Beekeepers (1): The story begins in 2004 when a young and innocent anthropology student finds herself in Adamaoua, (a savannah region in Cameroon about the size of Wales), caught up in the overspill of excitement of a Modern Beekeeping Missionary. The Missionary is spreading the gospel of a dream of ‘modernism’, new hives, better lives etc. This is a famous mission in the beekeeping world, to try to transform beekeepers, who have learnt skills from their grandparents’ grandparents and can produce hundreds of hives with 100% local materials and very little financial input, into ‘modern’ and ‘professional’ beekeepers (requiring heavy financial investment and a new set of skills). Everyone is left hoping for the solution which will come from ‘outside’. It appears to turn up in the form of an aid from a donor partner, but unfortunately 60% of the funds are pocketed by the ‘Missionary’ and all hopes are dashed. Meanwhile, aside from the chaos, the region’s biggest honey and beeswax trader is slowly but surely trading tonnes of honey and beeswax to traders in neighbouring countries Nigeria and the CAR. His ambition is more concrete- to export directly to the international market. A few years later, an NGO in Cameroon is taking an interest in developing the honey market, and the anthropologist comes back to carry out a market study for them with a group of friends and colleagues. The opportunity to channel stockpiles of beeswax found in remote corners of North West Province and honey taken from the potentially thousands of tonnes produced in Adamaoua, into a larger scale exportation to Europe captures the attention of one of the study team members, a young Cameroonian entrepreneur (keen to put his studies into practice and generate his own income). The following year, the anthropologist returns again with some rapid training in the international honey market, a vague promise of an importer searching for new African honey sources, and an indignant conviction that something more sustainable can be done to improve the lives of this beekeeping community- involving better markets which reflect the value of this local richness in the prices paid for this honey; and the opportunity for each beekeeping family to do their own development. The vision has enough fuel to take off and Guiding Hope is founded by the young Cameroonian entrepreneur in April 2007 with 4 members. Guiding Hope’s aim is to be a marketing structure joining the producer communities to the international market. The young anthropologist founds an organisation called PAELLA-E, aiming to accompany Guiding Hope in its actions and relationships with suppliers and clients. Initially Guiding Hope works in partnership with the local honey and beeswax trader, but as trust is built up, he becomes its 5th member. The 6th and final member has over 15 years experience in business and environmental management, and has been working in the honey sector in Cameroon in an advisory/ capacity building role. Now, inspired by this dynamic and apparently successful starter, she decides to demission from her job and begin volunteering with Guiding Hope. Drawn together by friendship, fortuitous meetings, the desire to innovate and be a positive example, the team is complete. Cameroon is a difficult business environment to operate in: its financial infrastructure is limited, procedures for opening bank accounts are lengthy and longwinded procedures and extortionate taxes are placed on export. However during Guiding Hope’s first year of operation, a set of administrative and logistical hurdles is mounted one by one and in October 2007 the first beeswax is exported. This marks an important milestone in the consolidation of relations between Guiding Hope and the UK client Tropical Forest Products. Until now, these relations have been held together solely by the anthropologist- exchanging the problems and fears of the start-up enterprise for the founded consolation and advice from the 20 year old enterprise. A lot of factors make the situation in Cameroon very different from the UK client’s experiences in trading with beekeepers elsewhere in Africa, but similar problems are still coming up. The first foundations are laid with the producer groups- a minority 100 or so beekeepers amongst the thousands in this region. These producer groups have been selected because they are dynamic and hardworking, and ready to believe that this newly formed enterprise will turn its words into action. That is, Guiding Hope will provide training and extension, build appropriate honey storage centres and start to buy honey for export at a stable and higher-than-market price. These promises are made openly during the first beekeeper gathering the region has experienced, and a stopwatch is set for a period of 18 months, during which time all the preparations should be made for export of the first container of honey to Europe. A socio-economic study carried out by Guiding Hope’s partner PAELLA-E had determined that the major problem with the existing market was unreliability of buyers and prices, which change roughly every two weeks during the honey season. PAELLA-E’s analysis of the value chain has uncovered a spider’s web of beekeepers with hives dotted most of the way across the 63,000 km² region of Adamaoua, hundreds of bayam salam traders out on the attack for a small margin on honey bought from the village and delivered to the town, and a set of clandestine transporters carrying sacks of honey in overladen cars barely fit for the bumpy roads they trundle up and down. The web is held together either by a very patchy phone network coverage, otherwise simply by word of mouth. Although the goal to export honey to the European Union has been set and initial contracts discussed, all this is only theoretical because Cameroon must first join the list of countries recognised by the EU as eligible to export honey free of contaminants. Getting ‘on the list’ requires a concerted government effort, understandably quite a difficult thing in a country such as Cameroon where apiculture is a minority industry, tucked away in the corner with no one in particular responsible for it and little or no budget to develop it. Things are pushed forward by an impatient Guiding Hope, supported from the sidelines by PAELLA-E and a couple of NGOs and eventually the government takes up the challenge and appoints an official to supervise the dossier. Similarly, the market identified by Guiding Hope’s client requires that Guiding Hope obtains producer and processor organic certification for its products. Logically, there is no risk of contamination by pesticides, fertilisers and other chemical products in this vast expanse of sparsely populated savannah land, and the type of bee husbandry is almost at the opposite scale from the commercial beekeeping carried out in Europe, (where the bees are regularly fed with sugar and treated with medicines). However the challenge is how to introduce product traceability and internal control in a predominantly illiterate context where almost all commercial transactions are carried out using mental arithmetic and identification of ‘client’ and ‘supplier’ simply as ‘Grand frère’ or ‘Petit frère’. With PAELLA-E’s support, Guiding Hope introduces a system, which involves registering beekeepers and wax suppliers, providing training and signing contracts, building collection centres designed to ensure safe and appropriate storage of honey, managed by staff selected from the beekeeping groups. The system is controlled primarily by Mami Congossa (Congossa is a Cameroonian term for gossip), whose job it is to turn up by surprise in the village collection centres and listen and observe everything going on and then return and write it all up in official reports for Guiding Hope. Women are usually shushed by their husbands and expected to sit either outside the meeting room, listening through the walls, or to sit at the very back of the room and keep quiet unless they’re spoken to, but Mami Congossa is an outstandingly courageous young woman who is confident enough to sit and talk with the male beekeepers, and discover the truths that a formal inspector would not uncover. The stopwatch ticks bringing with it a series of discouragements: 1) Beekeepers are announcing widespread damage to their hives by a mysterious wild animal known locally as the baya. It is described as cat-like, with sharp claws and sharp teeth, a long tail and a stripy body and lives in holes in trees. Eventually, when it is presented dead, it is identified as an African Palm civet. 2) A problematic container of beeswax takes three months to sell and another two months to be paid for; this ties up the majority of the capital of the young enterprise, setting them significantly back for the 2008 buying season. 3) While commercially, activities remain fairly static, the group puts their energy instead into writing reams of project proposals, none of which seem to produce positive results because there is too much competition, the group is small and unknown, the activities don’t match with the donors’ objectives, etc. Then all of a sudden, an email arrives with news that Guiding Hope has been selected as a SEED Award Winner for 2008 because of its innovative and entrepreneurial approach to sustainable development, its potential to contribute to economic growth, social development and environmental protection locally in Cameroon and the potential to inspire others. The SEED Initiative promotes, supports, and researches such exceptional multi-stakeholder partnerships, which have developed innovative, locally-led solutions to the global challenges of sustainable development. A much needed boost to team moral, beginning with a day in the limelight with the Award Ceremony’s Host, the American Embassy. This brings representatives of the beekeeping community to Yaounde for the first time and gives them the opportunity to impress the guests with ‘how to produce a beehive in 40 minutes flat’. Leaves, bamboo, cord and straw and a beekeeper knife all have to be got passed American security for the demonstration. SEED also brings Guiding Hope face to face with the British Client, and the first draft of the Convention to be signed between them is discussed during a 3 day meeting on the beach in South Cameroon. Six more weeks tick by and six village collection centres are built, with storage capacity for 50 drums of honey. The team hires a battered car for a weekend and holds six opening ceremonies during which the official honey prices are announced and all the burning questions are answered. Six hundred bottles of juice and beer and honey wine are drunk and six cockerels are slaughtered. One busy weekend! Immediately following this, an intensive training programme begins, focussing on the importance of hygiene and cleanliness, honey quality standards and management of the collection centres. 128 beekeepers are trained and equipped to start harvesting honey for export and 12 collection centre staff ready to tackle record keeping and quality control. Through its partnership with the UK client, Guiding Hope is provided with a credible interface, responsible for marketing of its honey and wax in Europe. The partnership also involves other dimensions of collaboration such as R&D to improve production and quality; joint profit sharing and accountancy; and direct exchange during regular visits. Guiding Hope and its UK client must work hand in hand to scale up the capacity of both companies at a coordinated pace. In 2009 Guiding Hope buys its first container of honey, which is then stockpiled for 7 months until late October 2009 when Cameroon is finally listed as an authorised exporter of honey to the E.U. Getting a container of the honey into the UK proves to be as difficult as getting a visa for the UK and the honey spends several more weeks in the port of Douala, and again in the port of Felixstowe while all the documents are drafted, corrected, rewritten, stamped and approved. It finally arrives at the importers’ factory almost a year after it was bought. Despite the hiccups, the first year of honey exports shows promise and beekeepers are approaching Guiding Hope left, right and centre, hoping to be registered as suppliers for 2010. Guiding Hope therefore begins to plan its expansion into 24 new villages, involving the collection centre staff as messengers and trainers. They are better able to communicate and translate what Guiding Hope can offer into a language that their fellow beekeepers will understand. Training is organised in 32 villages, almost 500 new suppliers are registered and 10 quality control officers are taken on. The training programme is boosted by small grants from UNDP and the World Bank. Meanwhile, thanks to the marketing efforts of the British client, Guiding Hope’s presence on the market as supplier of organic African beeswax is beginning to attract important new customers, such as the Body Shop, interested in using the product in cosmetics preparations. As orders for beeswax and honey increase, and numbers of producers mount up, the potentially weak link in the chain is Guiding Hope’s purchasing power. The honey is principally bought during a period of 8 weeks and without a ready source of capital, Guiding Hope will fail to meet its orders and lose the trust of its suppliers and clients. This problem is resolved in the nick of time when a loan in agreed with U.S lender, Root Capital, 5 weeks into the honey season. Purchasing begins at full speed. The 2010 season is launched with the planting of bamboo forests in the beekeeping villages. The increasing interest in honey production has drawn beekeepers’ attention to the problem of diminishing supplies of raw materials for hive production. The local materials used to produce hives are also used in construction and furniture making. Beekeepers could once find bamboo in their villages but now many of them must make a 30km return trip to source their bamboo. The decision to plant community bamboo forests shows their commitment to the future of their industry and of their environment. Guiding Hope and its team could not have produced such results without the dedicated efforts of its 6 members (now organised as a Board of Directors), willing to work all hours for little pay, invest their own capital, and share risks. Friends and family have also given the young enterprise the benefit of the doubt and invested their money before seeing how it could be returned. Guiding Hope now engages over 60 village collection centre staff on a seasonal basis, whilst 18 people are employed full time in processing, marketing, logistics, training and skills development. Over 600 beekeepers have signed contracts with Guiding Hope to supply high quality honey in 2010 and have been promised a price roughly 30% higher than current market prices. This will allow them to make improvements in their living conditions, pay for medicine and send children to school. Over the next few years, as Guiding Hope increases in sales capacity, and fellow beekeepers start to see the advantage of selling to a reliable and people-centred enterprise, the number of its suppliers will increase manifold, as will the impact and reach of its activities. For example, Guiding Hope is currently setting up a Foundation which will support community groups in developing and financing social projects such as digging wells, setting up schools and support income generation by women. Three years of Hope bring this small enterprise to the frontline as first Cameroonian exporter of honey to Europe, first company certified by Soil Association in Central Africa, and one of the leading suppliers of African beeswax. However, success is measured more in terms of Guiding Hope’s capacity to push itself beyond all limits in order to meet its personal targets, set transparently with its stakeholders in 2007. Back then, one of the beekeepers had commented that ‘the bridge is standing over the water but we will need mutual understanding, courage and trust to cross over’. If Guiding Hope has got this far, it is because of such qualities found in its members, employees, suppliers, partners, clients and supporters. Source: guidinghope; Rebecca Howard, 6 May 2010 E-Mail: [email protected]
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 21:22:40 +0000
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