Better market information combined with simple technologies improve livelihoods for African farmers

My latest piece for GOOD is about African farming, the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, and the power of market information. An excerpt:

Before the ECX, if the price of coffee shot up on New York markets, the price of coffee in Ethiopia would rise—unbeknownst to farmers isolated in rural markets. Traders aware of the price spike could buy low from farmers and sell high on national markets.

“If everybody gets that information at the same time,” says Gabre-Madhin, “then the local market follows exactly what happens in the national market, and even the international market, so that means those margins start to get squeezed.”

Pre-ECX studies estimated that a farmer’s share of the final export price of coffee was 35-38 percent.

“Now, we’ve been measuring it and tracking it between 65 and 70 percent,” she says, “so that basically means that there’s a tremendous shrinking of the margins between the rural and the national price.”

Read the entire thing here.

Made in Africa: Oliberté Footwear provides jobs to the continent in lieu of charity

For GOOD, I profile Oliberté Footwear and its Made in Africa manufacturing model:

‘Why or how could anyone want to make shoes in a place full of so much poverty and corruption?’

That’s the question many people asked Canadian Tal Dehtiar when he founded Oliberté Footwear, the first company to make premium shoes in Africa using African materials and explicitly linking shoes sold by Western retailers to job creation on the continent. Dehtiar started the Toronto-based company in 2009, and sales increased from a mere 200 pairs initially to 10,000 in 2011. He projects sales of between 20,000 and 25,000 this year.

“At Oliberté, we believe Africa can compete on a global scale,” he says, “but it needs a chance. It doesn’t need handouts or a hand up. It needs people to start shaking hands and companies to start making deals to work in these countries.”

Read the entire thing here.

Photo courtesy of Oliberté