Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 30, 2021 - September 5, 2021

From Grow the Goose to Borneo Cocoa, Ida Faranina Othman’s ventures are focused on helping communities help themselves — by creating awareness on financial literacy, especially among children, and guiding cocoa farmers in Sabah to earn sustainable incomes

Ida Faranina Othman believes in financial empowerment, mentoring children and adults to help build better and financially better off communities. That is why she started Grow the Goose, and later Borneo Cocoa.

Nina, as she is fondly called, is a financial empowerment advocate and coach. When she moved to Sabah three years ago, little did she realise she would find herself guiding a community of farmers to discover a niche business in cocoa.

It all started when Magret Darusin took an interest in what Nina was doing then. Magret is a subsistence farmer and an all-around liaison in the village where Nina was running workshops for teenagers and young adults under her Grow the Goose initiative.

Nina established Grow the Goose Solutions in 2015, conducting money management programmes for children. She wanted to create awareness on the importance of raising financially responsible children, as debt and bankruptcy continue to climb to never-before-seen levels because young adults know little about managing their finances.

As it is also a social enterprise, Nina dedicates a portion of her profits to run free financial literacy programmes for marginalised communities.

Grow the Goose is a play on the classic children’s tale, The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, from Aesop’s Fables. As opposed to slaying the goose, Nina advocated nurturing.

“Magret, who handled the catering for the workshops, asked me why I was guiding only the young in building their financial and business knowledge, and not offering classes to older folk. I asked what she wanted to know and how I could help.

“That conversation changed my focus a bit. While we are used to working with children, there isn’t the same kind of support system here for adults. Household empowerment is key to changing the money mindset of all,” she says.

After the workshops ended, Nina visited Magret’s mountainside plot in picturesque Kampung Tambatuon, Kota Belud, where the latter grew paddy and cash crops such as pepper and pineapples. The sight of rotting cocoa pods caught her attention.

Upon further inquiry, Nina learnt that several farmers received free cocoa seedlings from the Malaysian Cocoa Board some years ago and planted the seedlings at the edge of their paddy fields and vegetable plots to see if the crop would reap them any financial benefits in the coming years.

The only problem was that the majority of them did not know how to turn the cocoa harvest into a worthwhile cash-yielding crop when the time came. “Of the 12 farmers who planted the seedlings, only four bothered harvesting the pods and after all the effort taken to process 10kg to 20kg of cocoa, they got only RM60 to RM70,” she says.

Apart from price volatility, problems with pests and disease have forced Malaysian farmers to abandon the crop. “Worse yet is that the community is an ageing one and their children aren’t interested in taking up the trade,” says Nina.

Although cocoa is no longer produced in large amounts, Malaysia is among the giants in grinding and supplying the crop to premium chocolate manufacturers worldwide. Nina says cocoa beans from the African continent and Indonesia are sent to Malaysia to be ground.

Appalled by the outcome for their cocoa endeavour and the raw deal they were getting for their produce, she took it upon herself to help build a sustainable ecosystem for them.

Nina founded Borneo Cocoa, a social enterprise empowering cocoa smallholders in the region with the knowledge and skills to create their cocoa-based products through ethical and sustainable cocoa farming and production, as well as to, hopefully, earn better incomes.

“We found out that many of them have access to micro-funding platforms such as Tekun Nasional and Sabah Credit Corporation. What happens is they take a loan, pay it back and then they take it again. They are constantly in a debt cycle without any real change to their business or their lives.

Apart from helping Magret and her fellow farmers establish a sustainable income stream, the Grow the Goose team is also thinking of ways to get the farmers on to a micro-investment platform or a savings scheme to help them break the cycle.

“The [most valuable] asset they own is their land, but as ancestral land is passed on from generation to generation, their land bank is eventually diluted,” she notes.

Seeing Magret’s unwavering enthusiasm to upskill herself, Nina also got Magret enrolled in Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE), an online business and finance academy created by the Thunderbird School of Management and the University of Arizona. AWE is funded by the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

Being in the academy exposed Magret to the ins and outs of cocoa processing. She learnt how to use a computer in the process, which was a challenge itself.

“Magret learnt how to use the laptop and improve her English by using Google Translate. The most inspiring bit, however, is that she never let poor internet connection derail her ambitions.

“From just being a farmer, she became an entrepreneur, and applied for a business licence from the Kota Belud local council,” says Nina.  

Magret’s company, Butiza, which means pearl in Kadazan, is the only one with an active cocoa licence in the constituency, according to the Malaysian Cocoa Board.

“This whole episode has taught us the resilience of the community, and as for Magret, we spend so much time together that she has become like the godmother to my children,” says Nina.

The project Nina started also inspired her eldest son, Armand Idrizam, 12, to start Koko Loko — a line of healthy cocoa-based snacks sourced from cocoa growers in Sabah — as a joint venture with his younger siblings Faheem, 10, and Julia, 5.

The family’s move to Sabah in 2018 had stalled the siblings’ homemade sausages enterprise — which was the outcome of Nina’s first empowerment lessons — and they needed to find a way to continue supplementing their pocket money for their own goals.

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in February, Armand began working on recipes for granola mixes and nut spreads. Together with the Sabah Society for the Deaf, Koko Loko started producing snacks such as cocoa nibs, which are now sold online from its home base in Kota Kinabalu.

Staying true to Grow the Goose’s exhortation to give back to society, 20% of the children’s net profits go towards greening the earth projects such as planting more trees and mangroves as well as coral propagation in Sabah.

This has not just created an income for the siblings but also for their network of growers and community businesses.

Over the course of the pandemic, they have bought more than 200kg of cocoa beans, which they have, together with the farmers, learnt to ferment and dry.

“The idea is two-pronged. While my children have their own thing going, we experiment with recipes and do market validation to help build another source of income for the Kampung Tambatuon folk. Apart from farming, the village is also a beautiful eco-tourism location.

“So, I figured that when the situation improves and they get visitors again, tourists could buy their cocoa produce as souvenirs or the curated gift boxes, which are things that were sold here before. Tourists aren’t likely to buy bags of rice to take back with them,” Nina says.

The inspiration came from South American countries where tourists partake in activities such as ceremonial cacao rituals, which were a part of the Mayan and Aztec cultures.

Nina’s Grow the Goose endeavour, on the other hand, has moved online as a result of social distancing rules. With family-edition modules, she conducts 2½-hour workshops for children and parents.

Financial empowerment and entrepreneurial skills have become even more pertinent following the adverse economic impact resulting from Covid-19, emphasises Nina. Insufficient savings, lack of a social safety net, income shock and sudden job loss owing to the pandemic have thrown socio-economic inequalities into sharp relief.

Through engagements with the Sabah Social Entrepreneurs Network, Nina found that many who had migrated to the capital for jobs are back in their kampungs now.

“These people [who have come back] have in-depth knowledge in areas such as digital marketing. But they aren’t interested in agriculture or farming. However, some are seeing the value in learning traditional skills such as bamboo basket weaving and matching that with their marketing skills.

“Which is why we hope to turn them into entrepreneurs. With sustainable incomes, they would be able to address unemployment, adapt and encourage others to think out of the box,” she says.

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