Origins
Nicaragua has a very strong co-operative presence, and co-operatives play a major part both in rural life and in the social economy, so Fair Trade is a natural partner. The Bristol Nicaragua Fair Trade link had its origins in visits by Fair Trade coffee growers under the auspices of Bristol Link with Nicaragua (BLINC) and the city’s official twinning with Puerto Morazan in north-west Nicaragua in the late 2000’s. 1 A few school visits in Fair Trade Fortnight in February formed part of these. The funding for these visits ended, and an alternative model was proposed, whereby schools would pay £150 per day, and the visits would be intensive enough to raise most of the funding required. The new programme was aimed at giving large numbers of children the chance to hear and question a grower face to face, and was administered by BLINC. Whilst it has never managed to be self-funding, the main cost, the flight, was covered. The gap was modest, a few hundred pounds, and in the early years this was met by the UK Co-op Local Community Fund, but more recently by BLINC itself and by Bristol and South Gloucestershire Fair Trade networks. Extras include insurance, local transport in Nicaragua, passport costs and a modest payment for loss of earnings. The total cost was around £2,000 per trip. Organizing, hosting and so on was voluntary, and though an offer for expenses was made it was not taken up. The organizing group has been small, and includes the authors, the Bristol Fair Trade officer and, latterly, the University of Bath interpreter course lead.
Recruiting Schools
Initially we contacted schools via the education authorities, who were supportive. Subsequently most recruitment has been through repeat bookings or personal contacts. The cost, £150 per day, was at the limit of what schools would pay, and initial take up was slow. In the first year a flurry of commitments allowed the project to take off.
In addition to schools, the Bristol Fair Trade network ran a Fair Trade Business Awards scheme for a number of years, and our visitor has been a keynote speaker at the presentation event. A number of the visitors have been really strong presenters to adults, and given really rousing presentations, leaving us in no doubt as to the value of their personal presence. They have also spoken at International Women’s Day events, hence our requirement for a female visitor. A toolkit describing how to organize a successful Fair Trade producer visit targeting businesses has been produced with EU support and is available to download for free on the BLINC website. 2
Scale and Benefits
One major benefit of the intensive programme in schools is the large number of children impacted. We have regularly reached 1,800–2,000 in a two-week visit, with activities in around fifteen locations. We are now looking at engagement with a total of well over 20,000 children after fifteen years.
We also offer visits to community groups promoting Fair Trade, as well as church groups and universities, sometimes in the evening or at weekends, though we have, of course, to ensure the growers aren’t overworked. They have all shown great stamina despite the cold February weather. The school visits are repetitive, often six classes a day, but the community groups are more varied and less pressured for the visitor.
Selecting the Visitors
The project was fortunate that BLINC already had a part-time worker, Gioconda Arostegui, in Nicaragua, and was able to use her to recruit, brief and debrief the grower. BLINC is also very committed to empowering women in Nicaragua and always recruits female growers. We evolved, in effect, a ‘person specification’ for visitors. Authenticity was absolutely key, so the growers all have to have land and can speak directly of the physical effort required in growing the crops, coffee and cacao. They need to be confident speakers, and most have held office in their local cooperative, several as gender equality officers. They also need the confidence to fly alone to the UK with changes of plane. Few had been outside Central America or even on a plane before. These demanding requirements have been amply met by a very impressive group of women who have benefitted professionally and personally from their visits. One of the authors, Alix, visited Nicaragua in 2022, and was able to meet with some of the recent visitors, who were very clear about the benefit to them of the visit.
We initially drew from various co-op groups but have settled with SOPPEXCCA, 3 a very successful co-operative union of sixteen independent cooperatives based in Jinotega in the north-west highlands of Nicaragua. Continuity has made organizing easier, and visitors are briefed by their predecessor on what to expect.
Logistics
The logistics of organizing the visit are challenging, but manageable. Indeed, the Bristol twinning officer was used to arranging paperwork and flights for visitors from across the globe. Bristol is a big city with heavy traffic and getting to schools for 9 am demands early starts. Consequently, we dropped more distant schools after the first two years.
We favour whole days, especially in secondary schools, but sometimes small primary schools really don’t need or want a whole day, so they can have half days when not far apart.
In recent years, the University of Bath has been particularly supportive, and taken charge of supporting the visiting grower for two or three days, incorporating her into their own primary school outreach programme, as well as in campus events. This has also reduced the amount of organizing needed by the central team, and is a strong pointer to a long-term sustainable model less dependent on a limited pool of volunteer organizers.
Language
None of our growers have had much English, most none at all, and although this has meant the complication of finding interpreters, we feel interpreters can help steer the session and prompt the grower on occasion. The project has been fortunate that the University of Bath runs an MA interpretation course, whose students have done most of the interpretation in recent years. They are closely briefed by the course leader.
Interpreter Lucy Matthews commented:
Providing interpretation between Fair Trade farmers in Nicaragua and school children was incredibly rewarding. Seeing people from opposite sides of the world being able to communicate through me is the whole reason I pursued interpreting as a career. Similarly, as an interpreter I obviously have a deep appreciation for the value of learning foreign languages and different cultures. Enabling children to see and hear from cultures unlike their own is really important, and something I was delighted to facilitate.
Interpreters need to not only interpret to clear English but keep the level appropriate to young children; several have had teaching experience. What seemed to be an obstacle at first has actually proved to be an asset.
Interpreter Izzy Vivian notes:
I thoroughly enjoyed liaison interpreting for BLINC in May 2022. Enabling the primary school children to understand the importance of Fair Trade and the growing impact of climate change on the livelihoods of Nicaraguan coffee and cacao farmers was both a heart-warming and humbling experience. The children were all engaged and asked insightful, poignant questions and the whole experience really reminded me why I decided to pursue a career in interpreting in the first place. It was a fantastic opportunity to put the skills I’d learnt over my year-long master’s at the University of Bath into practice, especially in the lead up to my summer exams. It was also the first time that I’d interpreted for two groups of people who, had I not been there, would not have been able to understand each other, and really reinforced the need for intercultural communications in our increasingly globalized world.
Hosting the Visitor
We haven’t had problems finding volunteer hosts, but finding hosts in the right location for the programme has sometimes been tricky. Some visitors understandably felt they had to move too often, as the average stay has been around three to four nights per host. Matching hosts, schools, interpreters and volunteer drivers is challenging. We have used student volunteer organizers: some have done very well; others, it is fair to say, have struggled, or dropped out, and had to be replaced by one of the organizing team.
The Education Offer
The visitors have addressed a wide range of audiences, from quite young primary children to university students, and from small sixth form groups to whole school or year group assemblies of 300 or more; a huge challenge for the visitors both in terms of confidence and getting the right level for the content. Mostly, though, participating children are from years 5–7 (age 10–13) in an ordinary class of twenty-five or so. Two classes, that is, about fifty, also works quite well; more tends to dampen questions.
Fair Trade usually features in the primary curriculum. The visits also, we have been told, often spark later discussion in PHSE or RE sessions, 4 and teachers of these often lead in securing commitment to the visits. They have also been valued by business studies, geography and Spanish staff as well. We aim to be flexible in responding to whoever signs up.
Our standard offer is an introduction, handling artefacts such as a Nicaraguan flag, a mosquito net or a child’s hammock, and asking the children what they are for. If there is time, we ask the visitor to briefly teach 1–10 in Spanish, which is a good starter. The main event is a 25-minute PowerPoint presentation of family life as a coffee or cocoa grower, with around twenty-five photos, followed by a question and answer (Q and A) session. There is emphasis on the benefits of Fair Trade and the impact of climate change. The visitors bring telling examples of the problems they encounter, such as ‘coffee rust’ fungus and fluctuations in world prices. They have without exception been passionate about caring for the land and soil, and this has come across strongly, for example, our very first visitor’s co-op spent their very first Fair Trade premium on training in composting and soil improvement. We leave the school copies of the slides and support materials, for example, writing frames, for further use.
SOPPEXCCA has a wide range of social programmes partly financed by the Fair Trade premium. As well as school packs, health screenings and so on, we learned how the premium is used to leverage other funding, for example, loans for a mechanical dehuller and a part payment for a road to spur a local authority into much wider action.
There is no doubt the local co-ops have been of major benefit to the growers; we were told again and again how transformative they have been, especially in permitting landless women to acquire land. Fair Trade is to some extent a bonus; the two elements together create a strong rural and national social economy.
In the classroom we have reduced the initial emphasis on agronomy, which teachers can cover separately. We now show more of the benefits of Fair Trade and the wide range of SOPPEXCCA activities, and place more emphasis on climate change and plant disease such as coffee rust. We strongly encourage a preparatory lesson to cover the location of Nicaragua and the basics of what Fair Trade is, and try and check that the concept of Fair Trade is understood at the beginning. We also offer a crib sheet of possible lines of questioning.
We came to realize that the biggest benefit for the children was the opportunity to ask questions directly of the growers, about their lives and work, and usually this can easily fill a standard school period. Typically, around half the class are able to ask a question. There have been some incisive questions, for example, ‘Will there be a need for Fair Trade in 20 years’ time?’
In earlier years, children would finish by doing one of the many Fair Trade games, with the visitor assisting, but this came to seem a poor use of their time. This was especially true of wider ‘international’ days run by some schools, where the visitor was the keynote speaker but was then not fully engaged when the children moved to breakout sessions. Younger children are especially keen questioners. Older students have occasionally been surprisingly reticent. Teachers have also been keenly interested.
We have tried to follow good teaching practice and keep things lively and engaged. We started to introduce some mild surprises. For example, we often pause the presentation to ask the children to shut their eyes briefly and think what life would be like without electricity. A quick Q and A shows an unsurprising emphasis on Xbox and phones. Only one in a thousand thinks of washing machines, so we then show a slide of the visitor scrubbing clothes on a stone. 5 Some sessions have usefully been led by trainee teachers.
We have also sometimes been brought some artisan chocolate, so have done a taste trial. We follow this up with an exercise in drawing logos and writing slogans for potential sale in the UK, though sadly we have yet to find a way of actually importing any.
We also include a slide with children dancing, and emphasize that Nicaraguans enjoy themselves in the same way as they do. The slides and other resources are normally left with the school.
Follow-up has included photos taken by schools for their parent newsletter, and one school made a large ‘gold’ ring when Fair Trade gold was launched, which then travelled round the libraries for six months.
Tourism
All the visitors were able to undertake some tourism in the area with volunteers from the organizing group or the local Hispanic community. We arrange church visits on Sundays for those who wish to attend. Internet phone calls have made communication with family easier than in the early years.
Evaluation
Formal evaluation of this work over time has been difficult, but observations from teachers and children are collected by the interpreters and volunteers. Informal feedback and repeat bookings convince us, however, that the sessions are valuable. The growers always complete an evaluation form when they are back in Nicaragua. The responses have been very positive, and confirmed by a visit to Nicaragua by one of the authors (Alix) in 2022 when he was able to meet several of the visitors.
The Future
During Covid-19, the physical visits paused, but we have had successful videoconferencing sessions with five schools, about 400 children and one with the University of Bath, although there was much less questioning via this means. In 2023 we expect to restart physical visits, with an academy chain, 6 a group of about seven schools in central Bristol, supported by the University of Bristol.
We believe the future lies with reviving physical visits and, more widely, with universities and academy chains elsewhere developing similar links to BLINC with Fair Trade cooperatives. Such links offer student project opportunities across a wide range of topics, such as event management, economics and alternate business models, supply chains, climate change impact and mitigation, as well as consumer preference and ethical business. For universities, extending this involvement to include outreach to schools is potentially a sustainable package.
Many of these topics, especially supply chains, have come to the fore since Covid-19 and it is an opportunity for universities and academy chains to update courses to make them more relevant, ultimately driven by the need to educate both students and young children about the world they will face. Schools are increasingly reluctant to pay directly, but business award schemes potentially offer a pool of placements. Bringing growers to universities for student sessions and also school outreach should be financially acceptable given the modest cost.
Conclusion
With suitable contacts and volunteer support, it is possible for a Fair Trade visitor to reach large numbers of children for a cost of little more than £1 a head. It offers an authentic experience and opportunity for direct questioning and interaction that cannot be matched in other ways. Whilst the Bristol programme has benefitted from the contacts and connections built up over many years by BLINC, it offers a model that can be readily adapted by universities interested in outreach and academies with a commitment to global awareness. The impact on the real world of Fair Trade in smallholder tropical production settings is an excellent route to building that understanding.