Tamale – Part 1

Robin and I spent all of last week in Tamale, a large city in the North of Ghana. I was a little bit intimidated, because in amongst the mix of perspectives on the Northern Region that I had heard in Accra, some suggested quite a dangerous, narrow-minded place. But actually I found it to be quiet, clean, peaceful and far more respectful of personal space than Accra– although I was advised not to be in some areas for fear of being mugged. Many of the women were dressed in beautiful soft and colourful cloth with intricate veils over their heads - some of them reminded me of colourful birds because they were so carefully put together, and I tried many times to take pictures as we drove through the city but we were always driving too fast! We visited the Kintampo Waterfalls on the way back (see the picture of Robin and Clement in front of the falls to the left), which were beautiful and peaceful, just like the rest of the trip.

We were there to visit Jana , a small rural community which is not part of the electric grid (see a typical house pictured below). The farmers must therefore travel to Tamale every time they need anything which requires electricty. Jana has a lot of crop residue from maize and rice, which could be converted with a gasifier into electricity for the community – they were selected through a study trying to find a good community to be a prototype for using this technology. Robin, Clement (a permanent staff member at KITE), and I were there to assess whether the social, economic, and environmental impact on the community is enough for it to justify the investment cost of the gasifier. This information is usually communicated to a funding agency with something called the Economic Internal Rate of Return (EIRR) – basically, make the best possible estimate of everything that would happen if we installed the gasifier and attach a numeric value to it, which they can then use it rank it against other development projects. We were also assessing the relative wealth of the farmers, to figure out how much of the cost the funding agency could get back from the farmers themselves.

One of the farmer's houses in Jana

I soon found myself with a translator by my side, listening to a farmer passionately describe how much his community needs electricty, and rapidly realizing what a giganguan task this will actually be. How do you convert into a number the suffering of a farmer when the stream runs try and he can’t get water, but he could if he could install an electric pump? What’s the value attached to children who could now study at night? There are so many industries that electricity could bring to their community (butcher, welder, dressmaker, carpenter, agricultural supplier, chilled water supplier, hairdresser...), but somebody needs to be able to pay the startup cost for them to actually be realized. How do you therefore put a number on a business that could happen? There were times when it was heartbreaking to talk to the farmers, who for the most part seemed to have utter faith that as ‘Obroni’ (foreigners) we could fix everything for them if we so chose, but had also been interviewed so many times for projects like these which never happened that they were beginning to lose hope completely. Even in the poorest families we spoke to, nobody ever lost the legendary Ghanaian hospitality. One women, in the midst of detailing how since her husband had died she could no longer afford hospital fees for her children, saw her friend come by with fried goat’s cheese – she stopped the interview and took great pleasure in offering us the goats cheese so that we could taste the local cuisine. At the end of the interview, she blessed us for coming to speak with her, even though all we had done was take time out of her day that she could have been using to farm. I don’t think I have ever been been so revered in someone else’s eyes, or felt quite so helpless all at once.

How many farmers store their crops.

It was also incredibly difficult to “get inside the heads” of the farmers we spoke to, because their lives and their thinking was so different from ours. Even though we’d borrowed many questions on our questionnaire from similar studies, we soon found that some of our questions were hopefully inadequate – “how much money do you spend on firewood per month” rapidly turned into “how long would that pile of firewood over there last your family? How much would it cost to buy that much firewood?”. We often ended up switching from Cedis to bags of rice or maize, since for the most part that is the currency of the farmers lives. Asking if anyone was intended to start a business turned out to be an entirely useless question, as virtually all of the farmers we interviewed said “yes”. “What business?”, we asked. “Any business!”, many of them replied. By the end of the study, our questionnaire looked quite different than it had when we started, but I do think that we left the community with a detailed description of the various ways in which electricity could affect their lives, and decent estimates of their ability to pay for it. There are many decisions we are going to have to make as we analyze the data, and quite a bit more research we must do to make sure we get it right, but if nothing else the farmers' passion will insure that we do the best job that we can to make sure we have left no stone unturned in detailing the potential impacts. Of course, we’ll also need to be very sure to double check the feasibility of much of what they told us – for example, if they had an electric pump, does a water supply even exist that they could pump from?