United Methodist Church

Agricultural Security | 2023

How might we design a financial sustainability and reinvestment tool to enhance agricultural growth and food security?

Kathryn Gibson || United States

Kathryn Gibson is an experienced and passionate public servant. For the past two years, she has served her hometown of Las Vegas as a bilingual federal investigator with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), investigating charges of discrimination and enforcing civil employment laws. Before that, Kathryn attended Tufts University, earning a BA in international relations, focusing on economic development, with a minor in economics. She received honors for her senior thesis, which reviewed the impact of access to microfinance institutions on marginalized Ecuadorian populations.
After graduation, Kathryn served as a community economic development Peace Corps volunteer in a rural agricultural community in Colombia. During her service, she focused on providing education on entrepreneurship to high school students. Thanks to her time living and studying in Latin America, as well as her work with the EEOC, Kathryn is fluent in Spanish. As a master of global affairs student, she is the recipient of a Paul D. Coverdell Fellowship.

Renee Perez || Venezuela

Hailing from Venezuela, Renée Pérez holds a double BA in political science and economics from the University of South Florida. She currently works at the Center for Economic and Policy Research as an international program intern, where she researches and advocates for policies that promote global economic justice, with a special focus on Latin America. As a volunteer with the UN Foundation’s United to Beat Malaria campaign, she regularly meets with members of Congress and their staffers to foster support for global health programs, and she’s trained fellow volunteers on grassroots advocacy techniques at the organization’s annual leadership summits.
Renée’s previous professional and volunteer experience include business and legal writing, project management, at-risk youth mentorship, and animal welfare work. Having grown up in the US and Venezuela, Renée is particularly interested in shifting Latin America’s economic development priorities, so success is not measured by GDP growth or the presence of multinationals, but instead measured in quality of life for all people. As a master of global affairs student, Renée is the recipient of a Kellogg Institute Fellowship and a Kerrigan Family Global Fellowship.

Nyangah Rogers-Wright || Sierra Leone

Nyangah Rogers-Wright is a 2022 Mandela Washington Fellow, feminist, and girl’s rights advocate from Sierra Leone. For three years she has worked as a program coordinator at Purposeful, a hub for girls’ activism in Africa. She has experience in participatory grantmaking, media engagement, and the facilitation of life-skills training for girls. Nyangah managed and helped develop a youth-led participatory grantmaking program, which has provided microgrants to organizations and informal youth-led groups across Sierra Leone.
Nyangah co-hosts a weekly radio program that teaches life skills for girls and broadcasts on 32 radio stations, reaching more than 17,000 girls in Sierra Leone. She led efforts to overturn a law that kept pregnant girls out of schools and inspired a #MeToo movement in Sierra Leone by sharing her own experience of abuse. She also led efforts to center the prevention and response to rape culture in her country around the stories of survivors. Nyangah’s goal is to promote equality and create a world where girls can live freely with dignity and bodily autonomy. As a master of global affairs student, Nyangah is the recipient of a Donald & Marilyn Keough Fellowship.

Alexus Tucker || United States

Alexus holds a BS in communications from Indiana State University, where as a student she served as student representative to the board of trustees. Alexus’s minor in civic leadership introduced her to the importance of civic engagement and enhanced her desire to pursue public service. She began her career working for the Indiana House Democratic Caucus as a legislative assistant, later serving as internship director and then director of legislative affairs. She also worked as special assistant to former United States Senator Joe Donnelly, handling constituent outreach related to issues and concerns that impact African Americans, and she led Donnelly’s efforts to promote the Veterans History Project, a national project by the Library of Congress to record and archive the stories of US veterans.
In 2019 Alexus transitioned into an international development role, serving in the Peace Corps as a youth development volunteer in the Kingdom of Eswatini. Her work there focused on increasing the capacity and reach of educational programming for youth on sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS mitigation, employment, and life skills. As a master of global affairs student, Alexus is the recipient of a Keough Family Fellowship and a Dean’s Fellowship from the Notre Dame Graduate School.

Overview

In 2018, 9.2% of the world’s population experienced severe food insecurity; however, Sub-Saharan Africa is disproportionately affected, with an estimated one third of its population facing an insufficient quantity of food and undernourishment (Roser 2019). To intervene, the United Methodist Church’s (UMC) General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM) has invested $1.34 million dollars in grants through the Yambasu Agriculture Initiative (YAI) across multiple African countries to support the development of agriculture projects, intending to promote economic growth, food justice, and long-term financial sustainability. As the project enters its second year, a mid-term evaluation is needed to determine: what processes are being leveraged by UMC Conferences and project sites to achieve the project’s desired outcomes; the efficacy and efficiency of those processes; and what bottlenecks are impeding advancement toward project outcomes. UMC has identified three premier sites that host a diverse range of agricultural activities: Sierra Leone, Cöte d’Ivoire, and Mozambique. By interviewing UMC project staff, beneficiary household members, as well as greater community members, in conjunction with conducting financial analysis, the i-Lab team will provide vital insights through a synthesis of evaluation data to demonstrate the Initiative's successes, and how it may be improved moving forward.

Key Research Questions

The overall goal of the YAI program is that the “African UMC Partners and communities experience sustained and inclusive economic growth that is agriculture led”. Two key indicators to capture impact are:

Percent of UMC Episcopal Areas with increased net revenue (while maintaining development activities); and,
Percent of UMC Episcopal Community areas with increased food security.

The five key outcomes of the program include:

Improved levels of sustainable food production and productivity of staples and/or high value crops in marginalized communities utilizing UMC Episcopal Area land and resources.
Improved access to markets and financial services that supports the sale of staples and/or high value crops.
Improved levels of wellbeing through access to (consumption of) diverse and nutritious foods in UMC Episcopal Areas.
Enhanced sustainability of Natural Resources and ecosystems that support agricultural activities in UMC Episcopal Areas.
Improved levels of revenue generation for UMC Episcopal Areas.

The main purpose of this exercise would be to conduct a process (mid-term) evaluation for 2-3 of the YAI project sites (countries). These project sites have received at least two grants for large-scale agriculture projects and should be at the point of reinvesting revenue generated from the operations back into the projects. In addition, the students should work to develop a financial sustainability and reinvestment tool to pilot it in the respective countries, that can later be used by our partners to monitor reinvestment along the way.

Definition of Success

There are two main products that would be expected from this project:

An evaluation report and presentation that documents and reflects the process evaluation findings, highlighting current context of each project site selected, successes-to-date of the project, challenges, and recommendations for improvement.
- Presentations and reports are not only developed for Global Ministries HQ, but also to our partner sites that have been evaluated.
A piloted and tested financial sustainability and investment tool for the YAI partners to use moving forward. This tool should be scalable to other countries not evaluated to incorporate into their project.

Required Team Skills

Interests/Background: Background in food security, livelihoods, and agriculture projects; experience and/or background knowledge in finance; work (and field) experience with international development organizations
Skills/Methodologies: Monitoring and evaluation skills and experience (qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis using software); experience in process evaluations
Language(s): Portuguese and/or French proficiency preferred (depending on country), or use of translators/interpreters
Characteristics: Strong in systems and analytical thinking

Partner Liaisons

Amihan Jones, Director of Monitoring and Evaluation
Xin Li, Monitoring and Evaluation Manager

Possible Locations

Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Liberia, Zimbabwe, and/or Cote D’Ivoire

Organization

The General Board of Global Ministries is the worldwide mission, relief, and development agency of The United Methodist Church, working with partners and churches in more than 115 countries to equip and transform people and places for God’s mission. Global Ministries connects the church in mission through the sending of missionaries, evangelism and church revitalization, disaster response and recovery led by the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), and global health.