I wasn’t born on a farm, but in the summer before I started the second grade, we moved from Hope, Arkansas, to one my uncle owned outside of Hot Springs and stayed for more than a year. We raised cattle, sheep, and goats on about four hundred acres. I enjoyed helping with the animals, and have many fond memories of that time, with two exceptions: the outdoor toilet, cold in the winter and attractive to snakes in the summer, and getting butted over and over again by an angry ram unhappy that I’d hopped the fence into his territory. Before then, when I was a small child and my mother was away in New Orleans studying to be a nurse anesthetist, I lived in town with my grandparents. My grandfather was a kind, hardworking man who ran a small grocery store, and supplemented that modest income with a job as a night watchman at a sawmill, where I spent a couple of happy starry nights, climbing on the large sawdust piles and sleeping in the backseat of his car. While there was enough money for essentials, there wasn’t much left over for extras.
I’m telling you this now because in addition to CGI and CHAI, I was always looking for more ways to form productive grassroots partnerships, starting with our work with small businesses in Harlem. Some of the most interesting and rewarding ones have helped men and women—who work small plots of land and scrape by without the money or other resources to do more than just that—get by from day to day. One of the difficult truths of our newly interdependent world is that intelligence, ability, and the desire to work hard are equally distributed, but opportunity is not. Much of what we in wealthier countries take for granted in our modern systems of health and sanitation, education, transportation, communications, and government aren’t available to people in poor countries striving for better tomorrows for themselves and their children. As a result, many bright, industrious people, no matter how hard they work, can’t rise above a subsistence living, pay for an education for their children or even make modest improvements in their own situation.
During my presidency we tried to help spur growth in and trade with Africa by passing the African Growth and Opportunity Act and forgiving the debts of poor countries if they used the savings to invest in economic development, education, and health. We also funded two million microcredit loans a year in poor villages through USAID. After I left the White House I wanted to keep working on these problems, helping many more farmers, ranchers, and fishermen and -women who were vulnerable to bad weather and inefficient supply chains. In theory, most African countries were capable of feeding themselves and producing crops for export. In practice, most farmers were just hanging on, leaving too much land fallow or poorly farmed, unable to afford good feed, seed, and fertilizer, and too often paying half their incomes to someone with a wagon to take their crops to market. Unless this changed, I was convinced that more and more poor farmers would keep flooding into cities already dealing with unmanageable growth and many more governments would yield to the inevitable temptation to sell or lease land to nations with lots of money but without the ability to feed themselves, including China and Saudi Arabia.
In the early years of the foundation, I met Sir Tom Hunter, a Scottish businessman and philanthropist. Hunter started with nothing but an idea: selling sports shoes out of his minivan. After he grew his idea into a $500 million business and expanded into other areas, Tom began working to improve economic literacy and entrepreneurship in Scotland. When I asked him to work with me to help small farmers in Malawi and Rwanda, he eagerly embraced the challenge. In 2005, at our first Clinton Global Initiative meeting, we announced the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (CHDI) to work with small farmers to improve their yields and their access to markets for their crops.
Over the years the focus of CHDI would shift—as later the name would, to the Clinton Development Initiative (CDI), after Tom Hunter’s foundation shifted its focus to other projects—but the central idea remained economic empowerment for small farmers and their communities. We wanted to help the farmers’ own bottom lines by improving their seed stock, fertilizers, and other inputs, showing them alternative planting techniques, helping them get their harvests to market at lower cost, and once there, helping them negotiate for better prices—very similar to what cooperatives and county extension agents do for U.S. farmers.
CHDI emphasized programs that could be expanded, replicated, and sustained, with costs borne by local governments and communities, instead of long-term reliance on foreign donors. We had learned a lot from our experiences with CHAI and knew that a big part of making the program sustainable was the ability to increase farmers’ incomes quickly. In the same way we needed manufacturers of AIDS medicine to still make a profit even when selling their products at much lower prices, we first had to help the small farmers succeed in the existing market for their goods to achieve long-lasting and replicable benefits.
In the beginning, CHDI had four major pillars—helping smallholder farmers to boost agricultural outputs, bolstering education in their communities by helping to build schools, improving water and sanitation by digging wells and building washing stations, and, in a joint program with Partners in Health, improving healthcare.
By 2007, CHDI had made good progress on its goals. Twelve hundred farmers in a local cooperative association received a $65,000 loan from the Malawi Rural Finance Company to purchase improved wheat seed and fertilizer. CHDI built the sanitation system and developed the piped water supply for the Neno District Hospital in Malawi that Partners in Health had built, and helped the government of Rwanda organize the largest purchase of fertilizer in the country’s history, increasing farmers’ yields and incomes.
I met a widow with a thirteen-year-old boy whose plot was only a quarter of an acre. The year before she joined CHDI, her income was $80. I don’t know how she made it. But with better inputs and the ability to get her crops to market at dramatically reduced cost, she earned $320, then above the country’s median income, and was able to send her son to school for the first time.
Two thousand eight was a pivotal year for CHDI when it launched its first experimental “anchor farm” in Malawi. Through donor contributions, CHDI bought a commercial farm to anchor smallholder farmers in the surrounding area. The initial anchor farm was able to buy seeds, fertilizer, and other inputs at bulk prices and share those savings, as well as its access to markets, with 250 smallholder farmers. Along the way the anchor farm became a central clearinghouse for instruction in higher-yield and sustainable farming techniques, such as encouraging the farmers not to burn the previous years’ stubble but to plant beneath it, using the decaying organic matter as a natural soil enhancement. The anchor farm model proved so successful that by 2020, CDI operated anchor farms in Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania supporting more than 105,000 farmers.
In 2013, Chelsea and I visited one of the anchor farms in Santhe, Malawi. The farm was impressive, with modern tractors and an energetic, well-trained staff. So was a conversation I had with one of the smallholder farmers, a woman who had been doing so well since participating in the program that she was able to send two children to school with the additional profit she had made from her small plot of land. She had managed to plant something on every bit of it surrounding her house.
I also met a group of women at the farm practicing planting in ways that both would save more soil in dry weather and better endure hard rains, and remember one of them in particular. I doubt she knew who I was, other than someone with white hair who had come a long way to visit the farm. Understandably skeptical of my knowledge and interest, she asked me if I thought I could do the planting she was doing with her small spade. I said I could. She seemed unconvinced, so I took her spade and seeded a bit of the row she was working. It had been a long time since I’d done that, but I was able to make my way down the row without too much trouble. When I handed the farmer back her implement, I’ll admit I was nervous to see if my work was up to her standards, and relieved when she nodded in satisfaction. It wasn’t a speech to the U.N. but it was a big deal to me. At least she knew we were on the level. Chelsea and our in-country staff got a kick out of it, too.
The anchor farms were only a part of CDI’s work supporting economic empowerment in Africa, but they serve as a good example of what I spoke of earlier in terms of building systems that are replicable and sustainable. Since the farms, and the farmers they support, are integrated into the local economies, they’re much more sustainable than those relying on a constant influx of outside capital. They don’t solve every problem faced by smallholder farmers, but they do provide supports that allow a hardworking family enough income to rise above a purely subsistence living. Best of all, the land stays with the local population. They don’t have to labor in futility or flee jobless to the cities while their land is given over to outside interests and its harvests exported.
Two other Clinton-Hunter projects supported Rwandan coffee and soya growers. CHDI had begun working with 6,500 Rwandan coffee farmers in 2007 to expand their operations and increase sales, and in 2008 created two organizations, the Rwanda Farmers Coffee Company (RFCC) to advance the fledgling Rwandan coffee industry, and Mount Meru Soyco Limited, a soya-processing partnership with a Tanzanian company that produced cooking oil for the Rwandan market and for export. RFCC began by securing better returns for coffee growers and promoting the sale of premium beans overseas, especially in the U.K. It soon became apparent that the industry needed a centralized roasting and packaging facility in Rwanda instead of relying on foreign companies and the overhead they added.
With the right kind of factory to roast and package Rwanda’s high-quality coffee for local, regional, and international markets, they could capture maximum value for the coffee and return a higher percentage of it back to Rwandan coffee farmers. RFCC, with the Rwandan National Agricultural Export Development Board, began the process of designing and building the facility in Kigali with our support. After some construction delays, it opened in 2014, with the capacity to process 3,000 tons of beans a year, potentially benefiting more than 50,000 smallholder farmers. The coffee was good.
The soya-processing facility also opened in 2014. Like the roasted coffee beans, the soya processed at Mount Meru was grown by the smallholder farmers CHDI was working with, providing a market for nearly 100,000 of them. The facility itself provided more than 200 others with jobs. By 2015, it was estimated that Rwanda produced approximately 25,000 metric tons of soya per year, much of it by its small farmers.
In 2005, while raising funds for the South Asian tsunami, I met Frank Giustra, a Canadian who had been successful in mining and movies and wanted to expand his philanthropic work beyond his home base in Vancouver. Frank began to support the foundation financially and in 2006 announced that he wanted to give away half his money, principally to help increase incomes and reduce inequality in Latin America. The Mexican businessman and a friend of mine, Carlos Slim, was so impressed that he joined Frank and me at the June 2007 kickoff in New York and pledged $100 million to support the effort. We agreed to focus on helping small entrepreneurs, fishermen, farmers, tradespeople, and artisans to raise their standard of living in ways that others could adopt.
At our third annual CGI meeting later that year, we announced the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, or CGSGI. In Peru, at the government’s request, we worked with Carlos Slim’s foundation to perform more than 50,000 cataract surgeries, ahead of schedule and under budget. In Colombia we helped six Cartagena hotels purchase 20 percent of their goods and services from 150 local suppliers; provided a professional nutritionist, health monitoring, and more than 3,243,000 healthy meals to children in schools operated by Shakira’s Pies Descalzos Foundation; and in Bogotá supported successful vocational training and jobs for more than 5,000 disadvantaged young people.
In 2012, CGSGI changed its name to CGEP, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, to reflect its new strategic focus on farm and business opportunities that could make a profit and support themselves. Over the next few years, CGEP started a lot of new businesses, including a peanut supply chain enterprise in Haiti, a produce seedling supply chain enterprise in El Salvador, and beyond Latin America, similar efforts in India and Indonesia.
In 2014, we refined our approach and doubled down on our most successful pilot, Acceso, a demand-driven model that provides small-scale farmers a path out of poverty into sustained economic mobility. Acceso bridges the gap between small-scale farmers and commercial buyers and acts as an intermediary, taking farmers’ products at guaranteed prices, aggregating, processing, and then selling to the best market channel. Farmers benefit from increased agricultural productivity, financing, fair prices, and sustainable access to high-value markets, which improves their livelihoods. Buyers benefit from competitive prices, stable supply, high product quality, and the opportunity to impact low-income communities by purchasing local products.
Since 2016, Acceso has grown its seed-to-market model to serve farmers in three countries: Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti. In early 2020, CGEP transferred out of the Clinton Foundation to continue its work within Acceso, which is supported by Frank Giustra and the Giustra Foundation. Since 2007, the project had helped more than 600,000 people through its social enterprises and health programs in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, with more than $42 million generated for smallholder farmers and fishers.
As of 2024, Acceso works with more than 26,000 farmers in Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti, has bought over 54,000 metric tons of products from small-scale farmers, and has generated an average increase in income of 250 percent for farmers and food system workers, with expansion plans underway in Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic.
Frank Giustra made a promise to himself and others back in 2007 that sustainable development would be his life’s work and he’s kept that commitment and will continue to do so as long as he’s able. He’s donated more than $100 million, not for personal acclaim, but to ensure that Acceso earns a significant social return on impact by helping smallholder farmers and their families embark on a lasting path out of poverty. I’m very grateful that he kept his commitment to give so much. The smearing he took in 2016 as part of the radical right’s campaign to perform reverse plastic surgery on the foundation made me sick, but Frank believed in his work and forged through it, including staying on the Clinton Foundation board until 2020.
The Clinton-Hunter and Clinton-Giustra partnerships embodied important features of effective NGOs: a) the ability to try new innovative approaches and build on successes, and b) if projects don’t work, to learn from them, keep working to improve, or move on. Of course, you have to be careful with your donors’ funds and carefully account for how and why a project didn’t meet expectations. While not every project succeeds, you won’t know unless you give it a try.
With both the Clinton-Hunter and the Clinton-Giustra partnerships, as well as other projects in the United States and abroad, many of our efforts were unqualified successes, but in others we came in with good intentions, solid research, and relevant experience, but still found ourselves taking a different course when our efforts didn’t prove to be sustainable and replicable. Anyone who works in the nonprofit sector has had the same experience—it’s humbling, but you can often learn more from failing than you realize. Over the years when we’ve met with other like-minded organizations, offering and soliciting advice on projects, the hard-won knowledge about what didn’t work and why was often as valuable as the success stories.
I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of my favorite Clinton-Giustra projects was with the TANA organization, which supported Afro-Colombian women entrepreneurs in a remote part of Colombia. They grew organic spices from perches in trees to protect them from floodwaters of the Atrato River, which flowed through their community. CGSGI worked with the women to increase their productivity and to help them sell more of their spices in Cartagena and elsewhere. At first the effort succeeded in increasing the spice women’s incomes. Then, for reasons beyond our control, the market for the spices flattened out, and even with the support of our initiative and the spice growers’ increased productivity, the project wasn’t expandable.
I also loved our Chakipi project, in which native Peruvian women were provided backpacks full of basic consumer goods like soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and other products not available in small Andean villages. The women would go from village to village until the supplies or the demand ran out, return with their cash, and be paid the difference between the base cost of the products and what they sold them for. For most of the women, it was the first steady income they’d ever earned. Soon they were going in pairs to larger towns with a folding table to display their wares. Eventually they set up a store in Lima to cater to lower-income neighborhoods there. When Clinton-Giustra moved into Haiti, Chakipi went there, too. In the end, sadly, the project proved to be unsustainable. But I’ll never forget it, and I’m still not sure that the “Avon in the Andes” project wouldn’t work if it were part of a larger consumer products organization with steady financial support.
We had similar experiences with other initiatives. Of course, in many cases, particularly with CHAI, we had the opposite experience—our success in a particular area, reducing the price of HIV/AIDS medicines, testing, and equipment, was the key to expanding into other health challenges like malaria, TB, hepatitis, and chronic illnesses.
The biggest obstacle to breakout success in agriculture is that small farming and essential food production don’t receive anywhere near the level of support from donor governments, international organizations, and philanthropists that healthcare does, so we keep trying to fund scalable solutions against higher odds. The German government actually gave us $3 million to support our farming work in Africa for a couple of years so they could determine whether it could be scaled. It helped a lot of people but not for long enough. Thankfully, others are working on this problem, too. The Norwegian government funded our tree farmers in Malawi, who earn carbon credits for the investments. That did work and I’ll say more about it in the next chapter. In Nigeria, businessman and industrialist (and CHAI board member) Aliko Dangote personally supports aid to 180,000 small farmers, and the American philanthropist Howard Buffett has worked successfully for years for a comprehensive effort to lift the incomes of African farmers he supports. The right answer, I believe, would be an organized funding effort to expand all these and other successful efforts until four or five million farmers in developing countries can get good seed, fertilizer, proper skills, and efficient access to markets. It would be a tremendous boost to agricultural productivity, food security, and rural incomes. Remember the woman who quadrupled her income on a quarter of an acre? With the right help, there can be many more like her.