by Sara Minard, PhD.
Starting a social enterprise in a low-income country is not hard. There are enough social problems out there to test potential solutions, definitely enough donors who are looking for projects to call their own, and many willing souls interested in serving the poor. The act of beginning a social enterprise, like many entrepreneurial ventures, requires a combination of boldness and momentum. You often feel like the universe is rooting for you, and those involved in the idea are full of measured optimism.
In June 2007, I was working in Paris at The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a socio-economist on West African economic development policy. I was asked to attend a conference in Dakar, Senegal, to present the results of a study that I wrote with a team of experts on sustainable shrimp aquaculture in West Africa to the Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, the Minister of Family and Youth, and some development partners, including the European Union. The invitation to present came from a Senegalese colleague, a high-level scientific expert in aquaculture whom I had hired to work with me on the study. He and his French colleague, also a fisheries expert, were going to present their work at this meeting. They had conducted a feasibility study for the European Commission on the prospects for aquaculture development in Senegal. This was a real issue then, as it is now, given that the fish stocks in the West African region were dwindling fast due to overfishing by foreign vessels, and the need for fish protein, the staple in the local diet, was in huge demand with the rising population. It turned out that the main result of their feasibility study was that villages in the Gandiole region, near the northern city of Saint Louis, was an extremely good site to establish aquaculture in the country. It also happened to be the same river-based village community where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1998-2001. What a coincidence! Moments after their findings were shared, I learned from a discussion with the Ministers that a dyke (or large ditch) between the Senegal river and the sea, dug out by the government in 2004 to avoid inundation of the city during the rainy season, had expanded to an unmanageable size, was destroying many of these villages along with the freshwater ecosystem of the river, increasing water salinization and thus depleting river fish stocks.
It is rare that an opportunity for social enterprise comes together so clearly. The opportunity to grow aquaculture in this prime area could potentially offset the natural disaster for the local communities created by the dyke and offer them both economic and food security! It was an exciting connection, and my colleague and I knew we had to seize the day. This is how the social enterprise Yarum Jën, or ‘raising fish’ in Wolof, came into being in 2008. My Senegalese colleague and I intended Yarum Jën to be a social enterprise because we both knew from our experience working in villages – he as a scientist and professor, and me as a Peace Corps Volunteer – that projects only work in villages when they are run by the villagers themselves. To succeed in combining an aquaculture farm with a social enterprise whose mission is community development, we knew we had to solicit the support of a Senegalese NGO called Tostan, which has worked for twenty four years in strengthening the capacities of rural communities and whose reputation in the country was outstanding. My colleague has the mind of a technician, so it was clear he would be the main technical project manager. I was the socio-economist who had worked in these villages for three years and knew almost everyone, so it was clear I would be the one to design the social enterprise in conjunction with Tostan.
Our next step was to conduct a feasibility study specifically for this project and the context of the village community. The 37 page study he wrote for funders found that the project would be profitable in 3-5 years, and Yarum Jën would contribute to short and medium term food needs, providing a reliable source of protein for consumption and revenue for the local population. After we raised 60,000 euros of foundation support, we were able to bring Tostan’s program into the village for a two year engagement which included putting together a village council to oversee the aquaculture farm. After one year of Tostan’s extraordinary wok, we began to build the infrastructure which, for aquaculture, is the most crucial and expensive part of the business model. With Tostan’s community-led program a transformational success, we had thought we had built both a strong and holistic physical and social foundation to ensure the smooth, sustainable running of the farm.
After two years, in June 2010, we had harvested small amounts of fish but not enough to reinvest in the enterprise. It was thought, without much honest reflection, that we needed another infusion of capital before we would be on the path to sustainability. We made a second request for funding by targeting four key areas we saw as critical for the growth of the social enterprise: 1) capacity building for Senegalese villagers to learn the basic of operations and business management, 2) expanding infrastructure including access to safe drinking water, 3) documentation of the environmental effects of the dyke to predict future risk, and 4) the expertise of a monitoring and evaluation specialist for three months to help the community assess where the gaps were in the value chain. Unfortunately Yarum Jën did not receive a second round of funding and, as a result, some difficult decisions had to be made.
During this time of transition, contact was made with a Spanish NGO who had wanted to work in this area on aquaculure and had money to spend. My colleague had shared these four critical needs with the NGO but they said they only wanted to finance infrastructure for the farm, not fund other projects such as infrastructure for drinking water, which was the main axis of this second request. My colleague, the scientist/technician, was convinced that with this extra funding, he could work to get the farm running sustainably as we had planned. To me, the foreigner living at this point in the U.S. and far removed from the day-to-day functionings of my Peace Corps village family, this seemed like a very risky, and almost lazy idea. Without having a clear understanding of where things needed to improve, how would another influx of capital help to elucidate the blockages? Despite my protest, my colleague wrote a proposal that got funded for 18 months for 63,000 euros. They had requested, as most NGOs do, a “local contribution” from the community but on less than $1/day, there was no way any of the villagers would have been able to make the financial contribution of 6,600 euros. To remedy this problem, and to secure the funding, my colleague negotiated that ‘local’ contribution could be satisfied by the human capital (labor) contributions of the villagers. This would prove to be a major mistake on many levels.
After one year of this new money arriving in the village, sometime in the form of a new car or new solar panels, and new state-of-the-art infrastructure, my colleague was appointed as the Director General of the National Aquaculture Agency. While it was quite an honor for the village, because many looked to his work with Yarum Jën as evidence of his bold vision and expertise, this also meant that he would shift his focus from our enterprise to a national program, ostensibly abandoning the people working for its success. So what happened, where the enterprise could not sustain this shift in management, and why did it ultimately fail?
The failures happened at three levels. This is the first project failure: the lack of financial contribution of the village created a low level of commitment to the project. This project was planned from the beginning to be a social business instead of a traditional development project. As such, it should attract a different type of funding (eg, Clinton Global Initiative, Root Capital) from non-traditional development partners who understand the private sector approaches of social enterprises in community management of economic activities. The project needed a partner aware of the interdependence of aquaculture with livelihood strategies and basic needs, like drinking water, field irrigation, etc. In addition, this funding request to the Spanish NGO was done without a real concerted effort by the village members (eg, the document was never translated into the local language, Wolof) or those of other partners we were working with, like Tostan. Therefore it was not surprising that the NGO involvement had a negative effect on the project. There was a lack of transparency and accountability in the process and a dependence on my colleague as the intermediary.
The second failure was managerial. My colleague and I insisted, having seen aquaculture projects very poorly managed by governments and development donors all around the word, on the need for a management committee whose job it was to manage only Yarum Jën, and this group would constitute the core leadership group concerned with the business side of things. Unfortunately this was done without proper consultation with the community management committee already existing. Therefore, the separation between the Yarum Jën management committee, created to strengthen the discipline of entrepreneurship at the village level, and Community Management Committee (CGC) established by Tostan had created a critical breach of trust in the community between those responsible for Yarum Jën, which included some of the most dynamic villagers, and the rest of the community. Tostan, with their deep connection to the culture, always had village committees set up an organization for the management of daily affairs, and this operated during the two years of their work in the village. When we created the management committee for Yarum Jën we essentially destroyed this work by creating the impression that the members of Yarum Jën had private interests. Decisions should have gone first to the Community Management Committee (CGC), which was the real owner of the project according to the rules the village agree on. While the social enterprise was a community-owned enterprise, we managed like the assets of the business were private.
The third failure was external but also managerial. For many people in the village with whom I spoke to prepare this evaluation this December, the main cause of failure was when my colleague had decided to enter the government as Director General of the National Agency for Aquaculture. There was hope that his new responsibilities would bring resources and attention to Yarum Jën. The truth is that he decided to remain full time in the capital city of Dakar, and his visits to oversee the operations of Yarum Jën became less and less frequent. There was, as a consequence, an important gap created for miscommunication and misunderstandings between him and the villagers. For example, the project received visitors often because very few village-based aqaculture busiunesses in Senegal were as innovative as ours. One of the village leaders who was in charge of welcoming people to the social enterprise, cooking for them and preparing for their stay, would not be informed in advance of these visits, and would have to quickly prepare food which is not easy to do in a small, rural village without electricity and running water.
Promises were made by villagers we had put in positions of authority in my colleague’s absence, and they made promises they could not keep, ranging from employing villagers to construct or repair infrastructure, or solicit new partnerships with potential funders. While my colleague managed national projects in his new life as Director in Dakar, the lack of his physical presence and the lack of local ownership and capacity on the village level created untold difficulties. A deep anonymosity was carved between families who were either for or against Yarum Jën. There was disillusionment of the part of the youth who saw this project as a new hope at first, and then, when there was no way to make money, decided to leave the village in search of an income. To fill these gaps, the villagers most active in Yarum Jën tried to serve as a bridge between my colleague and the village, but with financial and other promises unfulfilled, the confidence of villagers towards them had deteriorated.
A final twist in this story which falls under the category of “uncertainties”. In 2012 with the election of the new President of Senegal my colleague was fired from his post as Director, and spiraled into deep personal despair. He decided to find refuge in his wife’s family village in the south of the country and stayed there for many months, without sending word. When he resurfaced, I found he had been appointed in the new administration to work on aquaculture and youth, and would be located hundreds of miles from Yarum Jën. I was delighted his spirits were back and his professional life was back on track, but it was clear to me that he had resigned his commitment to the success of Yarum Jën. On February 10, 2014, my colleague submitted his resignation letter to the remaining leadership of Yarum Jën and the social enterprise was officially dissolved, its assets and liabilities absorbed by the Community Management Committee.
The failure of Yarum Jën, like many business failures, was painful yet instructive. The most instructive part was that we did not see the value of the village governance structure for managing the finances of the business. We thought, like many do in the business world, that there must be a clear separation between hard-nosed finance and the collective decision-making of a village committee. We did not understand or appreciate, in retrospect, is what we should have expected from the fruits of labor of an NGO like Tostan whose objectives seemed so intangible: empowerment, capacity buidling, democratic organizing, human rights education, etc. We should have trusted the uncertainties that are inherent when you engage people in a process of participatory governance, but we were hasty and we confused our business discpline and precision focus on the business with the fact that in a rural village, time, trust and transparency is more valuable than money, and more valuable than fish.
Looking back, one lesson rings loudest of all. True development cannot be fast, unilateral or even “adequate”. It is not easy or simple, and no one can manage a social business in a community if s/he does not regularly monitor it from within the community. If efforts at community-led social enterprise are to be truly sustainable, they must take time. They will always be somehow difficult, complex, and full of uncertainties that require a concerted and consistent involvement of the community. And, they require what Jed Emerson and Cathy Clark call multi-lingual leadership that is transparent, respectful and always ready to adapt in order to better serve the social mission.
