This is not where I thought I would be a few months ago. This is by no means a bad thing, it’s a simple statement of fact. Sometimes life takes you in strange and startling directions, and this has been a textbook example. I write this first blog post as I sit on a train heading to Toronto for three weeks of intensive training with Engineers Without Borders Canada, before I leave to go overseas for what promises to be one of the most interesting and challenging years of my life.
My involvement with Engineers Without Borders goes back a large number of years, almost to its inception as an organization. Over a decade ago, I lived for a summer in Ghana, West Africa on a short term placement with EWB. I often say that the one week of pre-departure training for that summer changed my life as much as the subsequent 4 months overseas. Now here I am about to embark upon three weeks of training, with excellent sounding sessions such as “Intro to Human Centred Design”, “Systems Thinking” and “Environment and Development”. I have no doubt that the next few weeks will be as equally thought provoking and intense as the last time.
A few months ago I had never heard of a company called FarmDrive, or of an industry called Fintech. Then I saw a post on Facebook regarding a series of new Long Term Fellowships that had opened up with EWB. I had a look and saw one that looked incredibly interesting. I was nervous about applying for the role that was being advertised, but threw caution to the wind and submitted an application anyway. Less than two months later, here I am about to embark on a crazy adventure in Nairobi.
So first, who is FarmDrive and what will I be doing in Nairobi? I’m sure my understanding of what FarmDrive does will grow exponentially over the next few months, but let me share what I know as of now. Picture being a small farmer in rural Kenya. Like any small business anywhere in the world, you’d like to grow your business, and to do that, you often need a loan. The banks in Kenya, like banks everywhere else in the world, would love to give loans, it’s how they make money! Unfortunately, the farmers often do not have any credit history or collateral to secure a loan. So no loan for the farmers, no money to be made for the banks. Enter FarmDrive. It was started by two amazing women who grew up in farming villages in Kenya then went to the University of Nairobi for computer science, and the organization they started has the lofty goal of connecting millions of underserved farmers to credit. They use lots of different types of data and sophisticated analytics to create models that predict the rate of loan payback for farmers. Suddenly the banks have data on which they can base loans, and the farmers have access to credit at drastically more favourable rates. Pretty awesome, and kinda magical.
So what will I be doing? A great question. I applied for a “Data Analyst” job, but it turned out they were looking for a data scientist, and it also turns out I’m not one of those. Instead, I will be a “Product Manager”, which seems to be a very wide open job, a fact that is very exciting to me. I know I will be getting a much greater understanding of FarmDrive’s services, from the vantage points of the data scientists, the farmers, and the banks. I will also be helping those three parties communicate effectively and hopefully get access to different types of data to improve FarmDrive’s analytics.
The thing that excites me so much about the next year, is that I feel FarmDrive is truly on the cutting edge of what is possible for a small company that can access large amounts of data. People talk all the time about how Google and Facebook are taking all of our datas and selling it to advertisers. Well this is a chance to use this data ubiquity for the power of good. I feel that this is a time of great upheaval, where the democratization of large datasets can drive real change for some of the people in the world who need it the most. I am looking forward to living in East Africa and experience the culture and see the beautiful land, but I would be stoked to work with an organization like FarmDrive if they were based in Ottawa! And that’s pretty amazing.
A few years after I got back from Ghana, I got an EWB ring. It’s designed to be worn on your pinky, complementing the Iron Ring if you have one, and in the same fashion, it’s designed to remind you of your commitment to making the world a better place. It’s actually a bar code, which if you unbent the ring and scanned in a grocery store, would read “Human Development”. I stayed very heavily involved with EWB for a number of years, including two years as the President of the Ottawa Professional Chapter. Then, as sometimes happens in adulthood, EWB and I drifted away from each other. I moved out of the country for a bit, and started volunteering my time in other ways, and I lost track of that ring. I feel It is very fitting that as I was trying to go through many year’s worth of accumulated crap, I somehow found that ring again. It now sits back on my pinky, a silent reminder of a promise I made a decade ago, and of a year yet to come.
