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| Appendix F. Excel spreadsheet data roll-up |
OICI-Guinée
Food and Livelyhood Security Pita
BP 719
Conakry
Republique de Guinée
Attention: Mamadou Tanou Diallo and Amadou Petty Diallo
Dear Tanou and Petty:
I hope this note finds you in good health and spirits. 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.
OIC requested that I put together this letter suggesting follow-up activities for the beekeeping development project on which we collaborated. Much of the larger scale or higher level activities are best pursued by the Fédération des apiculteurs de Guinée (FAPI) but you may be interested in what those activities are: I have suggested that the Fédération create a specialty brand from their best honey and to create a public relations/marketing/education program around that. I have also created for them a couple of draft posters and labels for honey and moisturizing skin cream. In addition I suggested that they seek local craftspeople artisans to create wood or linoleum stamps that can be used to create standard attractive labels at the village level-- which can also create spin-off activities such as art-card and batik fabric production.
One of the principle follow-up activities I have suggested is hold a practical beekeeping 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:
Most of this planning is probably best conducted by FAPI staff—but I'm sure that Petty will be able to provide valuable assistance in identifying and communicating with client participants.
In addition, there are a number of activities which ought to be undertaken by Petty and other OIC technicians with respect to beekeeping activities.
One very specific activity that I would suggest is that Petty should complete the transfer of the bees from the pot in his yard into a KTBH. Such a transfer is usually a messy and relatively time-consuming activity-- but it is also very educational and an excellent activity for building self-confidence for working with bees. There are instructions for transferring rustic hives in Chapter 6 of Apiculture à Petite Echelle. In addition it would also be useful for Petty to view the video "ghana_bees07--hive_transfer.wmv" in the "videos_beekeeping_in_ghana" directory that I transferred onto your computer at the OIC Pita office.
I would also encourage you to keep in frequent contact with FAPI staff to coordinate regular partnership activities. Petty has already demonstrated his willingness and enthusiasm in doing this by visiting the Federation on one of his days off in Labe (after which he spent time revising hives with myself and FAPI staff in Kouraba).
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.
It would be very helpful to the program if OIC could also assist any technicians (such as Petty) who were interested in acquiring beekeeping equipment. I would suggest that this be on a cost sharing basis (up to 50%) so that technicians also make their own investment in the equipment-- a time tested technique to ensure that participants actually ascribe value to the equipment.
Before leaving Guinea, I met with Clifford Brown, Mission Director of USAID. He was particularly interested in concrete numbers indicating that efforts to improve beekeeping are actually having an economic impact. As stated in my trip report, 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. 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").
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
email: conrad.berube@gov.bc.ca
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