a global model for self-sufficient farming emerges in the south of Africa
As a consultant who always has four to five projects in motion, I get little time to reflect on the nature of the business – the 1000-foot view as they say – except for when I am not on the job. But one thing I’ve learned is that it’s impossible to be a consultant if each and every engagement were custom-made. What’s needed is a working model about how the work gets done. That’s because no matter how unique a specific engagement, there often isn’t enough time to experiment very much.
It’s not just a challenge for businesses. It actually might be the biggest challenge for nonprofits.
Modeling for scale was on my mind as I began researching this story about an Israeli organization with a remarkable, seemingly Quixotic goal. The organization, Tevel B’Tzedek, led by American-born Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, aims to transform poverty-bound subsistence farming in the Global South into small commercial enterprises that potentially can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. And to do that, it has in fact developed a replicable model. The foundation was a discovery that Tevel made early in its journey. Throughout the Global South, especially in Zambia, many communities are rich with a rarely untapped resource: an abundance of young people looking for a better way.
Challenges
On an early visit to Zambia, Micha, accompanied by a local crew, set out by jeep to inspect one of the most remote villages in the Mphande region. It was a long bumpy and desolate ride. Only every hundred yards would he see people, going about their daily routines. An elderly woman walking on the side of the road. A young woman carrying a child, right behind her. School children in bright blue uniforms, outside the only school in the village, which reaches only to seventh grade. They waved.
“It was beautiful hill country,” he wrote to me in a recent email. “It’s physical beauty and isolation – felt uplifting.” The landscape got greener, darker, more lush as they drove on. When they reached their destination – a small village at the edge of a forest called Shamanjanji – a small flock of villagers, along with the village headwoman, had gathered to greet him. They came with a purpose – to take the Rabbi to the village’s water source. With Micha in tow, they hiked down a narrow trail for about 20 minutes, then slowed as they approached the terminus. Micha took a look at a “dank pool of water about a meter wide.”
“That’s it?,” asked Micha.
“Yes,” said Rodney Katongo, the co-founder, along with Paul Kapande, of Africa Access Water, partners of Tevel who helped to arrange the day trip. This was the village’s only water supply, he confirmed. They were all but a few hours from the Zambian capital of Lusaka. Paul and Rodney’s mission was to develop Zambian villages through solar-powered use of groundwater and other water resources. Here was proof-positive of how much they were needed.
Micha had been down this road before, and early conversations with villagers and colleagues had prepared him for one of Zambia’s greatest challenges: though rich in natural resources, past practices had left the region bereft of ways to access them.
Access to resources is critical to the development of the impoverished region. As Tevel noted in an introduction of its work, “agriculture contributes 19 percent to GDP and employs three-quarters of the population.” Yet while close to 80 percent of the food supply is grown by smallholder farmers in places like Mphande, an almost equal percentage of those farmers are likely to be living in poverty. Today, Zambia is “one of the hungriest countries on the planet.”
Lack of access to water has been compounded by an unfortunate historical trend in the Zambian rural economy. Forty years before Tevel arrived, Mphande was a largely unpopulated forest, populated less by people than “lions, elephants and hyenas.” But when migrants began to arrive, they saw an opportunity to harvest the large trees in the region to make charcoal. The practice denuded the land already difficult to develop for farming food. In a 2022 baseline survey of the residents of Mphande, Tevel found that 68% of respondents listed “charcoal as their main source of income during the eight months of the dry season.”
Tevel then took notice of a number of gaps in agricultural practices and methods. In its literature, it discusses eight of these gaps: agricultural capacity and knowledge; water and irrigation infrastructure; access to quality inputs; financial literacy and market savvy; strengthening and create community institutions; community outreach and inclusion; value adding through small-scale industry; and monitoring, evaluation, and research.
Without going into too much detail, what Tevel created was a replicable blueprint, in the kind of language that’s accessible to funders, partners, and Zambian leaders in the public and private sectors. But as any non-profit leader will tell you, a model is great, but execution is what really matters.
Having managed projects like this before – with earlier versions of the framework – Tevel set out to put it into practice, using three assets it had at its disposal: access to advanced agricultural technology by virtue of the relationships it has developed with Israeli agronomists and academics; an historical understanding of how community-centered agronomy has fared in different cultures including Zambia; and, most importantly, a theory of how to access and mobilize what is perhaps Zambia’s greatest asset: its youth. Seventy percent of the population is under 30, and more that 50 percent are 17 years older and under.
To many, this poses a problem: with lack of economic opportunity, a young population can lead to higher rates of crime and to violent political youth cadres that feed instability. From Tevel’s perspective, youth is an opportunity. It’s a big focus of their work
The YSP Program
The focus is smart. Another rule in consulting for scalable impact is to focus on one’s strength. With the abundance of youth in Zambia, Tevel chose to address each of the challenges in its eight point plan with a singular focus on young adults — men and women from 18 to 28 years old. Launching in Zambia in February this year – after a successful run in Nepal – Tevel’s Youth Service Program (YSP) was designed to tap “the energy and idealism” of village youth to lift the entire village economy. Granting a small stipend (or in-kind opportunity) to village youth, the YSP sought to educate them in financial literacy and community and business organization.
Tevel implemented the program based on its strengths. First, the idea was to train-the-trainers, in this case the village young adults, – a model that Tevel’s leaders had deep experience with – for a virtuous cycle for community learning – the students were trained so they can train others in the village. Rodney, from Africa Access Water, bought into Tevel’s model enthusiastically. Over the next few months, it was his knowledge of how community leadership in African villages works, his easy rapport with the villagers, as well as his and Paul’s expertise in water resources, that enabled Tevel to begin their work in Mphande.
Second, Tevel took advantage of an eleven month program for Zambian young adults to study in Israel. Led by the Israeli Foreign Ministry – and conducted at the Ramat HaNegev International Center for Advanced Agricultural Studies – the program has brought more than 150 young Zambian BA graduates in agriculture to Israel along with young farmers from Nepal, Vietnam, and other African countries to learn from agriculture scientists, farmers, and university researchers about modern methods for water irrigation, small-farm management, data-driven methods for predicting the weather, and basics like timekeeping. Among all the learned skills, timekeeping got the most love from two young agronomists I spoke with via Zoom – Mwali Masiliso and Chibesa Makalu. Mwali summed it up: “It’s a really important thing to be on time in Israel. Because if you are not on time you’ll miss the bus, and if you miss the bus, you’ll miss the work. But I also learned that despite the different cultures on the farm, we were still trying to achieve the same goals at the end of the day.” It was a nod to the universal language of work, a key tenet for Tevel.
Kibbutz Thinking
Finally, an asset that stood out for Tevel was the founder’s Israeli heritage and knowledge in a much earlier farming experiment: the kibbutz movement. When first reviewing the eight-point plan with Micha, the community building aspects caught my attention. I asked Micha, “is it right to say that the history of the kibbutz has shaped your thinking?” Micha arranged for a meeting with two experts on the subject, Israeli historian Dr. Shaul Paz and Dr. Sara Shadi-Wortman, CEO of the Varda Institute for Community Building, who has consulted for Tevel.
The kibbutz movement, which began with east european Jews fleeing to Palestine to escape the pogroms, was dominated by young idealistic people. The problem was they know nothing about food, water, nor survival. “But they were committed to working, with their hands, in the fields, to create a new model of man,” said Paz. Together, they learned by trial and error, not just the early tools and practices.
In the early decades, the movement thrived and gave rise to other communal experiments in Israel like the Moshav movement, which Zambia invested in until the communities were expelled from the country when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) forced its member states to cut ties with Israel after the 1973 War. With the ascent of liberal democracy in Israel, the kibbutz and moshav had to evolve with less of an emphasis on communal sharing. But the older models continue to inform with its principles of how to start a community from scratch. Dr. Shadi-Wortman has taken things further by codifying the process of building community, which I think captures the essence of what drives young people to create a new world – a sense of belonging. “When the intention of the community is clear to the individual, you find a higher level of initiative.
After my talk with Sarale, I paused to reflect. Tevel, I believe, has grown in a scalable way that has delighted its funders, such as the Pears Foundation, the Rochlin Foundation, and Gary Carmell, who funded Tevel’s training farm. The numbers are there. As it reports in their public outreach, Tevel has helped to create eight hundred new village agro-entrepreneurs, in Nepal and elsewhere, seventy percent of which are women. It has educated and supported thousands of farmers in producing small-scale farming, bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars in new income annually. But more than that, it has learned to model, and remodel, these efforts so that similar programs can grow. And that, I am certain, is its ultimate contribution – a replicable model that can be owned and operated by many emerging communities in the Global South.
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