The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  "Did you ever see drip irrigation in Israel?" he asked me. I had indeed. Drip irrigation was simply a matter of connecting long, skinny pipes to a water source and then extending them down the length of a field, each one along a row where seeds will be planted. Extending from the pipes are microtubes, tiny straws that drip water by the stalk of the plant. The concept was brilliant, but it was designed only for use by large-scale farms, where the systems could be most profitable.

  Amitabha looked at the technology and determined that he needed to make it affordable for the poorest farmers. "We needed to follow three core principles," he told me. "The system would have to be so affordable that the farmers could cover the entire cost from the sales of their harvest in less than a year. Second, it had to be fairly easy to use. And third, it had to be infinitely expandable. If the poorest farmers had funds to irrigate only an eighth of an acre, that would be fine because once they earned income, they could buy a second system to double the amount of land irrigated and take themselves out of poverty."

  He was frustrated that several of his donors loved what he was doing but hated that he was selling the systems to such poor farmers and that the manufacturers of the system, as well as the distributors, were making a profit.

  "How can I explain to them that there are 260 million smallholder farmers in India? We have so many millions living on less than $1 a day-and to reach them, we must focus on providing financial incentives to ensure systems are well built. There is charity involved, no doubt, but we need to build systems that will last."

  Yasmina and I agreed wholeheartedly and Acumen Fund supported Amitabha's work, eventually helping him to create a for-profit company. Over the next 4 years, Amitabha's organization would sell more than 275,000 systems and see nearly all of the farmers who used them double their yields and incomes, and some even more than that.

  I shared Amitabha's story with Dr. Sono in Pakistan when I first met him in the Unilever offices in Karachi. I was struck by his amiable face, the way his eyes smiled, his salt and pepper hair parted on the side and his obvious delight in just about everything. Dr. Sono's eyes widened as we described what drip irrigation was doing to help Indian farmers change their lives. He could imagine a partnership with Unilever, as the company was committed to working in Thar, and with Acumen Fund because the farmers were so eager to change their own lives.

  Immediately Dr. Sono decided he wanted to try introducing drip irrigation to the farmers in Thar. We agreed to try our first technology transfer from one investment to another, this time from India to Pakistan. It would be challenging, partially due to the political tensions between the two countries, but we also believed that fostering this kind of learning and trade was a powerful way to build relations. And Dr. Sono seemed to be a great bet. Like Amitabha, he loved working with poor farmers, had built a community of trust, and had committed his life to his work. And like Amitabha, his eyes sparkled when he spoke.

  Dr. Sono's first step was to visit India and see for himself what IDE India was doing. It took months to obtain a visa to New Delhi, and only after he arrived did he learn his travel was restricted to certain cities that didn't include the farms where IDE India was working in Aurangabad. Importing the systems caused further difficulties, but these were two men for whom the word "impossible" had little meaning. While it meant another "lost year," Dr. Sono never lost enthusiasm and got to work establishing a demonstration plot so that local farmers could see the drip irrigation in action without taking the risk themselves.

  Farmers in general are rational decision makers, but they are a riskaverse lot. Their entire livelihoods-and reputations-depend on successful crops season after season. Risking new technologies could mean losing an entire harvest-disaster from both a food and an income perspective. Dr. Sono understood this, as well as the need to build trust not by telling the farmers about the power of drip irrigation but by enabling them to see it with their own eyes. With Unilever's support, he created a demonstration plot and then, after one successful season, convinced 20 farmers to experiment with the systems on a portion of their land at his expense. Only when they saw increased productivity was he able to sell 100 systems to farmers in Nagar Parkar whose land, all told, accounted for about 1,000 acres, thus starting the first real experiment.

  I drove to Thar with Ann to meet Dr. Sono in his office in Mithi, 51/2 hours outside Karachi, a long, hot drive (the temperature hovered at about 115°F) through sparse and beautiful scenery-huge tracts of land punctuated by a sugarcane factory here or a brick factory there. Everywhere the land was cracked and seemingly empty of life.

  Dr. Sono greeted me with a big hug. I couldn't help but feel happy around him. He hadn't been to see the farmers in Nagar Parkar for a month or so himself and urged us to eat quickly before we got back in the car and started driving the 2~/2 hours to our destination.

  As we moved along the single road through a monochromatic, moonlike desert landscape, the heat intensified. Despite being in an air-conditioned vehicle, sweat poured down our faces. I kept cool by looking at the furry camels sitting below scraggly trees, knowing I had to feel better than they did. With a deep breath of satisfaction, Dr. Sono exclaimed, "Don't you just love the desert in springtime? The air is so fresh and there is so much color everywhere!"

  "Please forgive me," I told him, "but I see a palette in shades of gray and tan, and to be honest, I'm not thinking the air is so fresh. It feels like we're caught in a cookstove."

  "Then you aren't looking hard enough. See the little buds in all of the trees out there? Look at the pinks and oranges and purple flowers everywhere," he said as he pointed at the horizon. "It is the festivity of spring in those small, small colors. Ali, I love this place."

  I asked the driver to stop for a moment and got out of the car to explore. Sure enough, if you looked closely enough, you could observe the beginnings of riotous color, all wanting to explode, held closely in the trees and bushes and flower stalks alongside the road. He was right. Color was everywhere if you didn't insist on the obvious, making it all the more powerful and compelling.

  As we traveled in early 2008, the food crisis was just beginning. The farther we got toward what felt like the ends of the earth, the more I understood how the farmers here were facing a perfect storm. The only way they'd historically been able to access water was through wells, which wealthier farmers powered with diesel fuel. Now the cost of oil made operating the wells prohibitively expensive for even the better-off farmers. During the dry season, poor farmers would walk for days to labor on bigger farms for usually no more than 504 or a dollar a day. With this they were expected to buy food for their families. High prices now made that untenable.

  Dr. Sono's experiment depended on providing the farmers with water. Solar power was beyond their capacity to purchase, so he negotiated with the government's Poverty Alleviation Program to provide 80 percent of the cost of a solar pump and his organization covered the rest. With infrastructure free for the farmers, those in the experiment had to risk only the cost of the drip system itself. Whether it would work, neither of us knew.

  Two and a half hours into this second leg of the drive, we finally reached our destination. At the distant horizon, I saw a sliver of yellow expanding slowly until we could make out an enormous field of sunflowers, bright yellow and green against the blue sky. The vision made us giggle like little kids.

  "This is the dry season in the desert, when it is so hard to grow things on small farms," Dr. Sono laughed. "Can you believe it?"

  At the end of the field, we stopped to admire the sunflowers growing 7 feet tall. Breathless, I felt a deep emotion well up inside me, perhaps because of the presence of new life, of birth on fallow land, of hope in a place too easily forgotten and abandoned. The drama of nature was one of gentleness, of sustainability coming from little plastic pipes laid along the earth's surface, conserving every drop of water and giving life where nothing but starched hunger had stood before.

  As Mary Koinange used to say in t
he Nairobi slums, "Water is life."

  At once, nine tall men began walking toward us from different parts of the field-a father and his eight sons, all dressed in farmer whites, each one more handsome than the next, surrounded by 15 or 20 little boys. Together this family owned about 7 acres that served as their sole livelihood, though it was possible to cultivate during only 6 months of each year. Rajan, the father, was a tall man whose green plaid turban capped a wise, leathered, mustachioed face with kind hazel eyes that reminded me of my father's. He gazed proudly at the flowers that would be sold to the government at a guaranteed price.

  Behind him, eight large blue solar panels angled toward the sun stood behind a well that pumped enough water for the drip irrigation. "How is it working?" we asked.

  "Not a single problem," he smiled.

  The tiny lines of IDE India's drip irrigation tubing lay in straight rows beside the healthy plant stalks. Sons and grandsons eagerly pointed to the workmanship required to properly lay out the field. "Our need for pesticide is greatly reduced," said one of the sons.

  Rajan didn't know yet how much income the field would generate. "But," he added, "this is the best yield we've ever seen on this land, even in the good seasons."

  I tried imagining a family of 50 people trekking across the desert in 110°F heat with only their livestock in tow to test their luck as day laborers.

  "I am an old man now," Rajan told us, "and this is the first time in my life that I've remained on my land. Finally, we can plan for the future."

  He pointed to a compound of little huts at the edge of one of the fields. "Come and see our home."

  Built on slightly higher ground, the compound was a circle of sleeping huts, each constructed of mud and a thatched roof. The doorways were small and low, requiring visitors to duck upon entering. The main hut, where the grandmother and eldest wives slept, contained only a clay storage trunk and a small shelf built along the wall with circles of brightcolored paint above it. A few plates and utensils stood on the shelf, "out of children's reach," the grandmother told me.

  In the middle of the compound, a depression in the ground, about 2 or 3 feet long and 11/2 feet wide, served as the stove. The women wanted to find something safer because in the windy season sparks could too easily be blown to the roofs. A stone mortar and wooden pestle sat beside the cooking area, waiting for the women to grind grains and leaves into family meals.

  Next to another hut alongside two clay vessels holding grains stood a large mill, a flat stone that turned with great effort to transform wheat into flour for the women to make chapatis. There were blankets on the floor of each hut, though I didn't imagine they would provide much warmth on cold desert nights.

  The women, young and old, were captivating, dressed in gauzy skirts and sequined tops in brilliant colors that reminded me of peacocks and other exotic birds. The married women wore white plastic bracelets on their arms, sometimes 50 or more. Their lips were painted pink, and many wore dark kohl, making their eyes even more arresting. Most wore colorful veils over their dark hair.

  The grandmother, slender and beautiful, wore a bright turquoise top and a fuchsia and blue veil. Though her dark skin was weathered by the sun and she had birthed a dozen children, she looked like a young woman.

  "You must be happy not to have to leave your home this season," I said to her.

  She smiled broadly and pressed her two hands together in a warm greeting.

  "Did you used to fear leaving your things behind before?" I asked.

  "What things?" she laughed. "We have only a few plates and cups for drinking and some urns for carrying water. The only ones who come here when we're gone are the termites, and they eat the straw from our roofs. There are no other guests."

  "But the termites must appreciate you, at least."

  "Oh, yes," she laughed, "very, very much."

  We asked Rajan what he would do now that he had income.

  "My children and their children have never attended school," he told us. "I would like to see my grandchildren educated."

  Someone asked him if that included his daughters. "Yes," he answered.

  "But they might stop veiling and become more progressive," the man challenged.

  Rajan responded gently that it would be a good thing for the girls. "I want them to attend school so that they will not be so discriminated against and also so that they will not discriminate against others."

  There is no more powerful reminder of the dignity to be found in making one's own choices than Rajan's endless sunflower fields shouting out "Life!" in the arid desert.

  The market can serve as a listening device: Through our experience with drip irrigation, we began to see the power of providing smallholder farmers with different inputs along the supply chain so they could increase their productivity. Think of all the opportunities to improve a farmer's crop. In addition to drip irrigation, improved seeds and fertilizers that are priced affordably can improve yields by 30 percent. Farmers also lose 30 percent of their potential proceeds because there are no storage facilities. We're exploring a solar tunnel that can dry grains more quickly so a farmer will ultimately have more to sell. Transporting the produce is another issue. And so is finding markets that will provide adequate profit margins to the farmer. If we think about the 400 million smallholder farmers as producers upon whom all of us rely, then there are myriad ways to support their growth and income and feed the world.

  Of course, the more we learn about how to sell productive inputs to farmers, the more we learn about the distortions the aid industry can foist upon those same farmers. When there is a crisis in a place like Kenya or southern Pakistan, the United States and Europe will send "free food" that is purchased at highly subsidized prices from their own farmers rather than sending the money to purchase the produce of local farmers. The world has a long way to go, but these relatively small experiments are teaching us how much is possible if we build trust, show the farmers what is possible, provide them with technical assistance, and connect them to markets.

  William Gibson wrote, "The future is here; it is just not widely distributed yet." It shouldn't be all that difficult, but we have to increase our sense of urgency and allow farmers to change their lives and change the world in doing so.

  CHAPTER 15

  TAKING IT TO SCALE

  "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my l fe for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."

  -OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  is hard to imagine a greater contrast to Pakistan's harsh desert clime than the lush green hills of Tanzania. There, in 2004, in a tiny village called Usa River, I met another unforgettable man for whom a simple technology was life changing. His name was Eliarehemu, and his hut was situated on a stamp-size patch of dirt that had a single stalk of maize growing outside his front door. He was wearing the only clothing he owned, an ancient, tattered, dirty hat and a ripped shirt he buttoned hurriedly as we approached. His pants, unworthy of even a scarecrow, were a patchwork of threads sewn over places where they had torn apart. His hands were battered, thick, and tough, like sandpaper to the touch, but his smile was likable and easy.

  At that time, he'd estimated his earnings as a day laborer in nearby fields at about $6 a month, but he was quick to tell us that malaria often kept him from working. "Sometimes it is so hard to move when you have malaria. You just stay inside and shake and try to sleep off the terrible ache in your head."

  Like many low-income Africans, Eliarehemu lived nearly full-time with the disease, scrounging together a few cents to buy chloroquine tablets when he felt sick but unable to take the entire treatment due to the cost. As soon as he felt better, he'd cease taking the medication, consigning himself to living in a weakened state. The presence of rice fields throughout Usa River meant there was a lot of standing water where mosquitoes bred, making malaria endemic. By failing to complete the required chloroquine regimen, Eliarehemu and hundreds of millions like him also contri
buted to making the disease more resistant to the drug, exacerbating the problem.

  In that first year, Eliarehemu told me spiritedly that he was feeling healthier, though he looked old, worn down, and deeply impoverished. "I am just too happy now that I have this bed net," he said, never mentioning that he had no bed under which to tuck it. He simply connected the bed net to the rafters of his house and then let it drape to the mud floor on which he laid his body.

  What struck me most, that first time meeting Eliarehemu, were his gratitude and joy despite how little he had in the world. A simple gift of a bed net, something to which everyone should have access, changed his life.

  "You see, I sleep peacefully through the night now, without the noise of mosquitoes circling and biting," he told me while holding his hands to his face like a baby napping, smiling with contentment.

  Each year I visited Eliarehemu, he appeared healthier, and with health came more work and income. He'd seeded a garden of corn, which had begun to flourish, and built a fence around his hut to keep the animals away from his crop. Two shirts hung on a simple line strung inside his modest home. All the while, we were developing a sweet acquaintance. I took photos of him at each visit and once brought him a bag of fine chocolates.

  Three years after I met Eliarehemu, he remained free of malaria and stood proudly by the stalks of maize now literally towering over our heads.

  "I have enough now," he said, "to feed myself through the year. And maybe next year, there will be some left to sell." He continued to work at nearby rice farms to earn cash and had begun studying at the local church in the evenings.

  "Oh, yes!" he exclaimed in English, though I hadn't asked a question. "I am feeling strong now."

  "Where did you learn English?" I asked, laughing.

  "The pastor is teaching me," he said.

  Then he switched back to Swahili and asked me to come into his hut. On the floor was a mattress with sheets, and for the first time, the bed net could be tucked underneath it.