Everything has a beginning, ours was in 2011 when we were in The Gambia, West Africa, to write our master’s thesis on how Swedish aid could be better adapted to run local entrepreneurship. We did not check into a nice hotel during our stay, instead we worked, ate and lived with the locals in the countryside. To really get to know and understand them for real.
Relatively quick, we understood from the villagers that jobs, not aid, is needed to lift the country out of poverty and an idea of how we could do everything well, for everyone, started growing!
Ours was in 2011. We went to The Gambia to write our Master’s thesis on how Swedish aid could be better adapted to run local entrepreneurship.
Instead of checking into a hotel, we stayed with a family in a small village in the Gambian countryside. And instead of delving into theory books, we spent our time getting to know the Gambian people and hearing their thoughts on aid.
We sat around their tables, ate dinner together and slept in their huts. It turned out they didn’t think much of the success of aid work. As we had always believed to be the case, they would rather have jobs; enabling them to give something back to the world instead of just receiving. “That’s how we get out of poverty,” they explained to us.
Instead of providing aid, we asked ourselves: How can Gambia help Sweden instead of the other way around? It turned out that there is a fantastic number of cashew trees growing there. In fact, most of the nuts we eat in Europe come from West Africa. But the challenge was that the nuts were shipped out of the country as raw material, not processed in Gambia.
We watched how merchants from India and Vietnam came to the villages to buy and import the raw cashew nuts back home for processing, along with the potential jobs. The farmers often work in isolation and are not part of a collective, increasing their vulnerability and decreasing their negotiation power.
Once on the other side of the world, the nuts are refined and often under terrible conditions (see our page Blood Cashew). The nuts are then sold on to commodity exchanges in Europe, where they are distributed within the trading networks.
