Cover.  As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.

Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience.  Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.

Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes.  (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.)  There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.

There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly.  The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem.  His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads.  (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)

What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?

• Perhaps the most wondrous thing about field research is people’s grace in allowing strangers into their homes, their lives, to pose a series of questions whose purpose must surely seem cryptic to them.  (The surveyors do introduce themselves, and the purpose of the research, of course.  But I think it’s a far cry from those introductions to understanding the worlds of academic publishing, or [in the case of this study] insurance product design, that are the prime movers behind these surveys.)  And yet they do let them in.  They even let me in, when I am monitoring surveyors in the field, and I have been profoundly grateful for these chances to sit under respondents’ carefully thatched roofs and listen to snatches of their lives in my mediocre Dagbani.
• It has been a blast getting to know our surveyors.  The team leaders are just great – thoughtful, organized, and intelligent – and I’ve slowly moved past my initial monolithic impression of the larger survey team as “that group of 20 men (and one woman) who do a lightning strike on the office for their netbooks each morning” to individual interactions, individual personalities.  There’s L., who willingly took on additional work when his team leader fell ill, and D., who is perpetually flashing the friendliest smile at everyone, and J., who elevated himself considerably in my opinion when he finally stopped flirting in French and began speaking to me politely, and many others.  They have been a fantastic group of people to work with.
• And honestly, much of what’s enjoyable is a succession of small daily things.  The reckless glee of being on the back of a surveyor’s motorcycle, on our way to find a respondent, speeding between houses so closely spaced our legs brushed the mud walls on either side.  The temporary cooling of buying cold Pure Water sachets on the way to the office and drinking them as quickly as possible.  Chasing chickens and small beautiful children out of the open door of the Walewale office, somewhat halfheartedly, because they think it’s a game to come into the office and get chased, and I enjoy the break.  An unexpected frog hopping out of a backpack containing soil samples and into my hands, to be set free outside.  All of these, perfect pleasant diversions from a job that is at times overwhelmingly busy, but always worthwhile.

There is a very strong correlation between my returning to Africa and my completely neglecting this blog – which says less about African internet than about how busy I always find myself when I’m here!  I came into my current position with IPA at the beginning of a two-month household survey examining underinvestment in agriculture in northern Ghana, and since then our whole team has been working non-stop.  Our surveyors leave for the field between 7 and 8 am every day, so I’m usually at the office by 6.30 to make sure that everything’s prepared.  Then it’s a long day of tracking survey documents, sorting soil samples, assigning survey teams to new communities, preparing per diem payments, troubleshooting the netbooks & survey software used in the field, selecting respondents for field audits, taking calls from surveyors, and making frequent three-hour round trips up to our satellite office in Walewale, among any number of other things.  An early day might end at 7 pm, and a late one at 10 pm.  The sheer amount of work has forced me to grow more as a manager than I have in any other position I’ve yet had, which has been fantastic.  It simply doesn’t leave much space at the edges of my days for anything else.

In a sense, “emergency” microloans are just a more expensive form of saving for the poor.  Rather than saving in advance and earning interest, they have to save after the fact and pay interest.  The incentives of the poor (not reducing current consumption for future expenditures) and the banks (taking in interest instead of paying it out) are currently aligned on this issue, but it results in a suboptimal equilibrium.  Or, actually, I wonder how these incentives might vary between formal banks, and microfinance organizations (often non-profits) which may acquire their capital from different sources.  At the microfinance institution I worked for in Ghana, the interest paid by lendees was just enough to cover their local operating costs.  It’s not totally clear to me how they could have paid interest on savings, even had they legally been able to accept deposits (which they weren’t, because they were registered as an NGO and not a bank).