The Studio

Wow, just realized that it's been a while since I've posted, and even longer since I've written anything about work. I figured it was time to tell you all a bit more about what I'm doing here, lest you think I've gone on extended holiday. (random note, I feel like my English has gotten a bit more british since I've come here, as you can see by my use of "holiday". I'm also "keen" to do things, and find that amusing things are often "brilliant". =P)

Anyhow, work has been quite busy of late, hence the lack of posting. Here's what you already know about my work:

• My client is the Tanzania Cotton Board (TCB), though I've actually been contracted through TCB's donor
• TCB is the regulatory body that oversees cotton production and export in Tanzania
• Some of TCB's functions include estimating and monitoring how much cotton will be grown in the country, and certifying the quality of the cotton before it is exported

Here are some things that you probably don't know yet:

• The cotton industry in Tanzania employs nearly 40% of the population, between farming, ginning, and end-to-end processing
• The cotton quality in Tanzania leaves a lot to be desired; as a result, Tanzanian cotton is sold at a discounted rate on the global market
• Many of the rural areas in Tanzania that could be used for growing cotton is laying idle
• One of the initiatives to increase the production of cotton in Tanzania as well as improve the quality of the cotton is a program called contract farming (more on that in a bit)
• My project was to conduct a 10-week assessment of TCB's IT strategy, processes, and assets, with the ultimate goal of making recommendations on how TCB could improve on its IT capabilities so that the IT group can better support the goals of the organization

The first thing I should clarify is that TCB doesn't have an IT group -- it has one IT guy who does everything. This poor guy is responsible for managing all the vendors who are developing custom software for TCB, troubleshooting all software issues, helping with user/training issues, installing new desktops/laptops, upgrading software on desktops/laptops, and also serves as frontline support for printers, faxes, internet, telephone, and pretty much anything else that uses electricity. He has an impossible job, yet he does it with gladness.

For the first few weeks of the project, Melanie and I spent a lot of time understanding the business functions of TCB, what everyone does, and what IT systems people use, and the deficiencies of the IT systems. Essentially trying to get the lay of the land. In parallel to our efforts, TCB is in the process of rolling out a contract farming program, aimed to address the cotton production and quality problems in Tanzania.

In today's free market model, farmers are responsible for buying seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides from whomever can give them the best price. In many cases, farmers will elect to not buy fertilizer and pesticides simply because they cannot afford it. This contributes to the production and quality problems because without fertilizer not as much cotton is grown, and without pesticides, you can get pests that stain the cotton, which diminishes its quality. Once the cotton is grown and picked, farmers sell to buying agents offering the highest prices. Buying agents are sometimes commissioned by ginners or are sometimes independents who take advantage of the opportunities during this particular time of year. Buying agents have been said to use faulty scales, so farmers counter-balance the bad scales by adding water or sand to their cotton to make it heavier, but which degrades the quality of the cotton. The agents then sell the cotton to ginners; during this process, it's possible for more sand and water to be added to the cotton so that the agents can get even more for the cotton. Ginners then have to process the cotton, separating the seeds from the lint. Ginners then sell the lint to textile mills, and re-sell the seeds back to farmers. In this model, there are no contracts and no obligations; everything is driven by an open and free market.

With contract farming, TCB hopes to address production and quality issues by:

• Providing farmers with better access to seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and all the other tools need to grow cotton well
• Cutting out the middle man between farmers and ginners
• Having ginners, who have a vested interested in the production of cotton, play a bigger role in cotton production earlier in the value chain (this takes the form of helping to educate farmers on cotton growing best practices)

In contract farming, ginners make an up-front investment in the cotton before it is even grown. Ginners will provide farmers with seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides up-front, as a loan. Ginners also promise to buy all of the cotton that the farmer is able to grow. In return, the farmer just has to sell all the cotton that he grows to that ginner. All this goes into a contract, hence the term contract farming. Once the farmer sells all his cotton to the ginner, the ginner pays for the farmer for the cotton, minus the loan amount. Throughout the growing season, ginners are supposed to be helping education farmers, and farmers are to be good stewards for the cotton. This is contract farming in a nutshell.

The reason that this is important to our project is that contract farming will fundamentally change the role of TCB and how the cotton industry will be regulated. That means we're trying to assess the business need, while the business need is rapidly changing. While TCB has conceptually outlined how contract farming will work, there are many details about how the precise tasks and processes that are yet to be ironed out. It's made our project extremely difficult; imagine trying to hit a moving target.

Last week, we had a mid-point presentation where we reviewed with stakeholders everything that we had learned and observed so far. We also called out risks to the project, specifically that there were things about the organization that we did not yet understand because some of it is not yet defined. During the discussion portion of the meeting, the stakeholders also stressed that the number one priority for the organization in 2011 was the successful roll-out of contract farming. Given the progress that had been made to date on contract farming (not a ton), it quickly became clear to me that our time and effort would be better spent focusing exclusively on contract farming instead of a holistic IT assessment.

Our work will likely need to make a 90-degree turn, but this change will allow us to be of most benefit to TCB, and will also be more rewarding to the team since this is the program that is best positioned to help farmers. It also allows me to be somewhat tactical (which I'm great at), and work on tangible things. It's this new focus that also led my client to ask me to stay in Tanzania for a year, to help with the deployment of contract farming... =)

Stay tuned for more stories of what's happening with contract and why I'm using mail merge to create word documents that exceed 40,000 pages. teehee...

Hope this post all finds you well, and Chúc Mừng Năm Mới