Agricultural Research, Gordon Froud and Sustainability.

Sanne van Laar, Marlise van der Plas, Esmee Arenhuis & Ine Cottyn.

What an interesting presentation we had last week from the unknown postgraduate students from the University of Utrecht about the agricultural projects that are being sponsored by the Dutch government in Africa and their own investigations.  It is interesting how the watchword is now "sustainability" just as it is with Rotary International.  It's taken a long time for governments and organisations to realise that this is the only way to go if you really want development.

The unknown students are no longer anonymous and let's hope we see them again and can maybe persuade them to join us.  Our thanks to Jankees Sligcher for organising the contact.

This Week
Our speaker is Gordon Froud, Senior Lecturer, Visual Art in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture here at UJ.  The FADA Building is just across the car park from where we meet.  I think he'll be talking about Teaching Art in 21st Century SA....but I may be wrong.

Gordon Froud

Gordon Froud has been actively involved in the South African and international art world as artist, educator, curator and gallerist for the last 25 years. He has shown on hundreds of solo and group shows in South Africa and overseas and has served on many arts committees throughout South Africa. He has judged many of the important Art competitions from local to national levels in South Africa. He graduated with a master’s degree in Sculpture from the University of Johannesburg in 2009 and continues to run the Sculpture department at this department. He has taught continuously at school and tertiary level in South Africa and in London. Froud directed gordart Gallery in Johannesburg from 2003 to 2009 where he showcased the work of new, up and coming artists. He shows on more than 20 exhibitions a year.

He is currently director of Art-icle showcase, an artist run art space on the art strip in Rosebank Johannesburg.

Next Week
My son, Edward James-Smith, is currently on holiday from Denmark and he has agreed to talk to us about Electrical Power Planning in SA, ..I'm not sure of the exact title of his presentation.  He consults for ESKOM. the National Energy Regulator and the SA Treasury.

Author and microcredit expert shares lessons in sustainability

By Arnold R. Grahl
Rotary News -- 8 February 2013
 

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Marilyn Fitzgerald, right, meets with Muhammad Yunus, who wrote the foreword to her book "If I Had a Water Buffalo." Fitzgerald serves as microcredit adviser and economic and community development coordinator for District 6290.

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Years ago, Marilyn Fitzgerald learned valuable lessons about sustainability from an impoverished rice farmer in Indonesia.

Fitzgerald, a past-president of the Rotary Club of Traverse City, Michigan, USA, was visiting a community to which her club was sending money to enable the children to attend school. But the farmer she encountered didn’t want money; he wanted a water buffalo.

The events that followed became the subject of her recently published book, “If I Had a Water Buffalo,” and have shaped her thinking about sustainability, a key principle of The Rotary Foundation’s new grant model. Fitzgerald now shares those lessons with Rotary clubs she visits, which recently included the Rotary Club of Evanston Lighthouse, in Illinois, USA.

Water buffalo, piglets, and hens

Fitzgerald relates how she persuaded her family to give her money as a Christmas gift so she could buy the farmer a water buffalo. The result was that he was able to triple his crop yield, increase his income, and therefore send his children to school.

The next year, women in the village wanted 20 piglets to raise, breed, and sell. Then the children wanted hens so they could make and sell an egg snack popular in the area. Eventually, many community members increased their self-sufficiency.

“For less than US$1,200, they were [able to send] their own children to school,” Fitzgerald says. By contrast, “I was up to a $72,000 budget on the school project. I had never even asked them what they wanted.”

The most important thing any Rotarian can do to make a project sustainable, she says, is to listen. The local community has to be involved in all stages of a project, from identifying a need to coming up with a solution to implementing that solution.

“At the end of the day, they have to feel good about themselves,” Fitzgerald says. “They need to feel so good about themselves that they can go on with the effort themselves.”

She defines sustainability as the ability of a project to continue once the donations end.

“A lot of people tell me a project is sustainable because they have long-term donors or they have all these clubs involved,” she says. “But that’s not true. If the donors walk away, what happens to the project?”

Fitzgerald, a clinical psychologist, is a board member of the Rotary Action Group for Microcredit and serves as microcredit adviser and economic and community development coordinator for District 6290. She says she likes microfinance projects because a well-run program lets the beneficiaries come up with their own business plan, while Rotarians provide the capital and act as mentors.

What they really wanted was cell phones

During her Evanston appearance, Fitzgerald relayed another story, about visiting a village to pursue a sanitation project for her club, only to discover that the villagers really wanted cell phones.

“I thought, no way is my club going to go for cell phones.” But when she probed further, she discovered that the villagers wanted the phones so they could relay business decisions – such as what color fabric is really selling well – to their markets more than a day’s journey from the village.

“If we provide cell phones and [villagers] increase their income, then they can buy these other things,” says Fitzgerald. “We absolutely have to talk to our beneficiaries and ask them what they want. We need to educate them about the possibilities, then let them determine the solution that’s right for them.”

She says she used to believe that any charity was better than none, but she no longer feels that way.

“I believe we can cause great harm when we build programs that people become dependent on,” she says. “Charity robs people of choice, voice, and dignity.”