In the year I’ve been with KOMAZA, our staff has quadrupled in size, from 25 to more than 100 people. Most of this growth has occurred in Ganze, where we are adding 1000 new farmers to the 1000 that have already joined us. Because field employees constitute the vast majority of our team – nearly ninety percent – and because they are our direct lifeline to farmers, the efficacy and structure of the field network is crucial in determining KOMAZA’s ability to scale.

We’ve built a large network of field staff to provide high-touch door-to-door (or in our case, farm-to-farm) support for each of our families. Labor-intensive service and distribution networks are widespread in the developing world: organizations like Living Goods have been built on this model. Grameen Danone, similarly, relies on sales people to distribute their yogurt from house-to-house in Bangladesh. Before wages rose and cars and internet became ubiquitous, the approach flourished in the US as well. For KOMAZA, investing in the human capital required for a large field extension network makes sense given conditions in Ganze.

Joseph, a Facilitator, travels from farm to farm across remote Ganze District.

Where roads are poor and land is sparsely populated, a small, centralized staff cannot reach all of our farmers without huge outlays for vehicles, fuel and time. Instead, we need locally-based people who can travel on foot or by bicycle to meet with farmers on a regular basis. This means hiring a village-based Facilitator for every 30 to 40 farmers we have. Given a high unemployment rate and the resulting low cost of labor, it’s more economical to hire additional staff rather than purchase new vehicles. Our approach also makes KOMAZA one of the largest employers in the district.

Facilitators who live in the same communities as our farmers are not just affordable, they are incredibly effective. They have relationships with local leaders and understand farmers’ needs and constraints. Moreover, in an area with unreliable mobile phone coverage, Facilitators provide a direct line of communication between KOMAZA and our farmers. This is extremely valuable as tree farming can (occasionally, if not surprisingly) require rapid response time. For example, an outbreak of longhorn beetle can girdle a tree within days or hours; if it attacks one of our trees, a Facilitator or Field Officer must be present to respond immediately.

Field staff are responsible to work with farmers, actually getting trees in the ground.

But KOMAZA needs more than effective service. We need a smoothly operating structure that we can replicate to serve not just one to two thousand families, but one to two million families. To ensure a well-functioning team, we have built our field extension network so that each person has a very clearly-defined role in the overarching structure. Working with a solid managerial configuration in the field, we can easily add more staff as we add more farmers. And, currently, we’re recruiting our first-ever Field Director to take over the day-to-day operations in Ganze, freeing KOMAZA to expand into new districts with thousands of new farmers.

Ultimately, each farmer’s success and the organization’s scalability rely on the trained agronomists and experienced farmers who comprise our field extension network. As our small team in Kilifi taps away on laptops and charts long-term strategy, the people in the field are making our goals a reality. A growing number of Facilitators are trekking from farm to farm, meeting with partner families, and digging their hands into Ganze’s dry, red soil. The team’s rapid growth has been stunning, and, with each planting season, it’s going to continue.

She’ll start her day before sunrise. The first job is to cook breakfast for her children and husband. This is followed by a two mile walk to collect water at the nearest borehole. By the time she returns home, she needs to start preparing lunch for her husband – ugali, a nutrient-poor yet filling mainstay of Kenyan diets. Afternoons are spent on the farm harvesting maize. As the sun begins to set, she’ll return to the borehole to collect more water, while her oldest daughter gathers firewood. Only late in the evening, after cleaning up from dinner and washing her children’s clothes, will she have a moment to rest.

Although she is only 22, she’ll repeat this same routine everyday for the rest of her life. Any prospects for further education and life beyond her farm vanished years ago.

Carrying her five-month old child, a woman gathers firewood. 90% of African families use wood or charcoal for energy.

Barriers to development in Africa are well-known and complex, but here is one that is a game-changer – whether you’re born a male or a female.

Here in rural Kenya – as is the case in most developing countries – women take on a vast majority of agriculture work and are the primary family caretakers. They are responsible for producing food, tilling land, grinding grain and carrying water inordinate distances.

Although women make up 50 percent of the world’s population, they often have significantly less ownership, control and access to land, education, technology and financial services. How will communities – indeed, entire countries – ever overcome poverty when half the population does not benefit from development? Until we start paying more attention to the role that gender plays, they won’t.

Evidence shows that investments in women provide tremendous social and economic returns. When women are given the chance to participate fully in business and economic decision-making, they become a driving force against poverty.

Take Kenya’s neighbor to the west, Rwanda, for example. Over the past few years, Rwanda has exhibited remarkable economic and social development. Women now have the right to own land and property. When they marry they can decide to combine their assets with their husband’s or keep them separate. Last year, while countries around the world sunk into a deep recession, Rwanda’s GDP grew at 5.5 percent, and the country has recently become East Africa’s hotspot for foreign direct investment. Could there be any link to the fact that there are more women in Rwanda’s parliament than any other country in the world?

“Educating girls and women leads to higher wages; a greater likelihood of working outside the home; lower fertility; reduced maternal and child mortality; and better health and education.” You would think that this comes from a USAID or UN report, right? Wrong. It’s a direct quote from a 2008 Goldman Sachs Economic Outlook.

Simply put, it’s a smart financial decision to invest in women; it’s a low-risk, high-return investment with a significant multiplier effect: better educated and healthier children, increased household incomes and more prosperous communities.

Today, over 60 percent of our farmers are women, and we are working hard to increase this ratio even further by partnering with local women’s groups in our new communities. Additionally, a growing number of women are working as part of our village-based Field Extension Network, educating their communities on improved agricultural practices.

KOMAZA Facilitator Margaret Charo helps a farmer measure land slope.

In a new video released today, we attempt to explain the transformative power of microforestry and its implications for sustainable development. We center the story around Elizabeth, one of several hundred female farmers who has ambitious plans for her microforestry income. Over the next few years, KOMAZA will help Elizabeth harvest her half-acre tree farm and we will pay her based on tree growth. It will likely be the largest single payment she has ever received.

This will be the pivotal moment that we have been looking forward to: the chance to turn economic outputs into social outcomes. With new income, Elizabeth has an opportunity to make life-changing investments in her family’s future. She will no longer struggle to afford monthly school fees, health care and clean water. But what’s more, she can also afford to send her children to college, purchase a new house or start a small business. Opportunities that were once unimaginable will soon be within reach.

Watch how a half-acre tree farm has the potential to change Elizabeth’s life.

The soil in much of Palakumi location, Ganze district, is red. It is the red of desert rocks in the American southwest, the red of a sunrise mellowed by a thin layer of clouds in the east, a red that gets in your socks and shoes, and dusts the cuffs of your trousers. As the wind kicks up, the red dust spreads itself over the rest of your clothes, finding seams and pockets in which to deposit itself.

Gabriel, his wife and Facilitator, Benson, pose among eucalyptus seedlings on Gabriel's farm.

Red color in the earth is usually an indication of an old, weathered soil, with a high proportion of iron oxides. Most of the soil in Palakumi is sandy, like a beach. The sand makes for easy cultivation and tillage, but cannot retain much in the way of water or nutrients. The rains do not fall in abundance there. The majority of the vegetation is low bushes, a few grasses, and some scattered trees.

Most of the trees that have been left produce something that was once a cash crop, either coconuts or cashews. Buyers no longer come for the cashews since the factory was moved to a different district. A few locals tap the coconuts to make a syrupy alcohol that keeps unemployed young men occupied for the day. The clumps of trees stand like little segments of forest, holding tightly to what is left of the soil. If you pick up a handful of the red sand, it sifts back through your fist without holding any form. It appears to be relatively devoid of organic material, as if the scattered leaves and grasses break down into nothing and simply disappear.

Benson, a KOMAZA farmer turned Facilitator, sits with his wife and children near their house.

Soil organic matter is integral to a healthy agro-ecosystem. Organic matter can bind mineral particles together, helping aggregation and increasing porosity. Organic matter can tie up nutrients, so they are not immediately available to plants, but it can also build up a long-term store, increasing the overall nutrient holding capacity of the soil. Organic matter provides a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of both sandy and clay soils and a buffer to shifts in pH. Without organic matter, sandy soils can see their nutrients quickly leached away, and crops, without the aid of substantial inputs, will grow poorly.

And yet when Gabriel hears that Ganze or Kilifi districts are the poorest in the country, he disagrees. He tells Benson and I that there are riches waiting to be tapped right here, from the ground under our feet. He, a farmer, a retired teacher, sees potential in this dry, red soil. Benson, a KOMAZA Facilitator, nods in agreement. We have been walking together across the community, visiting farmers participating in the KOMAZA program.

After visiting their KOMAZA farm, I pause for a photo with Gabriel, his wife and daughter.

At the end of my visit to Palakumi location, my feelings are mixed. I am optimistic about farmers’ participation, and I am eager to begin work in developing training programs for KOMAZA. At the same time I am concerned about the expectations in place already. Managing the expectations of the people who must pull their livelihood from that dry, sandy, red soil may prove to be as critical as the logistics of delivering trees to our expanding network.

From the expectations of program participants and donors, to the science and logistics behind the operations, to the mundane details of the budget, it is imperative to allow for a sharp focus on each task without losing sight of the broader picture. Looking forward, I try to balance my optimism with caution, my assumptions with an open mind, and the limited scope of my training project with the breadth of Gabriel’s everyday life in Palakumi location, Ganze district.

In the end, hoping not to sound too much of a reductionist, I have come to think that balance itself may be the goal. When we speak of sustainability, that ill-defined concept so popular in the vocabularies of development and environmental management, it may be valuable to keep that goal in mind. Balance in the soil, balance in the organization, and balance in development as a whole.

As we prepare for the short rains planting season, our team is growing by the week. Each new hire is arriving at a pivotal stage in KOMAZA’s history, as we move from start-up to well-established. The staff is navigating uncharted territory, rapidly developing new resources, systems and strategies to drive our work in Kenya and beyond.

Founder Tevis Howard, in 2008, tells field staff about the vision that sparked our beginning.

There are no directors at KOMAZA. We’ve designed a flat, team-based structure with lots of space for creativity and innovation. Everyone in the office completely self-manages their projects, setting their own deadlines, schedules and objectives. It’s extraordinarily freeing. And it comes with incredible responsibility.

Day-to-day, we face many pressing questions, and we don’t always know the answers. KOMAZA’s Microforestry model is a unique creation, so there are no reference points in defining our field work. And it’s a new organization, so there are few policies or precedents to guide administrative decisions behind-the-scenes. Moreover, many of us are young, and whether we’re from Nairobi or New York, all of us are new to the art of running a social business in the challenging economic, social and environmental context of Kenya’s Coast Province.

When we go into work each day, we are pioneers, setting our course in unexplored terrain. Which tree species will provide the most benefits to farmers? What’s fair compensation for field staff? How do we find donors with the foresight to fund a novel program? How and when will we harvest trees and deliver profits to our farmers?

During April's long rains, KOMAZA's staff chart operations, from seedling delivery to maintenance checks.

The answers will affect outcomes for thousands of families and influence how we work going forward. In making decisions, we cannot operate in a vacuum. It’s critical that we learn from our peer organizations like One Acre Fund and KEMRI, building on the best ideas in a traditionally fragmented sector. We’ve got to research and experiment with possibilities, collect data on results, and go back to the drawing board so we continually improve. In everything we do, we must remember our context, shadowing field staff, staying with families, and studying Swahili to learn from our farmers.

When I joined KOMAZA last year, I couldn’t have imagined the scope of the questions I’ve encountered while learning the inner-workings of an early-stage social business. The new faces joining me in Kilifi will fundamentally shape the future of our organization. You can’t say the same for most entry-level staff outside the start-up world.