A New American Export: Adding Business Perspective to Global Development Efforts

By Chip Goodman


I recently returned from a conference in Accra, Ghana, focused on the global effort to expand school feeding programs in developing countries. Approaching sub Saharan Africa from the west one quickly recognizes the beautiful terrain and fertile land not yet in productive use.

I’m an entrepreneur with more than 40 years experience in the food service industry, specializing in school based child nutrition programs. As my wife and I travel through the developing world we have developed a regimen of our own. Whenever possible, we try to follow the supply chain in reverse from wherever schools meals are served back to their point of origin (whether locally sourced or well traveled USAID shipments from America’s heartland.) My first-hand observations tell me we must find a way to inject entrepreneurial and managerial expertise into the global effort of feeding the world’s hungry children.

For the recent trip to Ghana I was fortunate to be accompanied by two like minded friends from the UCLA Anderson School of Management—George Abe and Lucy Allard.

The conference brought together experts from the donor community and delegates from 17 government and NGO partners representing education, agriculture, finance, and health interests. Most everyone agreed that the management perspective of UCLA was a welcomed addition.

To a large extent the Ghana conference agenda was driven by core concepts highlighted at last year’s G8 Conference in L’Aquila, Italy. That meeting marked the G8’s first official recognition that food security constitutes a basic building block for global security and, by extension, US national security as well. Implicit in this acknowledgement, the US can no longer act as "breadbasket" to the world. The drive toward "home grown food security" via agricultural development has begun in earnest.

Providing the right incentives to drive agricultural development in developing countries starts with creating new market demand that then expands capacity. There is no better way to increase demand than to serve home grown food to hungry school children. The triple bang for the buck is easy to understand: children will come to school for the food and stay for the lessons; children receiving proper nutrients will learn more effectively; and farmers will work to grow the right crops knowing that there is new demand. Eventually, entrepreneurs emerge at all levels of the supply chain to meet new demand and increase efficiency as competitive market gains traction. The concept is not entirely new, yet only a tiny fraction of the need has been met so far.

We have long relied on a simple metric to measure how developing countries mature into market economies. In the US, one farmer feeds one hundred citizens, in Ghana it takes 70 people working the land to feed one hundred of its citizens. Experts agree the best hope for an emerging economy starts with making food production more efficient.

The challenge is to create the right environment for private investment to help increase farm to school capacity and efficiency, where seeding a new market in schools for local food drives more productive approaches to produce, store, and distribute home grown foods. Then young human capital has the potential to shift into a new middle class and filling more skilled professions, supplying other home grown capabilities like engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs. This transition simply cannot happen in the long term without a plan to engage the private sector and private capital for farm equipment, training, food storage, processing, and distribution.

By way of example, the Ghana program shows early signs of hope. School feeding funds have recently been targeted to national, then regional governmental entities that in turn contract with local women to procure food locally, then to prepare, and serve nutritious meals at local schools. This policy has the practical effect of empowering a new group of entrepreneurs striving to provide the best service at the best price while directly benefiting local farmers. It’s a start.

Business thinking is essential to make the programs sustainable and provide donor nations and organizations with an exit strategy. There is, in fact, an untapped resource that the global child feeding community can and should engage; talented young Americans pursuing studies in graduate business schools. Most of these men and women already have practical experience in the business world and through graduate management education are developing special talents in finance, operations, micro-finance, entrepreneurship, governance, and other critical skills that could be applied to making school feeding programs strong and sustainable. Any approach would need to be carefully planned and executed with special sensitivity and to local cultures.

A meeting is being organized at UCLA this fall, with stakeholders discussing how to engage MBAs in an integrated, global effort.