Tackling Seasonal Hunger and Poverty in Northeastern Nigeria
The founders of the Taimaka Project share how evidence inspired their approach and continues to inform their plans to scale.
In this post, CEGA Senior Program Manager Leah Bridle speaks with Taimaka co-founders Parth Ahya, Justin Graham, Muhammad Uba, and Abubakar Umar about Taimaka’s approach to applying research evidence, and their progress to date.
Taimaka means “help” in Hausa, a language spoken in northern Nigeria, and is the name of a new organization founded to do just that: combine the rigor of academic research with the dynamism of a startup to help reduce seasonal hunger and poverty of smallholder farmers in Gombe State, Nigeria. Based on evidence from a CEGA-funded study¹ by CEGA affiliated faculty Marshall Burke, Lauren Falcao-Bergquist, and Ted Miguel, the Taimaka team helps farmers access improved crop storage (PICS bags for crop storage), and offers post-harvest loans to help farmers wait to sell their crops when prices rise. Their goal is to increase the incomes of extremely poor households by 20%, measuring their progress and impacts as they scale operations.
Leah: We have seen Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD) take a similar approach: ground their programming and operations in promising evidence, then scale operations and iteratively test along the way. We love to see the evidence we’ve helped generate through the CEGA-J-PAL ATAI program inspire action. How did you decide to found Taimaka, and specifically to implement post-harvest storage loans as a way to help smallholder farmers in Nigeria?
Muhammad: In December of 2018, I got connected to Parth — an undergrad at Oxford with an active interest in Nigeria. At the time, I was working as a lecturer in engineering at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in northeastern Nigeria and designing solar irrigation solutions for smallholder farmers. I was keen to build affordable solutions for the poorest people in my community and so was Parth. He recruited Justin, an Oxford friend with a background in quantitative economics and coding, and I recruited Abubakar, a childhood friend and a practicing doctor in a rural hospital. Together, we built a plan to survey extremely poor communities in Gombe State to gauge the biggest challenges facing farmers.
Parth: Through the survey process, two key themes continuously appeared: (1) farmers struggled to wait long enough after harvest to sell their crops at higher prices, and (2) farmers wanted more and better farm inputs (fertilizer, seeds, etc.). We focused on the first problem. Every year, in remote markets in Gombe and across Africa, prices shift seasonally. After the rainy season harvest, when supply of crops for sale is high, prices hit their lowest point. In the lean season (the 3 months preceding the harvest), prices peak. Yet most farmers — due to a lack of liquidity and a legitimate fear of crop loss — are unable to save to sell their crops later. This is a problem for farmers, reducing their incomes. The price spikes are also a problem for consumers, as they lead to increased food insecurity in the lean season across northern Nigeria.
Justin: Francesco Valente, a mentor and friend of ours, who previously worked as a program manager at One Acre Fund, suggested post-harvest loans as a well-evidenced remedy to this issue. He pointed us to the CEGA-funded study in Kenya which showed a 29% return to farmers on the loan amount. We subsequently stumbled across a study in Tanzania by Hira Channa which was even more promising. Combining post-harvest loans with PICS bags resulted in a 40% net-return on the loan to farmers. On the heels of this promising evidence, we launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 and deliver post-harvest loans and PICs storage bags to 50 households in Northeastern Nigeria.
L: You’re clearly thinking very carefully about the specific design of the post-harvest storage loans approach evaluated in Kenya, which inspired your work. What did you look for in your context to understand if this approach might translate to benefit the farmers you aim to support? In other words, what gave you hope that this could work in Gombe, and what did it take to bring this promising approach from the evaluation in Kenya?
P: Our read of the literature on post-harvest loans was that they would work well under three conditions. First, prices shift seasonally by an amount greater than the cost of storage. Second, farmers are liquidity constrained. That is, they have cash obligations (e.g. school fees, health expenses, religious festivals, etc.) in the post-harvest period and no way to meet them without selling their crops. And, finally, farmers experience high rates of post-harvest loss.
A: We found immediately that the first condition was fulfilled: the consensus among surveyed households was that lean season prices for grains routinely exceeded 140% of the post-harvest price. As for the other two conditions, the majority of farmers we spoke to reported that they had no access to post-harvest credit and that they suffered from a relatively high rate of post-harvest loss, especially given how quickly they were selling their crops. With these conditions fulfilled, we concluded that what worked in Kenya and Tanzania could, if properly executed, work just as well in Nigeria.
L: Taimaka has by now piloted the storage and loan offers with 100 farmers in your first season of operations. We are interested to hear whether farmers indeed change their crop storage and selling decisions. How has the pilot gone so far? Do you have any preliminary insights for your operations?
J: As we wrap up our Y1 pilot, we have positive, if tentative, results to report. The loans we delivered seem to have made a direct difference in the lives of our clients in Gombe. We collected data from a demographically similar “control” group of 50 households to compare selling patterns with those who received our loan. We found that, seven months after the harvest, farmers who received the loan retained 54% more of their maize and almost three times more of their millet than those in the control group. At the same time, due to the pandemic and internal border closures, the price of grains went up by over 150% relative to the post-harvest price, enabling the farmers who received our loan to make a significant profit.
We should add a caveat that may be obvious to CEGA blog readers: this result was observed in a very small sample, and likely is confounded by a number of other variables. However, given the magnitude of the differences observed between farmers who received our loan and those who did not, this data provides us with some reason to believe, coupled with more rigorous evidence like the CEGA study, that our loans are having an effect. We take the above numbers as a positive signal, which we consider alongside other variables such as repayment rates and demand for our loan product at escalating interest rates to determine whether the program is worth continuing.
L: Now that the initial pilot implementation is wrapping up, what monitoring and evaluation activities are planned? What does this mean for Taimaka’s operations next season?
M: On the heels of positive results from this year, we are raising $45,000 to scale our operations from 50 to 200 households with the aim of reaching 1,100 people. The great news is, we’re already almost halfway there. We recently received $20,000 from the D-Prize which funds early stage non-profits effectively implementing proven ideas to combat extreme poverty. On the point of M&E, we intend to continue collecting sales data from farmers to determine whether the loans are enabling later sales of harvested crops. We do not see this as a replacement for a randomized evaluation, which would allow us to more cleanly and rigorously measure our impacts and which we hope to run once we reach sufficient scale (targeting Y4) alongside CEGA affiliates.
J: Along with our scale up of post-harvest loans to 200 households, we are exploring another idea which we have internally labeled “direct arbitrage.” At present, we see that traders across Gombe buy and sell grains back to farmers for a significant profit, the result of limited competition and collusion between traders. The core thought behind direct arbitrage is, what if we did the same but sold for a more competitive price?
Having done some initial research into the cost of transport and storage, we believe we could run this profitably, enabling us to pay out dividends to households in the form of subsidized food during the lean season. Depending on the magnitude of impact generated from the subsidy, we think this model could be highly cost-effective. However, some operational questions around security and crop price volatility remain open. To resolve these, we want to do two things: (1) continue crop price research and (2) launch a small-scale pilot of the direct arbitrage model in December. We are currently engaged in conversations with donors and academics about how we could make (2) happen.
P: As for the long-term plan for post-harvest loans, we intend to scale to 1,000 households in Y3, run a 2,000 household randomized evaluation in Y4 and, conditional upon impact, scale to 8,000 households in Y5, reaching over 40,000 individuals and generating implementation knowledge for policymakers across northern Nigeria. Something we are particularly interested in exploring through an randomized evaluation is the potential of post-harvest loans to generate food security effects. 57% of households in northeastern Nigeria reported being food insecure in August in a recent panel survey.
We suspect that additional lean season income and lower crop prices could make a substantial difference on this front, but lack the empirical evidence to confirm it. We’re excited to work with partners at CEGA to explore this potential and we’re grateful for the work CEGA, Innovations for Poverty Action, Lauren, Marshall, Ted, and so many other researchers and funders have done so far to shine an evidence-based path forward for us to make a difference in the lives of families in northeastern Nigeria.
For more information on their work, or to get in touch with the Taimaka team, visit taimaka.org
[1]: The impact evaluation in Kenya was funded by the CEGA-J-PAL Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (see atai-research.org), with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UK Aid for the British People. The research was implemented by Innovations for Poverty Action in partnership with One Acre Fund.
