A Traveler’s Tale: Here’s What Happens When Impact Meets Innovation in Tanzania

Diana Callaghan

Everyone loves a great story.  And so far, during my Dar es Salaam-based fellowship with Land O’Lakes International Development’s United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Innovations in Gender Equality (IGE) program, I have accumulated many.  In particular, I want tell you about my experiences meeting innovators competing for grant funds and capacity-building support through IGE-hosted Innovation Expos.

Children In Mbeya Checking Out the Great Expo 5 Innovations

The IGE Expos target entrepreneurs with technologies impacting women in agriculture. For the first Expo, I provided the 10 finalists with needs assessments and business development support. To do so, I traveled throughout Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Mwanza to sit and speak with:

•          A top mushroom-growing maven
•          An engineer creating customizable crop processing machines
•          An education-greenhouse organization
•          A fish-poultry-produce aquaculture company
•          A palm oil extraction company (palm oil is in Nutella… investment please…)
•          A company developing solar driers
•          A business creating solar bird and animal chasers

I was thrilled to see many of these organizations using clean energy sources to do everything from dry produce with solar driers to chase bird and animals away—about the latter, think of it as an automatic, screeching scarecrow with a solar panel. Each entrepreneur I met with had great stories. I eagerly listened to their experiences, and I was equally excited to brainstorm ideas with each of them about how to push their technologies even further. For example, through these meetings we learned that many had no accounting systems set up, and therefore had prices that were many times too low to have a sustainable business. In other cases, we heard that they planned to teach people how to develop their technologies, which contradicts the idea of growing their own business. During these visits I noted many areas for improvement, and with the IGE team, we have now developed trainings to help relieve many of these issues and will be working one-on-one with innovators to help push their development further.  

Just as everyone has a story, every story has its setting.

Tarangire Lion Fresh From a Nap

Zanzibar Sunset Sail

Oh what a magical place I’ve found myself in! If you haven’t already checked it out, read my other blog post, Entrepreneurship in Agriculture & Impacting Women's Lives in Tanzania. Since I wrote that, so much has happened in my life here in Dar es Salaam.

I’ve traveled around Tanzania working with additional entrepreneurs in agriculture, met new friends from around the world while exploring the tiny uninhabited islands off the coast of Dar, attended a 3-day Strategic Planning meeting to help devise a strategic plan for a new organization, and even met some of my favorite Rossers for a memorable trip to Zanzibar.

Arusha

Mount Meru

Tarangire Safari Time

Mommy and Baby on a Walk

During my time working with Land O’Lakes, I was honored to explore some of the most beautiful parts of Tanzania. Arusha is like the Denver of Tanzania. Sitting at the foot of Mt. Meru, the city has a temperate climate with lush greenery, abundant produce and vails of flowers. Expats flock here for NGO work and the many tourist attractions the city brings. Hip English-clad coffee shops, restaurants and boutique hotels made me feel less like I was in an African country and more like I was in the Rockies. Points of interest near this city include Serengeti National Park, Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Mount Maru, and the infamous Mount Kilimanjaro.

Given time constraints (read: I’m not in my most “tip-top” shape), I was unfortunately unable to climb Kilimanjaro. Time also did not allow me to take the long trek to Serengeti but I was able to catch a Safari at the beautiful Tarangire National Park. Arusha is also where I met with the innovator developing a multi-crop processor and the organization building indirect solar driers.

DORGO Agro Multicrop Processor

SIWATO Indirect Solar Dryer

Mwanza

Lake Victoria Rocks

Lake Victoria Resort

I also spent some time in Mwanza, during which I made a quick visit to Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world behind Lake Superior (Go Michigan!). This is where I was reminded that some people are just natural entrepreneurs.  In speaking with the warehouse innovator, we learned about all of the work she has personally done to develop her business. We heard success stories, saw prototypes, and heard about the awards she has received to date. In speaking with her, we learned that her innovations came from listening to the needs of potential customers and designing solutions to address those needs—a sign of a true entrepreneur.

JikoBora Warehouse Prototype



Jiko Bora Entrepreneur

Dar es Salaam

Returning to where my internship began, I worked on a kick-off event for 6 other innovators supported by IGE. In part, I developed and implemented a training on business model development and performed a needs assessment to identify any gaps in innovators’ business models. At the training, we openly and successfully brainstormed creative solutions to some of their most pressing problems.

Since then, I have also worked in conjunction with IGE staff members to develop a social media campaign, revised training materials, and developed strategies to help further support innovators in their development processes.

Easy Breeze with Tangawizi (Gingerale) and Skype at Bagamoyo

Mushroom Shelter and Spawn Production

Solar Bird and Animal Chaser

I only wish I had an additional time in this beautiful country.  I’ve made some great friends along the way, joined a volleyball team, sang karaoke under the stars on the beach, had dinner at the Greek Club, learned how to negotiate with the Bajaji taxis (aka tuktuk) like a pro, danced until 5am at the local dance clubs, and became a regular on the islands of Mbudya and Bongoyo—to snorkel and dine on freshly caught fish and lobster. I’ve also attended restaurant openings, sat at wine tasting events, slept on a beach under the moon, swam in the Indian Ocean at night, explored the many restaurants of Dar, and met people from all around the world.  And of course I can’t forget 4^th of July on Zanzibar with two of my favorite WDI Fellows.

Zanzibar Market

Me and My Boys

Sailing the Blue

Beautiful Kendwa Rocks on Zanzibar

Simplicity of the Sea  (Not Posed)

 Streets of Zanzibar

Julio, Shukun, and I Representing UofM and Ross in Africa

My experiences have been both personally and professionally rewarding. I wish all of the innovators I’ve met through IGE much success and I’m grateful for working with and learning from all of them. Kudos to Land O’Lakes for partnering with students to catalyze innovation to enhance women’s participation in the agricultural sector and to help improve food security.

Want to hear more travelers’ tales? Be sure to check out the fellows’ blog to read blog posts about WDI Fellows working in healthcare, energy, entrepreneurship, and education in emerging markets.

Adeus USA, off to another adventure!

Nancy Kasvosve

Hello WDI Blog readers. Welcome to the chronicles of my summer in Brazil!

Julio (enroute to Rwanda) and me (enroute to Brazil) at the airport

It is almost surreal that this is my last summer in school, probably forever.  After this I have to become a real adult and get a real job and stop galavanting the world with little to no money! In the meantime I have one more chance to do what I do best, be a "professional foreign person" in yet another part of the world, this time in Latin America.

Let  me introduce myself a little bit. My name is Nancy Kasvosve and I am a dual MBA/MPH student at Michigan.  20 something years ago( not to reveal my age or anything), in a harsh July winter (in recent years I  found out it was not that bad, #thanksChicago), Warren Park Polyclinic in Harare, Zimbabwe delivered a future nobel prize winner into the world.This being her 5th gig of the whole baby thing, three days later early afternoon, my mum walked out of the clinic carrying me, to find  a chaotic house in which my older sisters had not done any chores because they expected her in the evening, when my dad was supposed to pick her up after work.They proceeded to receive the first scolding that they ever blamed on this new baby. My sister who comes before me, has never quite gotten over my dethroning her from being the youngest and family favorite with all of my adorableness and obvious closet geniusness, see what I did there, I just made up that word, thats how clever I am  : ).

Of course I am in the one in the coolest purple glasses of all time!

What am I known for to my family and friends, I am a big challenger of the status quo. My family labeled me the stubborn one and my grandma swore that when I get married my husband’s family will send me back for disobedience. It is apparently a thing in my culture, marriage is a  transaction in which I am a commodity and can be sent back if I am defective.Oh grandma, rest her soul! In any case I have always been a fighter, a believer in that your circumstances do not have to define you or your destiny. I came of age in a harsh time in my country. Once the bread basket of Africa, Zimbabwe withered away in political and economic demise and we were probably the hungriest trillionaires in the world at one point. If you have not heard of us, we are the country that had the highest inflation ever, a few million percent, so much that when we finally gave up on our beloved Zimbabwean dollar in 2008, 1 USD was some 3 billion Zimbabwean dollars,and you needed a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread.

Just casually going to buy a loaf of bread

As if that was not enough, the country was also in public health crisis. The biggest scourge was HIV/AIDS  for which we declared a national emergency in 2002 when the prevalence for our small population of 12 million, was at about 30%. In my high school age group, 1 in every 3 of us was HIV positive.  I have three childhood friends who perished in our teens, and that is where my passion for all things medicine was born. I  was fortunate to "escape" this reality, when I got on a plane and became an undergraduate at the University of Chicago on a full scholarship. I was a hardcore premed and once in love with cancer; like no seriously, I have a favorite tumor. It is called pheochromocytoma, a tumor of the adrenal glands, that causes over- production of adrenaline and aggressive behavior and has been used to justify the actions of hardcore criminals (thanks Dr. House). I was going to be an oncology surgeon until I changed it all around.

I will not bore you with the rest of my resume, but long story short, I am now super into travelling around the world, eating new food (doro wot), hiking up mountains( oh hey table mountain),  taking pictures of art( seriously I will never afford some of this stuff), drinking local cocktails (caipirinhas all day), learning local dances (I am not that great at eskista though) and most of all learning about why everybody, everywhere in the world does not have adequate healthcare and how can we  made this all better! That's right, I am a dreamer, who wants to use modern tools to fix the world, in my case business strategy.  My most recent conquest and  current obsession; eating all of the fruits under the face of the earth in Brazil, drinking caipirinhas as soon as the sun goes down, and having elementary Portuguese conversation with my cab driver and the  kitchen staff at my hotel.

my breakfast for the past week, 4 types of fruit!

My latest healthcare topic is renal disease in Brazil. I am working with an exciting team called Business Model Innovation for the pharmaceutical company Baxter Healthcare. We are building business models to expand Baxter’s footprint in the renal therapy business in Brazil.  I got thrown into the deep end in my first week,complete with 12 hour days in the field talking to various stakeholders  to learn the renal ecosystem.  Even though almost all the conversations around me were in Portuguese, I got a fair understanding of the situation. Being a former clinical medicine enthusiast, my favorite stakeholder is the patient.  Patients with chronic diseases are amazing in so many ways. I got to work with cancer patients previously, and I learnt that when you come to terms with an illness that alters your life in such immense ways, you have to buckle up and live through it. I think humans have more capacity than they imagine they do, especially when faced with hard circumstances in which they virtually have no choice . I know,because I am one of those people that people like to call "amazing" or "strong" when they hear my story. I did not make a conscious choice to be out here fighting for an education and to not see my family for 5 years, circumstances put me here. My plight is nowhere near to what cancer and renal patients have to go through, but I think in life, you get what you get, you are dealt a deck of cards and you cannot fold, you have to play! People who meet me think I am the most positive person ever, that it because I choose to wake up every morning and live through my circumstances and in spite of them.  Most of all, as I have always believed, your circumstances do not define you, it is what you make of them that makes all the difference.

But on a more serious note, what is up with all the amazing graffiti all over Sao Paulo?  I cannot wait to find out!

Perfect graffiti shot with this guy walking by in a Brasilia jersey!