ENABLE

NEWSLETTER OF THE ASSOCIATION

FOR BETTER LAND HUSBANDRY

NUMBER 16, JANUARY 2003

(First produced as hard copy)

FOREWORD

At present there is great concern to alleviate rural poverty in many African countries.   Drought, floods, AIDS, population growth, declining productivity of village fields, lack of marketing opportunities, corruption,  insufficient advisory services, etc., all exacerbate the problems in the daily lives of the rural poor.

The results of the actions of national governments and of outside aid agencies - among the ‘international community’ and NGOs – over the last 50 years or so have not shown the expected degree of success in lessening the overall incidence or severity of rural poverty in Africa, despite much effort and vast amounts of money.   In what proportions is this due to (a) mis-management of the resources made available, and/or to (b) mis-direction of outsiders’ efforts, through not  understanding clearly enough the true nature, causes and components of personal poverty in Africa’s rural areas?

Through the recording of rural people’s own descriptions of poverty and how they cope with it, Patrick Hamilton’s first paper, which makes up this 16^th issue of ENABLE, will shock us into realising the degree of mis-match between our own imaginings and assumptions, and rural Kenyans’ real-life experiences of poverty.   It is a powerful example of what ‘listening to farmers’ really means, and what insights into real life this can provide.   It brings us face to face with their reality, shattering our illusions and humbling us by their fortitude.  Those who contributed their experiences are from among the rural communities in Kakamega and Kerugoya  which have been the focus of ABLH’s attention and assistance over the past eight years.

At the field level ALBH’s work has aimed at helping farmers to improve  soil productivity in order to sustain higher yields and more-varied output of crops, as a contribution to alleviating hunger and malnutrition.  Another survey recorded that many farm families had derived multiple benefits from the teaching of organic farming by ABLH and other NGOs.  It is based on the practicalities of developing organic-rich farming using double-dug composted beds.   The results have been so encouraging that we have attached some brief extracts from the second Report -  “Goodbye to Hunger!” - as Annex 2.

In parallel with the agricultural work, ABLH has also concentrated efforts on developing market opportunities for farm families so that they may gain more income, thus alleviating financial poverty also. However, in addition to people’s appreciations of the benefits, Annex 2 also indicates the nature of constraints which in practice hinder wider adoption of the technical methods for production.   For policy-makers, the results show that some of the constraints could be removed quickly, cheaply and successfully, while other constraints – especially with relation to trade and marketing of small farmers’ products – require more far-reaching changes in public policies.   The possible mismatch between our thoughts and their reality may not be a wilful one, but its effects are of vital significance. These reports indicate how part of the gap may be narrowed.  

T.F.Shaxson,  Editor of ENABLE.

STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE POVERTY

  A Survey of Small Farmers' Coping Strategies in Rural Kenya

by Dr. Patrick Hamilton.

1 Introduction: Coping Strategies

Poverty is a fact of life in rural Kenya and its nature and causes have been well documented.  The aim of this study is therefore somewhat different:  to understand the strategies that small farmers use in their struggle for survival. This, it is hoped, will enhance understanding of their daily life:  what they are trying to achieve, the options available, the pressures upon them and the reasons for success and failure.  This, in turn, should add depth to our understanding of poverty itself and prove useful in designing strategies to help communities of small farmers to cope. 

1.1 Methodology

The strategies of these small farmers will be referred to as "Coping Strategies", although it is acknowledged that the term is not perfect.  Sometimes their actions are reflex responses to crises rather than consciously planned strategies.  This is particularly true in relation to health crises.  Moreover it is certainly the case that farmers do not always "cope".  Well aware of the daunting difficulties facing them, some are reduced to a shrug of the shoulders and "All we can do is hope".               

In order to reach some understanding of coping strategies, it seemed self-evident that the crucial requirement was to listen to what farmers had to say.  They were therefore encouraged to tell their own stories and their words form the basis of this analysis, as will be evident from what follows.  Such a methodology is time-consuming and dictates a very small sample size.  Representativeness was consciously sacrificed in the interests of depth.

The survey was conducted between July and October 2000 for the Association for Better Land Husbandry (a Nairobi-based NGO) and focussed on 74 farmers in Self-Help Groups (SHGs) around the two ABLH field stations in Kerugoya (Central Province) and Kakamega (Western).  Within each SHG, farmers were selected randomly within each wealth category (see below).  The survey teams consisted of ABLH staff with the author as team leader.  Finance was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

The core survey technique was a loosely structured interview probing key strategies but it was backed up by diet and income/expenditure diaries for a sub-sample.  These were kept for two weeks.  Most of the farmers had been included in a baseline survey conducted for ABLH in 1999, so that a good deal of basic information was already available: essentially, data on families, farms and farming.  That survey also included a wealth-ranking exercise in which farmers classed themselves as Very Poor (VP), Poor (P), Average (A) and Rich (R), having first defined the meanings of these categories.  The terms are, of course, relative.  Even a "Rich" farmer has, on average, just 3 acres of land [1 acre = 0.4047ha.).  Nonetheless the distinctions are important.  The "Very Poor", for example, are either landless or nearly so, and this greatly restricts the options open to them.  Not surprisingly therefore, there is a close relationship between wealth and coping strategies, as will be seen.  In that baseline survey, 15% of a sample of 322 farmers were "Very Poor" and 41% "Poor".  The latter will generally have less than ½ acre of land and perhaps a couple of goats (rarely a cow).  "Average" farmers accounted for 30% of the sample and would have from ½ to 1½ acres, 2 or 3 goats and perhaps two unimproved Zebu cows. 

Within the present survey sample of 74, a similar representation of wealth categories was maintained:  "Very Poor"-15; "Poor"-25; "Average"-18; and "Rich"-16.  Interestingly, over four-fifths were women farmers, this largely reflecting their predominance in farming as a result of the outmigration of men to the cities.

In this article, farmers are referred to by first name, name of self-help group and by letters indicating wealth ranking (above) and location (Western Province = W; Central = C).  Generally, poverty is more widespread in Western Province and there is less scope for irrigation and cash crop production.  In the study and in this paper, heavy reliance is placed on case studies of individual farmers, using their own words wherever possible.  All the quotations shown in italics are taken from the records of field interviews. Local currency is referred to frequently  [at the time of the survey, Kenya shillings (KSh) were approximately 75 to $1 (US), and 110 to £1 sterling].

1.2 The Need for Coping Strategies

Coping strategies are devised by farmers in an attempt to satisfy their basic needs.  Five such needs are usually identified in the poverty literature:  food, clothing, shelter, education and health.  However, all farmers in the survey have housing and clothing of some kind and, arguably, these needs are less pressing.  For this reason, it was decided to focus on the remaining three, which are pre-occupations of most families most of the time: 

·        Food.  All farmers need to feed themselves and their families.

·        Education.  Schooling, in modern Kenya, requires cash.  Almost all rural farmers have children (whether of pre-school, school or post-school age) and they regard their education as a very high priority.  This is not only for the benefit of the children themselves but also in the hope that the children will eventually get good jobs and lift their parents out of poverty.  This, in itself, is a long-term coping strategy.

·        Health.  Roughly a half of the sample families required significant health expenditures in the year before the survey.  In contrast to the needs for food and school fees, these are often unpredictable and urgent.

Of course, there may be a high degree of overlap between the strategies evolved to satisfy these three needs.  Cash, after all, can be used to satisfy any or all of them.  Nonetheless, it will be helpful to examine each separately (sections 2, 3 and 4 below), identifying their potential and effectiveness.  It is worth making the obvious point at the outset that these three basic needs will often be in competition with each other for available cash.  Agonising decisions are frequently required by farmers as between, say, spending cash on food on the one hand, or school fees on the other.

1.3 Causes of Poverty

Although the focus of this paper is on coping strategies rather than the causes of poverty, inevitably the survey threw up some important insights into the latter. Two, both components of the social environment of farmers are all-pervading and deserve to be highlighted at the outset as they provide important context for what follows.  Moreover they do not always feature prominently in the literature on poverty:

·        Land Hunger and Population Pressure.  There is no escaping the fact that most farmers do not have enough land, and this is because of the large size of families and an inheritance system which insists on the equal division of land between male heirs.  The implications are as daunting as the arithmetic is simple.  With an average of 3 sons per family, a farmer now in his 60s who inherited, say, 3 acres of land, would probably have had a grandfather who enjoyed the relative comfort of a 27 acre farm; but his own grandchildren are likely to receive just one-third of an acre each. We have a landscape which is filling with the farms of these ‘grandchildren’.  Over a half in the survey are already well under 1 acre and, in some villages, most are below ¼ acre.  This relentless population pressure is obvious to all who work at the household level in the field (see Annex 1).  The long-term sustainability of the farming system (any farming system) is therefore a huge issue. 

·        School Fees.  Although not always identified as a cause of poverty in the past, this is now emphatically the case, as will be seen.  Primary education in Kenya used to be free and the enrolment rate nationally far exceeded 90%.  No longer, thanks to World Bank policy insisting on privatisation in developing countries and the reduction of government expenditures on social services such as health and education.  That policy has since been reversed for education but, in Kenya, the fees remain and poorer farmers struggle, often in vain, to put their children through primary school.  Secondary education is impossibly expensive for them and even the richer farmers have seen standards of living plummet as they struggle to keep their children at school.  Often they fail. 

In addition to these, and other problematic socio-economic aspects of the farming environment, the rural ‘system’ is periodically afflicted by massive pressures from the natural environment.  The year 2000 happened to be one in which the main rains from March to June virtually failed as also did the main maize harvest.

2 Food Coping Strategies

Food is the most basic of the three ‘basic needs’.  Without food, the other two become irrelevant.  How then do farmers feed themselves and their families?  What strategies can be used?  How effective are they?

2.1 Types of Food Strategy

It may be helpful to note at the outset that strategies may be:

·      either farm-based or off-farm

·      and either cash or non-cash.

This produces a simple typology (figures in brackets indicate numbers of adopters in the sample of 74):

Farm-based non-cash Food Strategies

Food production (63) directly for the kitchen (i.e. subsistence production) is the most obvious strategy for those who have land.

Farm-based cash Food Strategies

Farm sales (62) again are an option for those who have land, whether or not there is a surplus over subsistence needs.

Off-farm non-cash Food Strategies

Borrowing food (21)

Begging food (6)

Off-farm cash Food Strategies

Casual labour (51rading [sic](28)

Permanent       employment (28)

Borrowing (0) and begging(0) cash

Borrowing and begging is used when all else fails.  Of course, situations may become so desperate that they also fail, in which case families either starve or there must be crisis counter-strategies such as out-migration or international food aid.  Hunger was encountered time and again in the survey (as also in the 1999 baseline survey) and death from starvation certainly occurred in rural Kenya in mid-2000, although not, as far as is known, in the 74 sample families.  It is important to appreciate this fact at the outset.

It will be helpful to summarize the frequency of adoption of these different strategies before examining them in detail.  In the table below, frequencies are expressed as a proportion ie "1.00" means that all farmers in the sample opted for this strategy.  The small sample size makes percentages inappropriate. 

Table 1.  Strategies by Wealth Rank:

Proportions of Sample Farmers Opting

Key: 

Italics/small font         0  - 0.50 of farmers opting for this strategy

Normal script             0.51 - 0.75                 ,,

Bold/large font           0.76 - 1.00                 ,,