These fruits of labour last longer

By Rasheeda Bhagat
Farmers in his Tanzanian village always grew plenty, but he helped them go a long way with the help of simple solar driers..

Joseph Sekiku: Farmer's friend indeed

As he was growing up in Karagwe, a region of Tanzania west of Lake Victoria with “extremely high agricultural potential and one of the most fertile regions in the country, I asked myself why the biggest problem here is poverty and food security,” says Joseph Sekiku, founder of the Fadeco Community Radio.

Probing further he discovered that the biggest problem was “the lack of value addition to agri products and access to markets. Most of the crops our farmers grew, especially fruits such as bananas, pineapples and mangoes, and vegetables such as tomatoes decayed and wasted. Almost 75 per cent was wasted due to decay.”

The sorry plight of the farmers made him opt for science and agriculture in his university education. “Through the 1980s I kept asking myself what I could do to help these people,” says this social entrepreneur, who is a Fellow of both the Ashoka and Lemelson Foundations, which organised the Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad recently where he shared his experience with others like him.

Sekiku's father, a doctor, was keen that his son should also study medicine. “But even though I wanted to be like my father, I would always argue with him that as many of the people who came to him for treatment were malnourished due to lack of adequate food, I should try to do something in that area. So that's how I stepped back from medicine and went into agriculture.”

The first “challenge” he undertook after completing his university education in 1990 — a degree in post-harvest technologies from the Makerere University — was to “find some way to help my people.” Of course, like other youngsters with university education he took up jobs but “these took me out to the cities, and every time I went out to a big city, I felt it was a betrayal of my community … something within told me that I was deserting my people.”

So, finally, Sekiku decided to do something on his own to help his people. He realised that the need of the moment was not newer technological tools to improve agricultural yields. “They already knew how to grow crops… lots of fruits and vegetables; the problem came after they were grown, eaten and the surplus got wasted as there were no storage or processing facilities.”

Solar driers

With most people in the region having no access to electricity, Sekiku started looking at the traditional ways people used to preserve cassava or coffee in the olden days. “Fortunately, in 1988, my first year at the university, there was research on to improve the coffee crop using solar driers. I thought if this technique could help with coffee — the coffee dried in two days — why couldn't we modify it to dry and preserve bananas, pineapple and other fruits.”

He began researching while he was a student and by the end of his third year at university he produced a booklet on how farmers could dry tomatoes, pineapples, mangoes and bananas in the solar drier. “This drier is locally made out of timber or bricks and the energy is provided directly by the sun's heat and no solar equipment is needed.” Sekiku designed different kinds of solar driers, with one or more racks for drying farmers' produce.

Through this method the fruits and vegetables dried in two days “and farmers could keep them as long as they wished, provided “they were not exposed to pests, moisture and were kept in a tightly closed container”.

Karagwe is a big village with a population of about 10,000 and after “graduation I returned to my village. In those days, and even now, everybody looked up to me because I went to the university and they thought I had money and solutions for everything. I told them you have to learn; I will teach you different ways of growing, preserving and going to the markets for business.”

So for the next 15 years he taught them to implement what he had learnt at the university — from drying fruits and vegetables to making jams, finding markets and even running small hotels!

So, what does he do to earn a living?

It is the utter selflessness of most of the social entrepreneurs that is heartening. “Oh, now and then I get a job,” smiles Sekiku. He also has a six-acre farm where he grows maize, beans, and so on. “I am now planting a lot of trees as I am working with the environment,” he says.

Radio station

Sekiku is married and has five children. In 2007, one day he suddenly wondered: “I am already 43 and after some years maybe will I die, and I don't have the capacity to disseminate all this technology to a much larger group of farmers who are far away. So I thought of starting a radio station.”

Glancing at my conventional dabba-like cassette recorder he smiles and says: “I also use a tape recorder like this; only recently I got this MP3 player.”

Since 2007 he has been running the Fadeco (Family alliance for development through cooperation community) radio. “Now my entire work is on the radio. We give different kinds of agricultural technology — from production to processing and linking farmers to the markets.”

He does the last by using the Internet to get information on various markets interested in Tanzanian farmers' produce. “Also, when I am in a place like Hyderabad, I develop contacts and find out the prices of bananas or pineapples here and then convey that information to my farmers on the radio. And farmers can decide where they want to sell their produce.”

Sekiku adds that while farmers who have mastered the drying technique do export their products, the others too have been able to establish local markets and more or less cut out middlemen.

And like many others at the conference, he too found fellowships looking for him and not the other way round. “I didn't go to them; in 2006 Ashoka sent me an email saying they were interested in knowing about my work. I didn't respond because I didn't know what, or who, was Ashoka. In 2007 they sent another mail, saying we will visit you and see your work.”

His radio station might be small, his resources modest, but Sekiku has the farmer's interest at heart. “I know that in our country we have many elderly farmers who are very wise and have a lot of knowledge on farm practices. They can't come to my radio, so I send out my ‘reporter' with this tape recorder to interview them and then relay their message over the radio.”

Courtesy: Business Line / Life (March 12, 2010)