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| Appendix F. Excel spreadsheet data roll-up |
Fédération des apiculteurs de Guinée
BP 49
Labe
Republique de Guinée
Attention: Mamadou Yaya Diallo
Dear Yaya, Abdourahmane, Harouna, Dian Bobo, Alpha Oumar, Tanou, Abdoul Gadiry, and Rahilou:
Thank you so much for your kindness, hospitality and help during my recent Farmer-to-Farmer visit. I believe we made some significant contributions to apicultural development in the project areas.
I hope this note finds you all in good health and spirits. OIC Philadelphia has asked me to write to you to provide short-term and long-term recommendations on follow-up activities to my Farmer-to-Farmer visit of November 12, 2007- December 18, 2007.
In the short term I would suggest that we proceed with refining the promotional posters for "FAMiel" and that concurrently the federation should define and implement criteria for this "flagship" brand of honey. All component honey to be blended into this proposed premium label product should conform to the following specifications:
As we briefly discussed with Mr. Sidy Condé the federation may also wish to impose further restrictions on the honey accepted for this label (as a premium price should be paid to producers who can provide such honey) such as:
I believe that USAID might be able to provide money for the production of promotional and labelling materials. I'd suggest when we finish getting the French corrected that you print out the draft posters and forward them on to Clifford Brown, Chief of Mission at USAID. I met with him briefly just prior to leaving and I gave him a brief run-down on our activities during my time in Guinea.
However, the promotional materials should not be deployed until the FAMiel brand has actually been stocked into a number of key outlets. If there is a big grocery store in Conakry this would be a good launching pad-- and you might also want to look into supplying the commissary at the US embassy (if such exists). Once this is done then I would seek funding to put up a couple of billboards with the "FAMiel, pour la famille" message at key access points to that store (with the additional message "available at "L'Epicerie Grosse de Guinée" or wherever. A contest run to come up with a secondary product slogan could be used as a means to track the effectiveness of the campaign as the number of contest entries would give some indication of the number of potential customers reached. (The university would also be a good location for a promotional billboard as the educated/wealthier population attending the university is the demographic we want to get on board as a customer base-- not to mention that students might be more inclined to participate in the contest, being at a particularly creative, exploratory phase in their lives.)
I'm including a couple of label ideas for your consideration (see Appendix G: draft labels). You should have Tanou or one of the other technicians look into the cost of reproducing labels locally. I think the cost would go up depending on the number of colours. You may also want to consider going with a simple black and white label, at least for non-premium blends of honey and look at technologies for manual reproduction of such a design. Fairly detailed images and printing can be reproduced through using a linoleum or wood block printing and you may be surprised to find there is significant natural talent for such artwork in the villages. You might want to have the technicians ask FAPI members who have an interest in art to submit renditions of a standard image (I find that drawing talent is best assessed when a model is provided). You may even consider getting someone to experiment with batiked fabric labels that could be made from recycled cotton sacks or the inexpensive cotton used to make those red white and black undershirts that are typical in the Futa. This would best be done using a linoleum or wood block stamp to transfer ink onto the fabric. Get the technicians and villagers to look for someone who does batik dyeing using stamps then invite them to train any aspiring artists from the engroupments at a seminar in Labe (or wherever convenient) similar to the soap-making demonstration we arranged in Hoore Kola. Encourage participants to try making some batches of batiked cloth using beeswax (again, you could do this by staging competition for cloth to be submitted by a certain date with a prize of several bottles of honey or some beeswax to the winner).
Mr. Brown of USAID, was particularly interested in concrete numbers indicating that efforts to improve beekeeping are actually having an economic impact. Collecting this kind of data goes beyond what can be done in the short duration of a Farmer-to-Farmer visit and requires accurate long-term record-keeping spread over a wide geographic area. However, I will include here some very rough calculations to provide some general indication of potential economic impact that beekeeping may have in Guinea:
The current level of bee-skills I observed in the Futa Djallon region would
qualify the members of FAPI overwhelmingly as bee-killers (it is more common
than not for the folks to kill off a colony in the course of harvesting a traditional
hive) or at best "bee havers" rather than true beekeepers because
they do not actively manage the brood nests of their colonies-- see "Chapitre
1, Les abeilles et les hommes" of Apiculture à
Petite Echelle. Even those folks who have KTBH's have risen only to the
level of "bee-havers"; the KTBH's allows harvesting in which the the
brood nest remains relatively intact and the colony can be preserved from one
season to the next. In contrast to traditional nest robbing which destroys the
colonial "honey factory", bee-havers can eat their honey and hive
it too. I will therefore use the term "honey producer" in this document
to describe the clients with whom I worked. :
KTBH's offer a means to significantly increase the annual income from hive products.
Assuming that:
The annual income (from 10 traditional hives per honey producer * 3.5 kg/hive/year * $1.42 per kilo) is currently approximately $50 per year per beekeeper.
KTBH yields are typically 20 to 40 kg per year (almost ten times as productive
as the figures assumed above)-- but let's call the KTBH five times as profitable
(just to be on the safe side, since KTBH's are more costly to build than traditional
hives). Therefore honey producers should be able to easily increase their
income (with 10 KTBH's) to $250 per year. That's over 10% of the per capita
income (and I would imagine that rural farmer incomes are considerably less
than the $2000 national average)—but it also assumes that the honey producers
could find buyers for their wares—which may not always be the case.
I am attaching a data collection sheet (see Appendix E: data collection sheet) that can be used by engroupment officers to track honey and wax production at the village lesson. Technicians should discuss with engroupment members ideas for how best to record harvest information-- keeping in mind that what we are really interested in doing is to quantify differences between hives. Villagers may prefer to keep records differently—perhaps by keeping the honey harvested from different types of hives in different sets of appropriately marked containers and tracking what was sold from each lot. Per hive production could then be obtained by dividing the total harvest by the number of hives of a particular type that were harvested. Villagers may come up with other ideas but whatever tracking system is used written records should be updated every time the engroupment meets during the harvest period (or an ad hoc meeting called after harvest has been completed in order to acquire the information. (You may want to consider some means of ensuring unique identification numbers—perhaps by issuing chits distributed by the engroupment (to avoid duplication of numbers) with the following codes: rt (ruche traditionelle), ta (ruche traditionelle ameliore--i.e. with a removable access door), kf (ruche Kenya fourni pour FAPI) and km (ruche Kenya faits pour membres or by craftsmen local to the members) associated with a particular engroupment. So, if you come up with simple codes for each village the first improved traditional hive in Kouye could be something like "ta-KY-001".
I am also including a spreadsheet for the Federation to roll up the harvesting/income information at least annually (see Appendix F: data collection roll-up sheet). When visiting member communities technicians should ensure that this data is being collected and should transcribe any updated information. Technicians should also update information from these sheets each time that a community is visited. It would be useful to question the wider community how many times that year that honey had been used medicinally in the community and to what ends (such as: "honey used 4 times in rehydration drink, twice as a wound dressing and 6 times in ginger-honey remedies-- patients condition improved after all cases except one case of diarrhoea which required treatment with additional drugs").
Please remember to follow-up with Population Services International (PSI) as the Federation agreed to draw up work plans with them for the upcoming new year's work cycle. It would also be a measurable success of the program to keep track, in periodic work reports, of the partnership events that come out of such planning. These could be simple prose entries such as ("technicians conducted 4 village demonstrations of condom candle-making with PSI extensionists-- who report that they have used the technique themselves in 7 other communities; on two other occasions PSI technicians rode out with FAPI techs to distant rural communities and on 3 additional occasions rode out on PSI motos. A total of 250 people attended the various events, 125 men and 125 women").
While on the subject of partnerships, following our site visits, fellow FtF volunteer Joseph Foltz and I were talking about our respective experiences and saw some linkages that I did not have a chance to discuss with you before leaving. The groups he was surveying in the Sarakele area are growing ginger largely as a medicinal plant. We think that there is a good opportunity here to encourage interchange between the ginger and honey producers as there is a long tradition of usage in Western culture of ginger-honey mixtures as a home-remedy for coughs (I've been taking this myself the past couple of days). In addition, I had spoken to the apicultural technicians about researching a means to extract essential oils from local resources, particularly from all the orange rinds that are currently discarded, for use as scenting agents in the moisturizing skin cream we fabricated. Joe and his contacts came up independently with the same notion for usage of essential oils in medicinal and pesticidal products. Joe had some basic knowledge of the process involved and I am including a basic design for a steam distiller (see Appendix I: steam distiller plans) that could be constructed by local craftsmen near areas where oils will be fabricated. An oil extractor of this type could benefit both the honey producers in the area and the medicinal plant growers and perhaps will encourage their further partnership/linkage in the production of honey/ginger cough remedies. Similarly, I am attaching drawings of butter churns (see Appendix J: butter churn drawings) that may prove useful in the processing of shea butter. I would like to see a steam distiller used to extract oils that can be used to scent moisturizing cream and for medicinal use. I also believe it would be useful to test the use the use of a plunger style churn for the production of shea butter. Perhaps you could contact M. Lamarana Balde in the Sarakele area and come up with funding for him to arrange the construction of an experimental prototypes.
Please follow up on means to ensure that technicians acquire
their own hives. I believe that it would be worthwhile
to consider implementing a perquisite for technicians of FAPI and OIC to be
able to obtain hives at half the price offered to regular members. Three hives
is a good number to start off with as it allows resources from two other occupied
nests to support the third hive if a queen is killed, the hive raided by a pest
or is otherwise weakened. It is also a number easily managed by technicians
with an already fairly full schedule. Starting with more hives than that might
actually result in hives being manipulated less than they would be otherwise
as the prospect of inspecting many hives can be daunting to new hive owners.
I am flattered that FAPI and FLSPT have expressed an interest in my returning to Guinea. As we began to discuss, I believe an appropriate next step would be to determine the best time of year to hold a short-course. Such a course is probably best held as five days of intensive hands-on training. Participants in the course would include FAPI and OIC beekeeping technicians and one or two representatives from each engroupment (keeping in mind that the maximum number for this kind of thing is about 50 people). Participants from client groups should be chosen on the basis of their enthusiasm and their aptitude to serve as community liaison/instructors in their home communities as they will be expected to convey the skills they acquire within their own engroupments following the course. Samples for the lesson plans for such a short-course are available on the information I copied to your computer (under the folder "htm2008" (or I might have renamed it "conrad's website"). Open any of the HTML files in that directory then surf, via the navigation bar at the top or bottom, to the Ghana FTF page and click on the "Beekeeping short-course training schedule and lesson plans" link. FAPI will need to complete the following logistics:
To get started on all this you might want to convene a "team meeting", itemize all the tasks that need to get done and find out which technicians would like to volunteer for which tasks and get them to commit by completing their tasks by a certain date—and then check to make sure that they are completing their tasks on schedule. You've got great staff-people so I'm sure they'll be able to handle things.
Looking forward to continuing to work together!
All the best in the New (Western) Year ;-)
Conrad Bérubé
Environmental Protection Officer
Ministry of Environment
2080-A Labieux Road
Nanaimo, BC V9T 6J9
(250)751-3167; FAX:(250)751-3103
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