Peace Corps Togo manages the publication of the newsletter Farm to Market. This newsletter co-edited by two volunteers from the Small Enterprise Development program (my program) and two volunteers from the Natural Resource Management program. As farming is the primary economic activity for a majority of Togolese families, this publication focuses on interplay between business and agriculture. Each year a new team of editors is selected as the old team finish serving their second year of service and leave Togo. I was selected to serve as one of the new co-editors in June 2008.Below is an article originally published in the March 2008 issue. I co-wrote this article with a fellow volunteer, Golda Calonge, before being selected as a co-editor.
When meeting groupements for the first time, one challenge that a Volunteer must meet is facing the initial expectations of the groupement's members. At the outset, members are looking for something immediate or concrete: "What is this person going to give me - today - so that I can improve the quality of my life?" The Volunteer, on the other hand, does notcome to these meetings with readymade solutions for all of the members' problems. At thefirst meeting, we're still learning what those problems are before we're able to offer any useful advice.
So when the two of us set out to start meeting with the groupements in our area, wewere fortunate to discover a very useful method for interacting with the groupement members. By fusing training into our meeting, both the expectations of the Volunteer and the groupement were met.
Angela works in Kaboli as a SED Volunteer, and Golda works as an NRM Volunteer in the village of Afele, which is located about six kilometers outside of Kaboli. As both our programs encourage us to work with groupements, we decided to work together and start meeting with groupements in our area. One Sunday, Golda invited Angela to meet one of her women's groupements in Afele. Meeting the NRM program objective to raise awareness about the benefits of moringa, Golda opened the meeting by training the women on how to use moringa seeds in order to make water potable. As the water is required to restone hour so the moringa seeds can work their magic, Angela used this break in the demonstration to inquire about how the groupement works and to discuss how they would like to improve it.
We began the meeting by getting the women physically involved. In order to clean water using moringa seeds, someone has to pound the seeds, mix the seeds with a bottle of clean water to create a solution, and stir it into the dirty water which needs to be treated. Although a single person could have done all those things, we asked for volunteers in the groupement to help us, which got them actively learning about moringa and potable water.
Their active participation continued well into the meeting portion of our day. By the time Angela started her dialogue with the groupement, Golda had piqued their interest and focused their attention. Before Angela could even ask her first question, Sinatou, the groupement's president, expressed her enthusiasm by immediately askingwhat type of loan they should apply for at the local microfinance institution.Encouraged by Sinatou's honesty and eagerness to improve their groupement, Angela explained that before we could know the best way to advise them, we needed some fundamental information about how they operated. Angela deftly redirected the conversation by working questions into her answers, such as: "How many people are in your groupement?" "What kinds of activities do you take part in together?" "Do you meet regularly?" "Are there otherofficers?" and "Do you have bylaws?"
Though the discussion was largely dominated by Sinatou and Golda's counterpart, Ernest, who was translating, one or two other women would intermittently pose questions about how we could help them. Interweaving a training session into the groupement meeting encouraged members who did not speak French or hold a leadership position to ask questions about atangible subject that they felt more comfortable with. This gave each member ownership of the meeting.
For our part, we were able to ascertain the general framework of the groupement's structure and to discuss the members' ambitions to improve it. Sinatou talked about how the women organized their credit system and how their enterprise is primarily based on selling and storing grains. This signaled to us that we should investigate local lending optionsand different methods of grain storage in preparation for future meetings. Another member spoke out and showed her interest in soy processing and animal husbandry. Upon hearing this, we asked them if they would like to have another meeting that would include asession on soy milk production and a further discussion of the issues they had presented to us that day. The answer was a resounding "yes." Just like the end of any good time you have with people you'd like to get to know better, all we needed was the promise of a second date.
By the time we had wrapped up our discussion, the dirt from the moringatreated water had sunk to the bottom of our bucket and was ready to be filtered. We had addressed a communityproblem while gaining a better perspective of how to help one particular groupement help themselves. After their meeting, people from outside the women's groupement, including men, approached us on how they could plant moringa and where they could find seeds. By introducing a new practice, community members had something tangible to take home with them, even if they were not part of the groupement.
Instead of coming to a groupement meeting with the intention of purely extracting information about how they operate, the inclusion of an interactive and interesting information session created an environment for a mutual exchange of ideas. This provided an open forum for everyone involved to learn fromeach other.
