Jul 27, 2018
Field Notes No. 2: Updates on Existing Warehouse Options
Lire cet article en français !
Our project manager, Koura, has identified several communities with existing warehouses that are used to store food donations from the government or nongovernmental organizations. None of the communities, however, use these warehouses for storing household harvests. Instead, they use traditional woven granaries (as displayed above) that are susceptible to degradation from pests and fungus.
Our original plan was to take over a commercial warehouse and provide a storage option for communities with no access to improved storage. We planned on charging a fee for storage that would then go into a Healthy Growth Fund that is distributed to pregnant women and caregivers of children under 3 years old.
Since the communities Koura has identified actually own their warehouses, it might be hard to charge them for the use of their own space, which means we may have lost a funding mechanism for the Healthy Growth Fund. This is, however, an opportunity to understand what is currently keeping households from storing goods in their existing warehouse — many of which stand empty.
While communities store their grains in their traditional granaries still on the cob (or “unprocessed”), storage in a warehouse requires the grains to be separated (“processed”) and put into bags before storage. Is that something farmers would be willing to do?
Our outstanding questions are:
- What would it take for vulnerable farmers to want to store their crops in a communal warehouse?
- What are the assurances of security against theft?
- How would farmers transport their crop from the field to the warehouse and back?
- Would we need to provide storage sacks for storage (currently storage grains are unprocessed and stored in woven straw granaries)?
A few weeks ago, we detailed a three-part hypothesis to preventing severe acute malnutrition. Now our team is in southern Niger to kick off, refine, and iterate our prototype. While we’re out here, we’ll be sharing our observations and decision-making process along the way. We’d love to hear your thoughts or recommendations, so drop us a comment below or email us at airbel@rescue.org.
