Bawku West: Mapping the Onion Value Chain

I work with Engineers Without Borders Canada's Agricultural Value Chains Team (or EWB's AVC Team for short) in Tamale, Ghana. Our service is to provide high quality consultative services to development projects adopting a market facilitation approach to their interventions.

During one of my first field visits, I had the opportunity to witness farmers harvesting 'Bawku' onions to be bagged and sold in local markets. Onion farming is the biggest dry season income generating activity for men living in Ghana's Upper East Region, and some say is the main reason why most men in the region don't migrate to find work during the off season. This year, however, there was a major glut in the market: there were too many onions in the system according to the farmers and they were getting prices that couldn't even cover their input costs.

I decided to learn more about how this happened. So, I drafted a six week research plan and decided that I was going to map out the entire value chain from farmer to end market to understand the relationships throughout and points where farmers could be helped. In the process, I met with researchers, local staff at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and NGO staff looknig to intervene in the sector.

How did you use the HCD Toolkit and / or human-centered design as part of the project?

I utilized a number of HCD tools as part of a recent shift in our team's thinking towards being more intentional or focused around how we are learning in the field. These included Factors and Forces Mapping, Discussion Guide for Farming, Expert Interviews, Resource Flows, and some of the prototyping exercises.

What was the biggest challenge that the project faced? Did you overcome it?

One thing that I noticed was that some times the tools were appropriate and some times they were not. For example, I found that using Resource Flows was an simple and interactive tool for better understanding farm budgets.

Forces and Factors Mapping, however, was a more difficult exercise at the farmer level. I think this had to do with the nature of the exercise itself, my novice skills in facilitation, and the barriers to communication caused by the use of a translator.

The concept of levels, I think, requires a certain familiarity with thinking in systems. The farmers that I interviewed had a difficult time conceptualizing forces (the state, competition from Niger, etc) that had an impact on their lives. The exercise did not necessarily make the framing any easier. Likely, Factors & Forces Mapping would be more useful at the stage of Expert Interviews as these individuals (e.g. MoFA staff, or researchers) tend to be better placed to understand how the pieces fit together.

I would love to hear others' thoughts on when they have found some of these tools useful as is, and when they have had to adapt them for their own purposes. I started with some initial observations on our team's blog. Any other thoughts would be great!

What is (or will be) the impact of your project?

Unlike most of the stories on this site, my 'project' was simply to map a value chain in order to: better understand marketing issues in agricultural value chains to prep for my placement; to give farmers information on what I was seeing; and to to try and influence implementers already working the space to explore issues that they might not have addressed in their thinking. In this sense, I was removed from any direct implementation and had the time and space to 'dream big'. This is a great place to be in to experiment with HCD's toolkit.

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Kevin Kung – Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nyahururu, Central, Kenya 337 days ago

Great project! I'd love to learn where the biggest waste occurs in the supply chain in this case.

I have some friends who spent some time in India in January trying to figure out where in the supply chain that agricultural products go to waste:

http://inpec.in/category/research-projects/sam-kornstein/

Let me know if you care for an introduction.

1 Comment

Ryan Bourque 330 days ago

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for the post. I wasn't looking at food waste specifically but from my observations it seems like waste is rather limited in this chain. There is no formal 'packaging' other than jute sacks, which are generally recycled back into the system.

The biggest issue, I guess, would be spoilage during transportation. From my limited reading and experience there seems to be a major problem with rent seeking in Ghana (and West Africa more generally), which tends to delay transit and lead to higher incidences of spoilage than would otherwise occur.

Nickson Magak Kisumu, Nyanza, Kenya 332 days ago

Great Story. What are the results of your research? I am interested on how you solved marketing challenge. In the value chains program I am currently working, we sometimes experience a lot of production of vegetables or chicken particularly during rainy seasons. What measures or recommendation did you come up with?

2 Comments

Ryan Bourque 330 days ago

Hi Nickson,

If you send me your email address, I can forward you a copy of the briefing paper I developed from my experience. In it, I throw out some tentative intervention ideas based on some of the HCD prototyping exercises I did with my team (see the storyboard I just added to this post for an example). I would love some feedback on it. My email is ryanbourque@ewb.ca

Nickson Magak 330 days ago

Thanks. My email is: nicksmag75@yahoo.com

Suzanne Schwartz – Brandeis University International Business School Copenhagen, Denmark 139 days ago

Hi,
I would be curious to learn more about what you found out through your mapping of the value chain. As per the previous comments, transportation spoilage (as well as cost and infrastructure limitations) are huge issues throughout the "developing world" along with the irregularities of the crops and the resulting price elasticity (as discussed in your original post). Would there be value in some time of market regulations or developing a system of supplier/farmer and buyer relations to ensure "good" prices. I know, for example, that this has occurred to some extend and with different levels of success for coffee.

Very interesting project with a valuable critique of the use of HCD.

1 Comment

Ryan Bourque 127 days ago

Hi Suzanne,

I appreciate the interest in the research. To answer your question, while I agree that certain systems of direct buyer/supplier relations meant to promote good prices (such as the fair trade model) can be highly successful in certain contexts and with certain commodities, I am wary of how many NGOs often implement such a model. NGOs in Ghana often promoted a 'slap farmers together and find them a buyer' approach to their interventions, which often had limited sustained impact after the project life cycle. This was often due to a number of factors: the farmers did not autonomously organize and therefore did not 'own' the change process; they were often given inputs and other goods that created a false sense of profitability; and creating one business relationship often falls apart with the presence of external shocks such as a depreciation in the world price of said commodity.

These types of factors often mean that such an approach has limited efficacy over a long time horizon. I'm generally more in favour of working with already existing market actors to try and innovate on current practice, but again, this is contextual and I'm speaking from limited experience.

If you're interested in connecting to chat more I'm available at ryanbourque@ewb.ca. I'm always looking forward to speaking to other development junkies.