1) To encourage more ownership and responsibility from the farmers in maintaining the equipment.
2) To build the capacity of the farmers by helping them to better understand the idea of farming as a business.
To accomplish these goals, I briefly discussed how the irrigation equipment works and then took the farmers out into the field to show them the equipment. I told them that there are 4 activities they should be doing to maintain the equipment and physically showed them what each of them were.
I then performed an activity with the farmers to help them understand how drip irrigation will save them money in the long term. I split the farmers up into 3 groups: One group watered their trees with the use of plastic water tanks that had to be transported to the mango field by trucks (the traditional irrigation system), one group had the drip irrigation system installed but never showed up to the farm to maintain the equipment, and one group had the drip irrigation system installed and always showed up to the farm to monitor the equipment. I gave each farmer group 10 rocks which symbolized money. I told the farmers that their mango trees were 15 years old and created a story about how each farmer group maintained their equipment. I would collect rocks intermittently throughout the story which symbolized the amount of money they had to pay towards their loan account. All of this was based off of actual numbers I received from the accounts office. At the end of the 15 years, the farming group with the traditional irrigation system did not have any rocks left and the farmer group with drip irrigation who took care of their equipment had the most rocks left. From this activity I was hoping that the farmers would understand how the drip irrigation system is an advanced farming technology that will save them money and increase their yields. In addition, I wanted to enforce that they must take care of the equipment in order for it to be successful.
At the end of the meeting, I asked the farmers to repeat the 4 activities they should be doing to maintain the equipment and they successfully named all 4. Throughout the meeting I really felt that they understood what I was discussing and were genuinely interested. Of course I had a few difficulties, but overall I was pleased with the way it turned out. One of the outgrower managers was present at the meeting along with a Peace Corps volunteer. They gave me positive feedback and expressed that the meeting was useful and is something they might like to perform with all the farmer groups in the future.
I feel that my work with the irrigation system has now been completed. I will keep in touch with my co-workers and I am looking forward to seeing how everything turns out (and a bit worried). In my final week of work, I focused on writing reports for both ITFC and EWB. If you would like me to send you a copy of my report, please let me know (camiller86@hotmail.com). I decided to give a presentation on my work to anyone at the company who was interested. I wanted to make sure that my co-workers knew what I was doing these past 3 months as well as pass on my ideas for the future. I posted a notice at the office, inviting anyone who was interested to attend and said the meeting would start at 7:30 AM. By the time 8:00 rolled around only 3 people showed up, but I began my presentation anyway. By the time I had finished there were about 10 people and we had some pretty good discussions going. Normally, I would be very hurt if people showed up late or not at all to one of my presentations, but I have learned to be a little more light-hearted and go with the flow of things here. I feel as if I have adjusted to the pace of Ghanaian life, but I’m worried about re-adjusting to the pace to life back home and having to balance school, EWB, and then of course the things I like to do in my "free time".
This is a pic of the office from the main road
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