Self Help Africa

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Self Help Africa

Founded	1984
Founder	Noel McDonagh Fr. Owen Lambert
Focus	Improving agriculture and food production, promoting entrepreneurship, supporting women, and climate change adaptation
Headquarters	Dublin, Ireland
Location	Kingsbridge House, 17-22 Parkgate Street, Dublin 8
Origins	Ireland
Area served	Sub-Saharan Africa
Key people	Raymond Jordan (CEO) (Chair)
Subsidiaries	Partner Africa, TruTrade, Traidlinks.
Website	selfhelpafrica.org
Formerly called	Self Help Development International; Harvest Help; Gorta-Self Help Africa

Self Help Africa is an international charity that promotes and implements long-term rural development projects in Africa. Self Help Africa merged with Gorta in July 2014, and the group of companies operates under the Self Help name.

The organisation works with rural communities in ten African countries – supporting farm families to grow more and earn more from their produce. Self Help Africa provides training and technical support to assist households to produce more food, diversify their crops and incomes, and access markets for their surplus produce.^[1]

The agency also helps rural communities to access micro-finance services, and supports sustainable agricultural solutions that enable rural farmers to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change.^[2] Self Help Africa works with local partners across its African programmes to support the provision of good quality local seed and planting materials. This work includes assistance to local communities to multiply their own seed,^[3] and provision of support for rural groups so that they can get certification for the seed that they produce.^[4]

The organisation has its headquarters in Dublin, Ireland,^[5] UK offices in Shrewsbury, Belfast, London and American offices in New York and Boston. Self Help Africa is a recipient of funding from Irish Aid, the European Commission, US AID, the United Kingdom Department of Foreign and Overseas Development (DFID), of variety of trusts, foundations, other institutional donors, and the general public. It has three subsidiary companies, an ethical auditing provider, and two trade network promoters.

Programmes in Africa[]

Self Help Africa collaborates with government agencies and local partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on programmes in Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Togo and Burkina Faso. It recently^[when?] established a presence in Goma in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and in Bujumbura, Burundi from where it runs a number of agri-trade development projects. It has also worked in Ghana and Benin, but completed its projects in these countries in 2016-7. Self Help Africa currently^[when?] works in partnerships with other international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in Eritrea, where it had its own country programme until 2011.

Projects currently^[when?] being carried out by Self Help Africa include a cassava development project in Kenya that is backed by the European Union, and two major challenge funds – AgriFI Kenya Challenge Fund and ENTERPRISE Zambia, which provide investment match-funding to agri-businesses in these two countries, to expand and diversify their activities. AgriFI Kenya is backed by the European Union and and is disbursing €18M in funding to create jobs and markets for small-holder farmers, while ENTERPRISE Zambia is backed by the EU and is disbursing €24M in grant funding.

Self Help Africa are founder members of the Irish Forum for International Agricultural Development (IFIAD), a multi-agency platform that has been created to share knowledge and good practices for the benefit of development programming and policy.^[6] Its members include the Irish farm advisory service Teagasc, the Irish Department of Agriculture, Irish Farmers Association and other NGOs.^[6]

A subsidiary of Self Help Africa, Partner Africa^[7] was established in 2012 to support ethical and socially responsible business practice. Partner Africa is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and provides high quality^{[citation needed]} and innovative^{[citation needed]} ethical trade services and capacity building programmes to the private sector across Africa. A further subsidiary, TruTrade, was created in 2014 as a joint venture between African trading businesses, Rural African Ventures Investments and Self Help Africa. The organisation, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya, seeks to improve the share of income that small-scale producers receive for their goods at market.^{[citation needed]}

History[]

Formation[]

Farmer and businessman Tom Corcoran, a former chairman of agri-food corporation Glanbia, was appointed chairman of Self Help Development International (SHDI) in 2006, and Raymond Jordan joined as chief executive in 2007.^{[citation needed]}

Self Help Africa was established in mid-2008 following a merger between Self Help Development International (SHDI) and the UK agency Harvest Help - both set up in the wake of African famines in the mid-1980s.^[8] Both agencies had worked for almost 30 years, seeking long term solutions to the problem of famine and food insecurity in Sub-Sahara.^{[citation needed]}

Self Help Africa has won several awards for its website, including an Irish Golden Spider for 'Best Charity Web Site' in 2004,^{[citation needed]} and an Annual Digital Media Award 'Best Information Web-Site' in 2007.^[9]

Expansion[]

In November 2009 Self Help Africa was formally launched in the United States by former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.^{[citation needed]} Also in 2009, the organisation collaborated with a number of international development agencies including Development Fund of Norway and FARM-Africa to publish 'Climate Frontline - African Communities Adapting to Survive', which was launched in Dublin by Irish Environment Minister John Gormley, at the EU in Brussels, in London, and in several African capitals. The publication sought to lend a voice to rural Africa, and show how the rural poor were already adapting to survive in a changing climate.^{[citation needed]}

Early 2010s[]

In 2011 a campaign, Change Her Life,^[10] was mounted by Self Help Africa that sought to lobby funding agencies and donors to provide a fair share of existing support to Africa's women farmers.^{[citation needed]}

A promotional video produced by Self Help Africa, "It starts with a seed", was selected as the Best Video entry in The Gates Foundation "Answering the Challenge" competition in 2011.^[11]

In 2012, Self Help Africa were the beneficiaries of a trans-Asian 'Silk Roads to Shanghai' expedition that took Irishmen Maghnus Collins Smyth and David Burns overland across a distance of 18,000 km from Istanbul to Shanghai - by bike, run and raft. The expedition took the participants ten months to complete, and succeeded in raising close to €50,000 to support the charity's work in Africa.^[12] Also in 2012-2013, Self Help Africa extended its work to Benin, and established Partner Africa.^[7]

Self Help Africa was also involved in the creation of the African Agriculture Alliance.^[13] A multi-sector alliance, the African Agriculture Alliance (AAA) seeks to be responsive to the priorities of farmer organisations and entrepreneurs as well as to local, regional and global market opportunities.^{[citation needed]}}

Turnover in 2013 grew to €9.5million.^[14]

Partnerships[]

In Summer 2014 Self Help Africa merged with Gorta,^[15][16][17] the oldest development organisation in Ireland. The merger, which launched Gorta-Self Help Africa in the Irish market appointed Ray Jordan as chief executive. The organisation continues to operate as Self Help Africa outside Ireland.

Gorta was established by the Department of Agriculture in Ireland in 1965 arising from a UN-led international Freedom from Hunger campaign. In the past 50 years Gorta has implemented more than 2,000 largely agricultural projects in over 50 countries worldwide. Arising from the merger the new organisation will^{[speculation?]} extend its development work in Africa to one additional country - Tanzania, and in 2014 undertake additional projects in The Gambia and Rwanda.^{[needs update]}

The merger of Gorta and Self Help Africa was intended to enable the organisation to increase its turnover in 2014 from a projected €14m up to €19m – and extend its programme reach in Africa significantly.^{[citation needed]}

Mid-2010s[]

In 2015, Self Help Africa increased its turnover to more than €18m,^[18] and launched a range of new agriculture and enterprise development activities in a number of countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, and West Africa.^{[citation needed]}

Tom Kitt, a former government minister and former Minister for Overseas Development succeeded co-chairs Tom Corcoran and Sean Gaule at the helm of the organisation.^{[citation needed]}

Also in 2015, Self Help Africa secured a number of major new grants to support its work, including $750,000 from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a development project in West Africa.^{[citation needed]} During the year the organisation also co-authored a report by NGOs in Ireland on the application of climate smart agriculture techniques in Africa. An opinion editorial on the importance of a global deal on climate change at COP21 authored by CEO Ray Jordan was published in an Irish national newspaper.^[19]

In 2016, Self Help Africa increased its turnover to more than €18.7m.^[20]

In 2017, Self Help Africa increased its turnover to more than €20m,^[21] and launched a series of new projects, in Kenya, Uganda and Malawi.^{[citation needed]} Support totalling close to €40m was awarded from the European Union for BETTER, Malawi, a consortium project that is designed to create more than 13,700 community-based farmer training sites in the southern African country, and for KILIMO-VC, a part of the EUs AgriFi Kenya project that is designed to boost agri-enterprise development in the country. KILIMO-VC has also received support from Slovak Aid.^{[citation needed]}

A multi-media story-telling project,^[22] won a national award from Ireland's NGO representative body Dochas for its accounts of the lives of people living in Northern Zambia over a period of years.^{[citation needed]}

Meanwhile, a cashless trading platform designed for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, and developed by Self Help Africa subsidiary social enterprise TruTrade^[23] received an innovation award from MIT. In 2017, Self Help Africa also took over the operations of Irish-based trade development NGO, Traidlinks^[24] which has been involved in supporting trade development opportunities for agri-businesses in Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Late 2010s[]

Self Help Africa launched a number of innovative^{[citation needed]} new agriculture and enterprise development projects in 2018. These included an agricultural training project in Uganda that will enable thousands of farming families to produce and sell their grain to the UN World Food Programme and a maize development project backed by US Aid in Ethiopia.

In 2018, Self Help Africa's social enterprise subsidiary won the annual Dóchas award for innovation,^[25] while its annual report was short-listed at the Ireland Good Governance Awards and by the Leinster Institute of Chartered Accountants.^[26]

Self Help Africa also concluded a merger with War on Want Northern Ireland in 2018, and formally launched a new branch – Self Help Africa NI at City Hall, Belfast, in March 2018.^[27]

The president of the Irish Farmers' Association, Joe Healy, visited Self Help Africa projects in Ethiopia and Kenya and reaffirmed Self Help Africa as the chosen charity of the IFA.^[28]

2020[]

Self Help Africa responded to the coronavirus pandemic by providing personal protective equipment to vulnerable communities in several project countries during 2020. In Spring, the organisation embarked on a public campaign to plant 'One Million Trees'^[29] in Africa during the year. Supported by yogurt brand Glenisk, the campaign was also supported by the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) and by the Gaelic Athletic Association's Gaelic Players Association (GPA).

In Autumn 2020 Self Help Africa was one of the six founding member agencies of the Irish humanitarian response consortium the ^[30] which ran its first campaign to support communities in the Global South vulnerable to the pandemic.^[31]

References[]