Day 3

Today was the first day of meeting members of the sponsoring organizations.   It becomes quite complex.   My primary “client” is Fedamoza(FM), a farmers association for this area of the country with nearly 1000 members.   Some of the members are part of smaller associations which come under FM’s umbrella.   Promer is a Mozambique government sponsored organization that has funds to distribute and they are the ones who need a business plan in order to grant the funds.   They will grant up to 70% of start up costs and FM has to come up with the rest, much of which is likely to be in kind contributions (labor, materials, etc).   Then there is SNV, a Dutch NGO which is supposedly helping FM implement this project.   Whew.   Still not clear on where all the pieces fit.   SNV asked my organization CNFA (funded by USAID) to supply a volunteer to help with a business plan.   That’s me. 

I’m not even going to discuss the fact that on my first meeting w/ Antonio (country director of CNFA), he gave me a different scope of work from the one I was contracted to perform, different organizations and different location.   The desired outcomes of the two scopes have a couple of differences which I think I can work with.   

The morning began with a trip to the FM warehouse where the store corn they buy from their members and then sell to larger producers.   This is their warehouse. 

      note - having trouble with blogger entering my photos tonite - dont know why - go to dropshots.com/elizpou to see the pics from today.   

These women pack the corn into bags which are then loaded onto a big truck. 

These are some of the people we met with today.   Two of them are reps from FM.   When the others left to visit other projects (Promer officials were in the area to do monitoring reviews of several projects), I met in a thatched roof open area near the warehouse with members of FM and one SNV person.  Lots of questions asked.   Not a whole lot of answers available.   This project is going to be quite a challenge.  

The afternoon was free as SNV and Promer had other committments.   We met with them in the evening to try to gain a little more clarity about their expectations.   

Here is where I ate lunch, surprising tasty grilled chicken and fried potatoes.    

Below is my translator, Adriano who is with me at all times. 

These cute kids that were in front of the compound tonite, cutting up for the camera:

They like seeing their pictures as I took them. 

Somehow my camera has disappeared.   It was in a side pocket of one of my carry ons and probably slipped out during my array of plane entries and exits.  So pics are coming from the iphone.   

Right now, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed about what I’m supposed to accomplish in the next few days with the level of unanswered questions.   We are pretty far away from a legitimate business plan.   Its after dinner now and I’m planning on spending the next couple of hours organizing the next few sessions, along with some basic financial templates FM can use to project income, expenses, start up costs, etc.   Not sure how to proceed.   I’m going to start backwards from traditional business planning and work on finance basics first.   The we can talk about marketing, distribution channels, organization capacity, etc.   

Tomorrow morning, we start by visiting one of these corn processing machines and follow by a long session with FM reps to start filling in the blanks of the charts I will be creating tonite.   Whew again.