labor to productive work.

Why do you focus on women?

Over the last year, living here in Tamale, Ghana, and working with rural women farmers on our Greater Rural Opportunities for Women (GROW) project- I’ve expanded my understanding of the gender issues in northern Ghana drastically. Here, women and men face many cultural barriers, social expectations and a lack of opportunities due to poverty. In short, gender issues here are complex, messy and deeply rooted in daily routines.