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Welcome to GiveWell’s podcast sharing the latest updates on our work. Tune in for conversations with GiveWell staff members discussing current priorities of our Research team and recent developments in the global health landscape.
Elie Hassenfeld: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Elie. I'm sitting here with Teryn and we're just at our hotel in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi on day four of our trip. And today we're going to see an organization called Spark, which GiveWell's followed for a long time and we're gonna go try to see a lot of their work.
Teryn can you just share like, what does Spark do?
Teryn Mattox: Yeah. So Spark provides grants to communities, so it's called a facilitated community action process. They have facilitators that go to work with villages to get the village together and help them set shared goals for the community. And then once that community has those goals in place, Spark offers them an unconditional seed grant.
So that grant is something between 8,000 and 10,000 US dollars, and the community gets that cash to implement the project they choose. Then the community themselves actually carry out the project, but Spark supports them along the [00:01:00] way with planning and implementation support.
Elie Hassenfeld: So today we're off to see Spark, and the way that we set this up is we asked them to give us a list of seven villages. Of these seven villages, they each do different kinds of things with the funds they received. One raised chickens, another has a beekeeping business, a maize mill, cooking oil business.
And so we got these seven and then the GiveWell team is splitting up into two groups, and we're each going to try to see two villages, so we'll see four out of the seven they provided. And hopefully learn more about how these programs have gone. Like, what are the big questions on your mind with respect to Spark right now?
Teryn Mattox: Well, something that was really interesting that I learned over the last couple of days was that these communities have a village development committee in them, which is this committee that exists, sounds like it existed before these projects started. You know, a village member gets together with a group of villages, and they collectively put cash in so that each month, each village can, themselves, go and do a different project.
[00:02:00] And I'd be curious to understand how this Spark project kind of interfaces with the village development committee process, how they work with the tribal leadership in the region, and just kind of try to understand how that traditional power structure interfaces with this program.
I'm really interested to see what they buy and whether they are picking assets because of their ability to produce longer-term returns, which is part of the Spark theory of change, is that they'll be able to have longer-term returns at 10, 20 years out from their investment.
Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah, one of the things that I'm interested in in the villages that I'm going to, I expect to go to a village that had purchased a maize mill and one that does cooking oil production. And so with the maize mill, we actually saw this at our GiveDirectly visit the other day. It's this machine, at least in the village we went to with GiveDirectly, that everyone has to bring the maize they harvest to if they want to turn it into maize flour.
And the GiveDirectly staff that we were with was like, well that would be a good business to be in because [00:03:00] everyone is harvesting maize and needs to turn it into flour. And either you can, you know, reduce the cost that you have to pay to harvest maize if you do it as a community, or it's just like, it's constantly happening. I mean, that maize mill was just, we were standing in the village for, I don't know, four or five hours and it just went constantly, like it did not turn off.
So I'm excited to see that and understand, you know, that and this cooking oil business, just like what are the costs to get it started? What are the ongoing maintenance costs? Does it seem like this is a profitable business over time? Just as much as we can sort of like learn about it in that concrete way of,, like, is this turning this initial investment into more money over time?
Teryn Mattox: Yeah. And then just having the opportunity to be out there in the villages, I think I'll still continue to ask about care seeking, continue to try to understand kind of the broader context of their lives and the challenges they face.
Elie Hassenfeld: Right. It's like every time we get out there, we just have a chance to talk to the kinds of people that a lot of the programs we support are trying to help. And just understand what they want, what they're thinking.
And then like we've talked to Spark for a long [00:04:00] time in one way or another. I think I talked to the CEO, Sasha, for the first time 10 years ago, maybe more. GiveWell was supporting GiveDirectly and GiveDirectly gives these individual unconditional cash transfers. And then there's this question about what about public goods in the community? And so someone connected me with Sasha at Spark as a way of looking at a program that was trying to do a larger community grant.
And I know that we've been kind of following them ever since and more intensely in the last few years, thinking about whether there's a project we'd want to support. So where are we at with them, and what have we done? And what do you think are like the biggest open questions about our support of Spark?
Teryn Mattox: I think we've done a lot of research into Spark. One of their theories is that they can get more leverage because the village can put their money together and buy a much more significant productive asset.
There is some initial research on that, and I also know that we are working with them to try to understand if there are different types of research that we could support that would demonstrate Spark's effectiveness in one way or [00:05:00] another. And now that we have a livelihoods portfolio, I think that we're taking a closer look at Spark at this point.
Elie Hassenfeld: Cool. I'm really excited to get out there and see Spark and talk to some people and check in later.
Teryn Mattox: I'm so excited.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: After meeting up with the Spark Microgrants team, we split into two groups so we'd have the opportunity to visit more of the local villages they were working with. The first village my group visited had used their grant to start a maize mill. Maize is a vital food staple in Malawi. Many rural Malawians are subsistence farmers, and they grow what their family needs and then mill it into flour.
They use that flour to create a porridge or to bake into a baked good that they're able to eat. And so in that way, it accounts for much of the calories that people in Malawi are eating. It's important to be able to mill the maize to turn it into flour, but not every village has its own mill, and so people from villages that don't have their own mill [00:06:00] have to walk often long distances and pay a small fee in order to mill the maize that they turn into flour. And so these mills not only can generate some revenue for the community, but they also improve quality of life by preventing people from having to walk those distances so regularly.
So the village that we visited had used their grant from Spark to set up a mill last year, and we were able to hear from them how that was going. We arrived at this village, and we turned off a long, dusty road into the village. And one of the things that was particularly noticeable about this community is that the houses were much closer together than they had been in other places we had visited. Some of the houses were maybe only 15 or 20 feet from each other. And when we were in the center of the village at the mill, we were able to see 15 or 20 households.
So we arrived in this village and made our way into a roughly 20 by [00:07:00] 15 foot building that housed the maize mill. We walked inside, and it was a fairly crowded space, both with people from Spark, people from the community, someone who was there to answer our questions about the mill itself because she ran the business, and then a young man who was the operator of the machines. And there we saw two machines, one that was for refining the maize flour, and then the other to mill the maize into flour itself.
These maize mills are pretty compact machines. They're connected to a small engine and it's powered by—in the ones we saw, it was powered by gas. The engine needs to be cranked to start up, and sort of the size and sound of a riding lawnmower. And so it was a very loud machine going in this fairly small concrete room.
After we had this brief demonstration of how the machine worked, we had the opportunity to speak with the woman who was [00:08:00] effectively the business manager, about the operations, the challenges, the ongoing costs of running this mill.
--
Project partner: When we have it and put it like this, you can either mill it just like this. You produce flour that is called mgaiwa. But you can also make it, you can shell it first. So you remove this outer part. When you shell, it removes this outer part, the brown parts.
Elie Hassenfeld: Because when you take it off the stalk, it still has the shell on each kernel.
Project partner: It has, it still has this brown part. The brown part. But when you're going into that particular machine, the sheller is going to remove this outer layer of the maize corn. But if you directly mill it, it's not going to be removed. So scientifically, they say the flour that is milled directly like this is much more nutritious because of the outer shell that has a lot of fibers.
Elie Hassenfeld: Oh, so it's kind of like the difference between like whole wheat, we call it like whole wheat bread and white bread.
Project partner: Yes. Yes.
Elie Hassenfeld: So it's like refined and unrefined.
Project partner: This is whole, and the other is [00:09:00] refined.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: When people come in with their maize, do they do this themselves? Or there's someone here who knows how to use the machines who does it for them?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: So it's him who manages the machine, he's paid every month.
Elie Hassenfeld: He's paid every month. So you work here every day on the maize? Does anyone else do that or just you? From six to six. Six to six.
Maize mill manager: Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: Just him . . .
Maize mill manager: But only Sunday, half day, half 12.
Translator: He only rests Sunday afternoon.
Elie Hassenfeld: Oh, he only rests Sunday afternoon. Okay. How did he become the person who does this, who does the job of running the mill?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: Okay. So they had a recruitment process where they were looking for someone who's experienced learning the machine.
Elie Hassenfeld: And does he live in this village too?
Maize mill manager: Yeah. Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: And where had he previously worked on machines?
Translator: Okay. They have a neighboring village [00:10:00] that also has a maize mill, so he was working there before here.
Elie Hassenfeld: Oh, got it. Can you say like, how much does it cost for someone to mill their maize?
Translator: Okay so, when they mill 50 kgs, it costs 3,000 kwacha. 20 kgs is 1,200. One kg, 200. So this is that side, where they are producing flour. When they're just grinding, this side of the mill, 50 kgs is 2,500.
Elie Hassenfeld: Uh-huh.
Translator: So grinding is cheaper than milling.
Elie Hassenfeld: Got it. So it costs more, if you want to have the refined maize, it costs more because you have to do this first and then this.
Translator: Yeah. Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: Okay. How long have these machines been here?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Maize mill manager: August 2024.
Elie Hassenfeld: August 2024. What did you do to mill maize before the machines were here?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: 10 kilometers. The closest [00:11:00] are 10 kilometers from here.
Elie Hassenfeld: Oh, that's the closest.
Translator: Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: Before August 2024, people would have to go all the way there to mill the maize. They must have transported a lot at a time, because you said this is operating constantly, how much did people carry 10 kilometers?
Because if someone carried that on their head, we said this was maybe enough for four people for four days. If you were doing that, you'd be going 10 kilometers every three or four days.
Maize mill manager: Yes.
Elie Hassenfeld: Did people, was that something people did commonly? They would walk every four days to mill maize?
Translator: Yeah. So she's saying, because people do not have a lot of maize at once. They go after four days, they buy maize again and go. So it's like that.
Elie Hassenfeld: A lot of back and forth every few days.
Translator: Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: We then went to an area where the community had gathered to share their experience with the mill so far, and also to answer remaining questions we had about its impact and how it had been received by the community.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: [00:12:00] Who do you live with here? Who's in your household?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: So he has a wife and four children.
Elie Hassenfeld: Four children. And what do you do here for business, for income? Do you farm or something else?
Translator: He's a farmer.
Elie Hassenfeld: And do you farm certain months of the year or all year-round?
Translator: He farms all the months of the year.
Elie Hassenfeld: All the months of the year. And what days of the week do you farm? Do you farm every day?
Translator: So he works six days a week and only rests on Sunday.
Elie Hassenfeld: Only rests on Sunday. Aside from the maize mill, how has the village changed since he was a kid? Has it changed? How has it changed?
Translator: So the difference he says is that now farming is becoming a business. Previously, the farmer used to grow maize just for consumption at home. But some are growing just even for sale. So they're more business-oriented now in their family.
Elie Hassenfeld: Do you think there's something else that would've helped this village more than the maize mill, that would've been a better [00:13:00] decision for the community to make?
Translator: I think this was the best option so far, because it has brought a number of benefits to the village.
Elie Hassenfeld: What are the main benefits it brought?
Translator: Yeah. So he thinks for him, going far to access the mill he was losing more time that he would've used for farming because he was taking more time to go to the maize mill, yeah.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: Thank you for talking to us. So you, you live in this village?
Translator: Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: How has it changed in the time you've lived here?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: He is saying maybe the huge movement that they're saying is the maize mill. Because there used to be nothing like this before.
Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah. How about other than the maize mill, any other changes from the time he was a kid?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: So he's saying an improvement in terms of food security. That people now are having food when there wasn't before. [00:14:00]
--
Elie Hassenfeld: From there, we headed to a second stop. This was a village that had used their grant to set up a mill, but this one was designed to make sunflower oil out of sunflower seeds that was sold for cooking.
So again, our vehicles came to a stop on a fairly dusty road. And here the houses in this village were much more spread out. We stepped inside a fairly similar concrete room, somewhat smaller, that housed just this one machine, the sunflower seed mill. And it also had a gas engine, and maybe it was, you know, one foot by three foot in total.
So the community members started up the engine and showed us how it worked. They fed sunflower seeds into a funnel at the top of the machine, and then we were able to see some of the sunflower oil start to emerge.
We left the mill and headed to another community meeting to discuss the project, but before we got there, we stopped by a small storefront that was attached to the room that we had previously been in. And that's where the community sold their sunflower oil in [00:15:00] plastic jugs, and it's similar to what you might find in the grocery store. When we were there, the shopkeepers took time to answer some of our questions about the business.
--
Translator: So here is the shop where they sell their cooking oil and other merchandise that is also helping their business.
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: In order to attract demand, they are also putting some other things, items into the shop. So when someone comes to buy another thing, they also buy the cooking oil. So that's why there are these things that they order from town.
Elie Hassenfeld: And so this is the cooking oil from here?
Translator: Yeah.
Elie Hassenfeld: Do you know how much you make? Like how much each bottle costs and how much revenue? So we know the revenue is like 12,000 for two liters.
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: So he is saying, in total, the cost of production per two liters is 7,500.
Elie Hassenfeld: The cost to [00:16:00] produce two liters is 7,500.
Translator: They're selling at 12,000.
Elie Hassenfeld: And they're selling at 12,000. And then 17,000 is the lowest price you could get for two liters somewhere else?
Translator: In town, 17,000.
Elie Hassenfeld: What's been the biggest challenge? Like what's been the hardest thing to make it work?
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: Shortage of sunflower, like a raw material for this.
Elie Hassenfeld: I see. And that's why next year they're trying to get more sunflowers planted. Is there just one harvest of sunflower every year?
Translator: Yes, it is one harvest.
Elie Hassenfeld: And when does that happen?
Translator: April, May.
Elie Hassenfeld: April, May. So they just can for now, you just use what you have?
Translator: Yes, but they're also planning to buy from other farmers.
Elie Hassenfeld: Oh, can buy sunflowers also. Oh, okay.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: Following that meeting, we also were able to sit down with individuals in the community to discuss the sunflower mill, the way the community was working together on the project and just to learn more about [00:17:00] their lives. Here's some of what they shared.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: Do you stay in this village?
[Translator translating the question for interviewee and interviewee responding]
Translator: Yeah. She stays here.
Elie Hassenfeld: Who do you live here with?
[Interviewee speaking.]
Interviewee's friend: She's, she was blind.
Translator: Okay. So she stayed with her parents who are also blind.
Elie Hassenfeld: Also blind. And was she born blind?
Interviewee's friend: No, trachoma.
Elie Hassenfeld: Trachoma.
Interviewee's friend: Six years.
Translator: So she suffered trachoma at six years.
Elie Hassenfeld: And how about her parents?
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: Okay. So her mother got blind this year.
Elie Hassenfeld: This year.
Translator: This year. So the father is, he is not blind, but he's very old.
Elie Hassenfeld: Okay. What did she think when Spark, when she first heard of the project coming to this community?
Translator: At first she was very happy because she was promised to [00:18:00] participate in everything about the project. So when she started getting involved in trainings, she felt like she was now being integrated into the village. She was becoming part and parcel of the people, because at first she was being sidelined or was discriminated against.
Elie Hassenfeld: Have you lived in this village for a long time?
Translator: She was born here. She has lived her life the entire life here.
Elie Hassenfeld: Okay. They made a decision to make the cooking oil their project. Were there other projects that they thought of doing other than the cooking oil?
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: So the other choice was to do irrigation farming. So they had irrigation farming and the production of cooking oil. So they looked at the demand and supply. The vegetable business is good, but the supply is so high and the demand is low. So they couldn't make . . .
Elie Hassenfeld: Like there's so many people who sell vegetables.
Translator: Yeah. So they choose a business that has a lot of demand, which is cooking oil.
Elie Hassenfeld: Got it. And did they consider anything else? Like, we saw a maize mill before. We've seen beekeeping, we've seen people who keep [00:19:00] chickens, a bakery. So did they consider any of those?
[Interviewee speaking.]
Translator: So they didn't choose the maize mill because there are already other maize mills around here. So they don't walk long distances to access the maize mill. For the bakeries, because other households are already baking within the households, so they didn't see it as a business because the supply is already there.
Elie Hassenfeld: Okay. Thank you. That's all.
Interviewee: Thank you.
--
Elie Hassenfeld: So we're just sitting here to talk through the villages that we visited, where we saw some of the businesses that people were aiming to set up. And I think one of the main themes that we took away from the day is just how hard it is for people living in rural poverty to get money and then turn that into a successful, profit-making business that earns them additional income.
Teryn, I know that was, I mean that was one of my takeaways, it was one of your takeaways. Just say more about what you observed on that front.
Teryn Mattox: Right, yeah. So the first community that we visited had decided [00:20:00] to start an egg-laying business, like, buy a bunch of hens and sell eggs. So, they bought a bunch of laying hens, they had a productive first flush of eggs, and then a bunch of those hens died.
And it just struck me that the amount of planning, the intensity of technical support that was needed to run a like semi-industrial-level chicken operation is very, very high. And these folks had chosen this because they saw a gap in the market, there were lots of goats. Lots of free-range chickens, and lots of pigs in their community. And in the market, there was goat and pig products, but there wasn't a ton of eggs.
And so they thought that they were addressing a market gap, but they also didn't realize just how big of a knowledge gap that they had in terms of raising these kinds of like, exotic, not free-range chickens.
Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah. And so I think that story to me is really telling because, so this is a group of people who got a big infusion of capital. You know, sometimes you hear the story, it's like if only people had some more money, they'd be able to then create a business [00:21:00] and make even more over time.
They successfully identified that gap, but the complexity of actually running an ongoing enterprise that's making money was really hard. And just they ran into like multiple issues where, you know, they couldn't overcome them. It just shows the challenges that exist in trying to achieve what they were trying to achieve.
One of the programs I saw was different, like the business that that community chose to start was a maize mill. Many people here are small-scale maize farmers, when you harvest maze, you have to mill it into flour. And the community didn't have a maize mill, there wasn't a maize mill nearby. Previously, they were walking 40 minutes each way, roughly twice a week, just to mill the maize and have flour that they could use. And so they said, let's bring this in closer and then it can start a business that is profitable.
I think in this case, just having the maize mill there made their lives better because they didn't have to walk as far. It also created a location where people who wanted to buy or sell maize would come because you'd sell it at the mill, that makes sense. But as a business it's less clear, you know, how successful it will [00:22:00] be. We did some rough calculations, you know, it's in the range of five years, to turn, if you take that initial investment of around $8,000, and to start profiting off of it, and even then the profit is not exorbitant. It's something like 15% to 20% per year off of that initial investment, you know, on an ongoing basis once you've kind of paid it back.
All that's really good, it's important, and I think it improves people's lives, but it has sort of a medium improvement, not this, I think the kind of improvement we'd all like to see, which is truly transformative because just the level of poverty, the level of wealth inequality that we see when we're there, you know, what we hope for is the program that will massively increase incomes quickly. And that just seems so hard to picture.
Teryn Mattox: I think in all cases it's this like much slower accumulation, slow accumulation over time. And then, not only do you need to make a good initial business decision, but you need to make good decisions along the way about how to reinvest that money. And that's just like a fairly sophisticated process of like planning that [00:23:00] needs continued intensive support over a long period of time.
Elie Hassenfeld: A lot of things can go wrong that are outside of their control. You know, you can have a bad rain season, and that means you don't harvest as much maize, which means you don't have as much food, and all of a sudden you have to deal with issues that are much more short-term than like long-term planning for a business.
What do you take away from this with respect to our focus on livelihoods? You know, we're increasing our focus, what does this all like, I don't know, make you think about, or wonder about, or change your mind about relative to, you know, where you were a couple weeks ago?
Teryn Mattox: I think just fundamentally kind of what you were saying, transformational change is extremely difficult and requires an extremely intensive program over a long period of time. And there's just not a magic bullet. It has felt like you should be able to just give these people the cash and then they can make a better life, but there are so many steps between that initial infusion and longer-term income generation.
Elie Hassenfeld: Right.