Alumni Conversation: Taio Gardey on Farming Out of Poverty

In this episode, Taio Gardey, GDI alumnus and Executive Director of Farming Out of Poverty (FOOP), discusses the realities of working on the ground in Sierra Leone. We discuss tricky decisions he's had to make throughout his career, the kinds of skills he's developed in recent years, and how development organisations can adapt and thrive in the current environment.  

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Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters

Transcript

Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institutes addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode, we'll bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debate in development studies. 

Speaker 2 [00:00:30] Hello and welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. I'm Louisa Han, Research Communications Officer here at GDI, and we're really happy to be recording another podcast with one of our esteemed alumni. Today, we'll be talking to recent graduate Teo Gardi, who has been doing fantastic work in Sierra Leone with an initiative called Farming Out Poverty. Welcome to the podcast, Teo. 

Speaker 3 [00:00:52] Thank you, Luisa, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very happy to be here. Of course, of course. 

Speaker 2 [00:00:58] So, just to introduce you, Teo completed his MSc in International Development Management here at GDI in 2021, and he is currently the Executive Director of Farming Out of Poverty, which has the fantastic acronym FOOP in Sierra Leone, where he works with smallholder farmers to increase yields, improve food security, and build sustainable livelihoods access to quality inputs training and market-oriented support. So yeah, before we get into your work with food, I wonder if you could just quickly talk about why you decided to study at GDI, what kinds of aspirations did you hold at that time? 

Speaker 3 [00:01:35] If I need to be honest, I want to study there because of David Hume. I read his story, about his story. And I love all what he have done, every place that he had worked with the different topics. And I say, I remember I won a scholarship from the government of the UK, the Chibnick Scholarship. And I was looking for universities in the UK. And when I see, when I read the name of of David Hume, I saw what he had done, I say, I want to study there. Right, I'm. 

Speaker 2 [00:02:08] I'm sure David will be really pleased to hear that. Yeah, so let's talk about your next steps then after graduating. How did you start working with FOOP and can you tell us a bit more about the organizations and its aims? 

Speaker 3 [00:02:20] Yeah, I have another, I have an NGO that I have founded that we do documentaries. So the realities I have been is here early on in 2018 and I returned a couple of times. And on those trips, I met one of the one organization that at that time was a, they were social entrepreneurs. And that was called work that they work working in farming. And I met them. Then I kept in touch and they called me in 2021. And they told me, Tayo, we are shifting into an NGO. Do you want to come and lead this new stage because you know the place, you know, the people, you know this stuff, you have been coming here. Why don't you come for the new stage? And I just came. 

Speaker 2 [00:03:08] Great, so yeah, let's talk about those kind of realities of working on the ground in Sierra Leone because you've been doing this for a few years now. So yeah, can you tell us about the kind of the biggest misconceptions people have about poverty and agriculture? And you know, if we were to visit Sierra Leones today, what does everyday life and kind of agricultural work look like for people? 

Speaker 3 [00:03:27] Yeah, I believe that first to start with the misconceptions and mistake, I really one of the biggest mistake is thinking that a subsystem farmer in a rural and isolated community in Sierra Leone can just work hard, make a big effort and become successfully or overcome poverty. It could happen, but this is a real exception. And why? Because here we need to start first, the macro context about it. When we talk about Sierra Leone, we need to have in mind that we are talking about one of the poorest countries in the world. And around three out of four people rely on agriculture to survive. And so and there is also a lack of proper agronomic ecosystem. There is no ecosystem. So what does it mean in reality? And This means that there are not agro dealers. So the farmers cannot go to a shop and buy seeds, but by fertilizers. And there is a limited agricultural research institute. So the seeds that the farmers are planting here have never been researched, have never be introduced. Nobody tried or yes, the farmers have tried, but there is no proper research to improve the seed varieties. There is a huge infrastructure problem. And the access to market is difficult and expensive because of the infrastructure problem. So these create that there is an absence of large scale buyers. And at the ends, all the production is sold in very small scales conditions in local market. What does it means that for a farmer? That it means the farmers when they need to plant, they need go to the neighboring village and ask to other farmers, Hey, do you have some seats? That you are not using this year, you have some seeds from the following year. And at the end they buy some, you know, they buy some seeds. When they buy those seeds, they don't know what kind of seeds they are. So what happened at the in this half of those seeds never germinate. And they are not, there is not homogeneity in those fields. So there are different varieties. Some are taller, some are shorter. Some ones are ready to harvest before, some ones later, another later. And this creates a big challenge for harvesting. And the consequence of this is very poor harvesting yields. Where some statistics in Sierra Leone that 75% of the farmers, of subsystem farmers, cannot produce enough to feed their entire households. We are talking about households between six to seven people. And that means that in the whole country, not only talking about farming, if not about the entire country, 88% of the populations face food insecurity. Food insecurity means that you don't know from where is coming your next source of food on the following meal. And when you talk about future generations, okay, what's happening? We have, depending on the source, we have one out of three or one out four kids under five-year-olds that suffer malnutrition. What does it mean? I don't want to give a negative image. It's not the idea of this podcast, and I'm not going to do that. What I'm trying to say is what we need to have in mind to understand the life of a farmer and how can a farmer overcome poverty and move out from hunger is not only by looking at them, if not understanding the system as a whole. And we should do this to understand each sector and each system, this with agriculture, with education, with health, and one by one. So sometimes you want to address only one component, but that is not enough. So you need to think about an logic that work in the entire sector of agriculture and food. And that is what we try to do, to work all along the value chain. 

Speaker 2 [00:07:41] Great, thank you. That's great context. And yeah, it's really complex. Honestly, being in this position, inevitably comes with like tough decisions to make. So I wonder if you could just walk us through a real example of a decision where you had to choose between two good attractive options, but both of which came with significant trade offs. So yeah, what were your thought processes here? 

Speaker 3 [00:08:02] Yes, it's good that you bring that question because we are currently working on a new strategy because we have been working for so many years in large-scale farming. In this Intormable that is an isolated community seven hours away from the city. And now we are starting to work also with more intense agriculture with greenhouses. So, there are two different models. In Turmaboom, what we are doing is we are working with the poorest people, with the farmers, and we are very well working with a model that works with large scale farming where we have strong relationships with the communities that most of our staff is from that community. We are having impact and we're working well, but we want to grow in producing more and more operational health hub. Of greenhouses closest to the city. And this it means that we are going out from where we have been working since 2012. If you create a hub that is closest to city, you have better market access, you have petal logistics, and you can produce vegetables based on market demand. And this brings more revenue and to achieve financial sustainability. So the trade-off here is... How do you choose this location? How difficult is to balance this? And how, at the end, you are juggling between what to do if you want to stay closer to the most vulnerable communities or building a new system where it's more financially sustainable. At the end you play with both and you try to do both to keep with a strong presence in Thermabond, but at the same time developing a new hub. That is more market oriented and it seems easy but it's very difficult because the funding is limited, our budgets are limited and in development the hardest decisions are always between two good things. It's never about one good and one bad so it's easy to define. If not, it's always about two good thing and how to protect your mission but at the end how to protect your model. And be financially sustainable in the long term, no? So these are very difficult solutions that we try to work out, and we are working in, and we try to align with it. 

Speaker 2 [00:10:42] Great, that's a really hopeful insight. And I think a lot of our listeners are likely to be development study students or people considering studying development. So I'm interested to know what you thought development work would look like at this stage of your life. What did you get right about the reality of the field? And what did you wrong about it? 

Speaker 3 [00:11:01] Well, I thought that if you get the funding to implement your work, if you the proper inputs to the farmers, if you got the training, if you can provide the technical advice, the things should work. The yields will increase and the incomes will flow. But this is not what happened in the reality because you are constantly clashing with the reality. Because we are working in a broken system, as I said before. And the farmers have a lot of risk from the climate conditions that we have extreme weather because here there is dry and rainy season. And if the rainy season moves two or three weeks before or after, starts three or four weeks after or before, that means that the farmers could lose. Uh the entire production and this happens so that it means that the farmer will not have food no and and this is this is one of the challenge but sometimes although you plan everything you have external things that you cannot manage you know like as we were saying the the weather we had an example of the of beans our main crop here and our staple food is rice that is what we most. But we are working more and more in crop rotation. So in 2023, we started with pilots of beans with farmers. They were very successful. We were very happy. So in 2024, we make a little bit a larger pilot with more farmers and was again successful. And in 2025, we made a large scale planting season with a lot of farmers and the production was well, the harvest was well. We take it to the market. Everything was happiness around. But then we realized that there were not enough buyers in the market to absorb that demand, something that we never thought. Because we were selling before the beans, here the production in general and the beans are not sell by 50 kilogram bags or kilograms or tons. If not, they sell it in small scale in cups in the markets. You go and buy one cup, two cups, three cups. And we had a lot of beans and the problem with the beans is that they are very sensitive. To the humidity and the heat. So it's spoiled very quickly. So what ended up happened is we ended up selling at a lower price. We sell it, yes, we sell it. But what you feel is a part of frustration that we have done most of our work very well. The people that were listening this podcast say, ah, you didn't think about the market. It's something very important. Well, it's true, it is true, but sometimes it's. It's difficult to analyze that and to understand the demand that you can have from a market, no? So sometimes what I got wrong is sometimes I was thinking that development is mostly about solving technical problems but the reality is that is understanding the reality and the system as a whole and how you can provide solution that adapt to that environment. And at the end, as I said before, you need to try to juggle a little bit and adapt and go through with these unpredictable things. 

Speaker 2 [00:14:27] Yeah, it's clear that adaptability is really key there. And I mean, this kind of feeds into the next question, which is development roles are wide ranging and require a broad range of skills. So can you tell us about the skills and capacities you've had to develop that are most critical in your work, but are sort of rarely taught in development programs? 

Speaker 3 [00:14:48] Well, I think that the most important skills that I develop here are not technical, no? So I can say like three different, I can split it in three different blocks. The first one is more human relationship and understanding the people, how to interact with them, how to empathize with them. And how to create a strategy and how to create work and a plan that adapt to the reality and the people follow it, no? And you need to understand why the people act like that before designing your strategy. And for that, I work very, very close with my operational manager that is a Sierra Leonean with a lot of experience here. So we are asking Can we do this? Can we implement this? Do you believe this is possible? Why not? No, I want to change this. What do we can do? So we always try to look for solutions that are based on the reality and how the people think, because we need to always remember that we are working with subsistent farmers that are from a rural community, that most of them, they have never been into a city. And in an environment that there is no water, no electricity, there are villages in farming areas. So that's the side of the human relationship. And then you need to manage how to work in imperfect systems, in the uncertainty. Uncertainty defines Sierra Leone. You never know what is going to tomorrow and you cannot you cannot expect what will happen but Also, there are solutions that you were not expecting. Things solved in some way that you never expect that those things were going to solve. So, this is very important to start to know how to deal with it. We had an example last year, for our farming machinery, we buy diesel from the trucks that come and came with 9,000 liters of diesel, no? But the diesel had water on the track. So all the engines that we had in our organization, it broke. All the tractors, all the combined harvesters, all the bikes, motorbikes, no? All the generators, everything was broken. So how you sold this? What do we do now? Because we have a garage, we have mechanics, but you don't have the technical capacity to solve this, no. And there is a lack of spare parts in the country, because there are not a lot of tractors. So these are the challenges that you are, you start to have every day, and it's living with this and understanding how to solve it, trying how to solving it, trying to plan A, B, and C, and then relax, be creative, and try to open your mind and find new solutions that you never thought in your life that are possible, but here they're also possible. And the last one, I will say that this leadership and communication as my role that I have, I currently have, is how to transmit ideas and feeling to the people and that they believe in you, you know. And this is to our staff, to our partners, to all our founding partners, that they need to believe in something that is not guarantee and that the need to imagine you are promising something that doesn't happen yet, but you are promising that it's going to happen. And so that is something important that you need to develop and success at the end. This is something that they told me when I came to Sierra Leone and there is a reality that success at end is not about doing everything perfectly. If not, it's about the times that you fail, stand up, do it again, try again, clash to the wall and do it and you can do it. But you need to try and try and try and to be creative again. 

Speaker 2 [00:19:14] Yeah, so it's clear that there's lots of kind of challenges you've come across in your work. So what are the hardest realities, would you say, of working in development that students, again, are often not exposed to or taught to expect? 

Speaker 3 [00:19:28] I will say that one of the hardest realities is the misunderstanding, not the hardest reality, not that one of the main problems is misunderstanding of the context. Sometimes you believe that there is a problem of behavior and not. There is another. There is the human act as a reaction because of something, No, because of our reaction, because of. So one of the things that this was sold one year and a half ago, but one of problems that we were having is when we produce rice, we need that the farmers go and do weeding one month and a half after the rice is planted, one month after. And this is during the starting of the rainy season. So when it's rainy season, just to put the people in context that are listening, it rains a lot. And there is a lot of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes here have malaria and the malaria is very dangerous for your body, can also kill you. But also in Sierra Leone, we have the lean season. The lean season is the hunger season that is coming by the end of the rainy season where the farmers don't harvest, the harvest is not ready yet. And because of the rain season where they are unable to produce anything Except from rice, they are they lack food, no? So what we were asking the farmer that is very common is to go and do weeding at the beginning of the rainy season to have better harvesting yields. But the farmers were not going. So we were creating demonstration plots. We were creating different things and nothing was working. And we were thinking, why this doesn't work? Like we thought that there was a problem of behavior. But then we also start to get to start to study more about behavioral change and to understand the problems. Of it and we understand that there was a rational decision behind them that was they were not going to do weeding because they were getting weak because they are starting to scare food. If they get sick, they don't have money to maybe treat the malaria and if you are weak, the malaria is very serious and can really kill you. So basically, they were taking care of themselves. And they were saying, I prefer to take care of my health and my life and not to take the risk. So one of the things that we start to change is, okay, we are going to start to feed you if you go to work to the field. So we are gonna provide you food, you are going be strong enough because if you eat well and if you are strong enough, the chances of getting malaria are lower, no? And once that we started to do that, deeeeeeeeeeeeeeee It was a huge change and the attendance grow a lot, no? So what in reality looks like a behavioral problem actually was a rational response to a real constraint, no. And I believe this is again, if we are not understanding well the context, we can easily misdiagnose the problem and. After that, what we make incorrectly is we make a wrong solution, no? 

Speaker 2 [00:22:56] Great, thanks, that's really, really insightful. So, just a final question, obviously, many development scholars and organizations are working hard to understand and endure a lot of crises at the moment, and there are lots of issues with the system. So, looking to the future, what do you think development organizations are getting wrong and what needs to change? 

Speaker 3 [00:23:17] I believe that one of the key challenge that we are having in the development sector is the misalignment between what we are trying to achieve the organizations that we're working in the fields and the conditions under which we operate. Development organizations are expecting to build long-term solutions, but the reality is we are operating under short-term. And uncertainty funding conditions. So in practice, we are working in instability, and that at the end it affects the programs and how you are designed in implementation. So I believe that here we will need to change. That's what makes you happen is you're changing funding priorities, you're changing your alignment, you need to adapt to a new donor, you need to bargain with them what to do, what not to do because in general the ones the funding partners tell you I want you to implement this and you need to start to bargain with them on how to do it and I believe that this is becoming more and more evident now where there is a reduction of the global funding and in philanthropy, not only from the government, but also from the individuals, from the citizens. So we as an organization, we need to adapt to this new environment. We need to be more creative. We have to rethink how to operate. Most of organizations around the world have reduced their budget in 2025, in the middle of the or at the beginning of the year because the expectation we're going to be difficult to meet. And for sure, we need to move towards more financial sustainability, as the organizations that's... So, because development work in the long term, but the incentives are offered in the short term. And here there is a misalignment. And I believe that These are new system that we need to build. We need to align them to provide proper funding structures, implementation that adapt to the realities, long-term commitments, and a little bit more flexibility. You know, we are listening all the time that these restricted funds, no? So at the end, it's not having the right model. If not, it is how to, you can get the right conditions to implement your model. In the long term succeed and create a lasting impact that is sustainable. 

Speaker 2 [00:26:13] Great, I think that's a really good note to end on. So, yeah, thanks so much for telling us all about your work, Theo. And yeah, before we go, how can people discover more about farming after poverty and everything you're up to? 

Speaker 3 [00:26:23] Thank you very much, Lisa, for the interview. I enjoyed it a lot. And the people can find us on LinkedIn and Instagram and farming out of poverty. That's how they can find it. And please join us. 

Speaker 2 [00:26:40] Great, thanks very much. 

Speaker 3 [00:26:41] Thank you very much to you, Rishabh.