What's in a Word?
Healthy or sickly? For smallholder farmers in Kenya and other East African countries, the health status of their livestock is a key towards economic well-being for their families. When farmers are asked how they assess if their animals are healthy, many respond that they are healthy if they are not sick. But the spectrum between healthy and sick is massive. An emaciated animal may not be sick, but neither is it healthy. An animal that is stunted may appear healthy because it is not sick. What to do?
A picture is worth a thousand words and words matter.
Ask the farmer to take a picture of their animal and send it in. Compare it with pictures of healthy cows. Teach the farmer to count the number of ribs visible on an animal and interpret whether their animal is emaciated or well-fed. Ask the farmer to measure how tall their animal is and share that information, along with the animal’s age. Compare that with normative data to determine whether the animal is stunted or within a normal range. Teach the farmer simple but effective practices to monitor well-being and take steps to move their livestock towards health. Do so as well for tending crops and maintaining proper soil conditions.
Su Kahumbu and her family are farmers and landowners in Nairobi, Kenya. She knows firsthand the challenges of farming with insufficient knowledge and tools. She educated herself on empirically proven agricultural practices. For more than 20 years, she has been educating fellow farmers, enabling them to learn to work smarter. But that in-person, paper-enabled teaching approach didn’t scale. And working smarter at scale was what was needed. So Su founded iCow (www.icow.co.ke) twelve years ago.
iCow has worked to inform and educate farmers, providing a database of regenerative agricultural information. The intention is to help farmers optimize their production systems, make timely and informed decisions, and reduce their risks. The database is available in a variety of formats, accessible via SMS, audio, video and images that can formatted for low-end feature phones, smart phones, tablets and computers. Sharing pictures and words back and forth, for example.
To make all of this happen seamlessly and transparently, Su developed partnerships with telephone companies, banks, philanthropic organizations, universities, research institutions and other agricultural stakeholders. With those as a foundation, she developed an ecosystem where partners could contribute their value to enhance the farmers’ experience. The ecosystem includes the above partners as well as suppliers, livestock and crop experts, governments, farmer organizations, content providers and development agencies. It took all of this to make the data collection, analysis, dissemination and other learning support available across communities, regions and national boundaries.
I met Su several years ago when she was a TED Fellow and I was doing pro bono coaching with them (though not Su). She did a great job of keeping members of her cohort informed of what was happening in her life. I was unsuccessful convincing her that iCow was a candidate worthy of her time to complete and submit an application for a Roger Kaufman Award (www.kaufmanawards.org) for social impact. In the past year or so, as a committee member of the CK Prahalad Awards (CKPA) for social innovation, I again approached Su, this time to invite her to submit an application for a CKPA and she agreed. Her application (at least her first draft with supporting documents) is in and ready to be reviewed and revised. She and I will be writing a chapter about iCow for a volume on social innovation, to be published in Social and Organizational Performance Review (SOPR) later this year.
What I’m struck by is the care, results orientation, systemic perspective, value-producing approach, and broad partnership and collaborative intent that Su and her team go about this noble endeavor. Her creativity, integrity and passion are evident in what she’s co-created, the emergence of new opportunities to explore and make real, and to continue to scale these services more broadly. Her ambition inspires me to consider how I can play a larger, more inclusive and impactful game, bringing my best self to the work ahead. I am already bringing that intention to the work I do.
What are your values? What gives you meaning, challenge, learning and joy? What games are you playing? Are they of your making? Have you identified your (higher) purpose? Are you aligned and connected to it? As you might imagine, this is an important, powerful context for making sense of the life you live. If you are so inclined, please comment and share. We have much to discuss.
#selfleadership #designyourlife #servantleadership #nobleambition