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> Posted by Bobbi Gray, Research and Evaluation Specialist, Freedom from Hunger
In part one of this review, we considered several themes that Roger Thurow raised in the book The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change that might influence how we conduct research and design evaluations to measure changes in poverty. The book follows four Kenyan smallholder families for a year, chronicling how their lives were changing as a result of participating in One Acre Fund’s agriculture training and loan program.
Understanding the decisions these families made about how and where to allocate their very limited resources helps us as financial service practitioners and researchers to understand and appreciate certain realities.
Financial service providers can feel both disappointed and encouraged by this book. We find ourselves uncomfortable reading about Leonida, the Kenyan mother and smallholder farmer who makes a credit payment instead of feeding her family. But we also see opportunity. It’s a difficult trade-off for Leonida, but she sees her credit payment as her ticket to new investment in crops, which have already shown promise after a year of participating in One Acre Fund’s program.
In our earlier discussion, we looked at how we might think differently about evaluating programs. Let’s switch gears to what Thurow encourages us to think about in terms of program design. He highlights two key opportunities that stem from a more client-centered approach to program design.
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> Posted by Bobbi Gray, Research and Evaluation Specialist, Freedom from Hunger
In 2009, Portfolios of the Poor illustrated a rich array of formal and informal financial services and money management practices used by the poor. For this reason, it has become a foundational text for development professionals seeking to address poverty through financial inclusion.
The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, by journalist and author Roger Thurow, chronicles the lives of four smallholder farmers in Kenya over a year’s time. His conclusions further enrich our understanding of household financial decision-making processes and tradeoffs made by the poor on a daily basis.
Along the way Thurow describes the critical role that the Kenya-based One Acre Fund plays in improving agricultural knowledge and practices by providing training and credit for agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilizer to families that have one acre of land or less. All four families followed in the book are One Acre Fund program participants.
The Last Hunger Season provides some important lessons for us as financial service practitioners. It helps us re-frame how we view client impact and design impact assessments. Let’s look at a few themes.
Think of “impact” or “change” in poverty in a more comprehensive way. Thurow shares the story of Leonida, a 42-year-old Kenyan mother of seven children. Several times each year, she must choose between feeding her children and paying school fees to keep her oldest son in a boarding school. Hunger is the tradeoff that Leonida accepts because she sees education as the ticket to a better future for her children and her family.
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