Mel Oluoch (PhD) is currently leading Sasakawa Africa Association as a regional director based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Eleven months have elapsed since he took the position. Besides having a lot of experiences in researching in other cereal crops, Mel who is a nation of Kenya is a PhD in horticulture, which is basically the study of flowers and fruits. He also studied in different countries; initially in Kenya and then Philippines. He then took his PhD in the United States.
As an Agriculture Research and Development professional with multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral background experience in Horticulture, Agronomy, project management, capacity building, rural agriculture development, seed systems, public-private sector partnerships, value chain development and technology transfer, he has contributed a lot to improve the livelihood of African farmers through his leadership and researches.
The Ethiopian Herald approached him so that he would share the activities of Sasakawa Africa Association and his rich experiences with its readers. Excerpts:
Herald: Would you share us your career-related experiences?
Mel Oluoch (PhD): I served in several countries at different positions before joining Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA). For instance, I worked in countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania, Mali, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States for a number of organizations.
In Holland, I had served for a couple of years at Plant Research International as a research fellow before I went back to US where I worked again as a research associate. After that I joined a World of Vegetable Center where I was based in Tanzania for about 10 years as training specialist and horticulture scientist. In those years, I carried out many researches and training for African personnel.
I then joined HarvestPlus, an organization engaged in carrying out researches and development on bio-fortified crops. Through breeding these crops, we used to increase the vitamin A content into the crop and we were raising the level of this nutritional aspect. As a result, the poor can have access to food which is nutrition and easily available. We introduced a natural system where everybody can have access to all these nutritious food.
From HarvestPlus, I moved to International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) where I was a project manager and scientist in developing systems to eradicate Striga weed in Africa. Striga weed is a very devastating weed affecting maize, millet, sorghum and other legume crops. It can reduce yields by 100 percent in many cases. So I have been one of the peoples who were at
the forefront in developing systems which can eliminate the Striga weed in the African. We are doing these in quite a number of countries in Africa. From there I went back to the World of Vegetable Center again before I joined Sasakawa Africa Association as a regional director.
Herald: Would you let us know how Sasakawa Africa Association is operating?
Mel Oluoch (PhD): Sasakawa Africa Association was basically started after the famine in Ethiopia in 1985/86. It was started by a Japanese Philanthropist Ryōichi Sasakawa with the Former United States President Jemmy Carter and Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug. These people were really high level profiles who studied this organization and nurtured it to where it is today.
Even though we are working in most African countries, the head quarter is in Tokyo, Japan. Most of our funding comes from the Nippon Foundation whose chairman is Yohei Sasakawa, still from a Sasakawa family. This funding enabled us to effectively carry out the development and research works in many African countries to improve the livelihood of farmers in the continent.
We currently operate in eleven African countries. We are planning to add other African countries by the coming January. With specific focus on Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, we carry out most of our grassroots agricultural activities. And we have other African countries where concentrate on building capacities of agricultural extension workers to be able to reduce the extension workers to farmer ratio which in most African countries is the lowest in the world with exception of Ethiopia where it has done exceptionally adequate extension workers to be able to address most of the challenges facing agriculture.
Significant successes have been attributed to SAA for it has been working very closely with the Ministry of Agriculture from the top level working at the level of Kebeles and woreds, working with agricultural extension staff to be able to give farmers new technology, seed, knowledge, information, improve access for markets, providing them inputs like fertilizers as well as improving the quality of the crops they produce.
Herald: You have told us that you have accomplished a lot to address the challenges farmers are facing. How do you do this? What are your focus areas? What makes SAA unique from other development partners operating in Ethiopia?
Mel Oluoch (PhD): We work on three important areas: crop pro ductivity, post-harvest handling and agro-processing as well as human resource development; basically capacity building of extension staff and farmers. At the same time, we have very strong partnerships with 28 universities in Africa where we have developed programs to train agricultural extension agents who can help and train farmers.
We have also a plan to ensure that most of our farmers have access to adequate information, have access to market, have access to input with a clear and definitive impact to improve the income of farmers and the livelihoods; we have much at the grassroots level and policy level to be able identify all the challenges. We also address several challenges our farmers are facing by introducing concept of sustainability.
There are many NGOs in Ethiopia; they get donor funding and carry out certain activities. But when the projects are finished they leave. Most of what they do, do not have sustainability; just collapses without continuity. But we operate differently; we work closely with the ministry of agriculture who would sustain the works with sufficient trainings after we leave and move to another area. Hence, this ensures the sustainability of what we have been doing to improve the livelihood of farmers.
As SAA, I would say we are medium NGO in the way we operate and in terms of our funding; we want to scale up our operation beginning from this year. So that we double our capacity, our reach, our funding base in order to reach millions of farmers specially who have never been reached. Hence, we would like to go to areas where the government and other NGOs could not be operating; where no one is able to work to improve the livelihood of those farmers.
We carefully focus to identify where resource poor farmers are. Our short and long term goal is to focus on resource poor farmers. We have improved the farming technologies. We have improved their productivity in terms of yield; we have improved the quality of the crop they produce after harvest.
We have also improved the marketing system to ensure that they have market access. We work across the entire value change including the nutritional aspect to ensure that those small income families eat well; not eating well but eat nutritious food to have progress in their health. Our goal is not only to improve their livelihood and income but to improve their health.
Herald: How do you measure the achievements?
Mel Oluoch (PhD): As an organization, we are always quite sensitive to the fact there are a lot of challenges; we have a division where we carry out monitoring and evaluation to figure out what those challenges are and to put proper measure for conquering these challenges so that we have clear cut evidence based approach which guides everything we do in the field. We just do not work blindly.
We work with values and figures. We can clearly see where the challenges like adoption of new technologies. While we are addressing those challenges we carefully follow evidence based approach before making any decision.
As such, we have made very significant strides we have clearly seen how we are able to improve the productivity in terms yield of farmers in Africa. We can see the quality of the produce by being able to give them specific post-harvest or agro-processing machines like threshing machines and others which help to ensure that what they produce has to be able to get the best price in the market.
We do not focus on one specific area but we work on different levels. We go across the entire value chain to make sure that we address all the challenges the farmers are struggling with in today’s Africa; we have also a lot of focus in Ethiopia where we continue to operate very closely with the government to ensure that we meet all our goals which are improving the livelihood of farmers and conquer the challenges.
The Ethiopian Herald July 23/2019
BY RUTH BENIAM
