Trainability, Entrepreneurship and Resilience among small- holder farmer community in Africa

Entrepreneurship is the innate (and acquired) ability of an individual to create, sustain and grow an enterprise with business acumen. The end objective of an entrepreneur is to generate wealth for self or for society as well as provide employment opportunities wherever feasible thus contributing to the local and national economy. Entrepreneurship is not the sole predictor of performance. Whether an individual who demonstrates entrepreneurship abilities is also willing to learn and acquire new knowledge and skills (Trainability) is equally critical for the overall success of an enterprise.

Trainability is defined as an individual’s innate desire to acquire new knowledge and skills and put in commensurate efforts. Trainability is also closely related to learnability. Learnability is defined as the desire and ability to grow and adept at new skill sets in a fast-changing world.

In the agriculture context, a farmer has to learn and unlearn many things due to factors such as new technology, newer ways of farming, mechanization etc. This calls for their training or learning quotient to be reasonably high. It is seen that many talented farmers are very resistant to learning new things. In fact, resistance to change and holding on to established ways of behaviour and practices is detrimental to growth.

While entrepreneurship and trainability are two broad terms, they constitute a number of sub traits thus forming a constellation. There are deep linkages between Trainability, Entrepreneurship and Resilience.As mentioned earlier trainability implies our innate and acquired ability to grasp things, put meaning into them and the skill to relate seemingly different things into a common thread and perspective. This ability develops through trial and error and the resulting insight.

Entrepreneurship denotes the ability to use available resources optimally and productively and through intelligent deployment of these resources make the enterprise successful both in terms of money and people. By nature, entrepreneurship could be both cognitive and non-cognitive in the sense many attributes are present internally and get sharpened via training and education.

Resilience can be defined as our ability to wade through the uncertainties and vagaries of life with a certain degree of anticipation and preparedness and not get overwhelmed by it.

A successful entrepreneur needs to have trainability, creditworthiness and resilience. We have been measuring these attributes by using our psychometric profiling battery named mPower-U. This far we have been able to administer the battery to more than 5000 small holder farmers, dealers, extension officers, input suppliers and sales staff from Senegal, Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia Bangladesh and India. we measure entrepreneurship, creditworthiness as well as the trainability. A successful entrepreneur needs to have the following traits in them.

-Networking ability

-Assertiveness

-Liking for people

-Achievement motivation

-Meta Cognition

-Passion for work

-Internal Locus of Control

-Extroversion

-Openness to experiences

-Self Efficacy

-Consciousness

-Creditworthiness

-Trainability

-Resilience

If the entrepreneurs have low trainability, then he/she will have difficulty in assimilating new ways of doing business and will be generally reluctant to accept anything that does not fit in his/her frame of reference. In addition, he/she may develop a hostile attitude for learning new technologies. ‘I know all’ will be the position adopted. Hence, we need to identify individuals who have high trainability. High trainability also denotes flexibility and willingness to change our mind when new data is available.

People with low entrepreneurship with high trainability can be groomed to be successful entrepreneurs by helping them via training and sound business plan. High entrepreneurship with low trainability is an oxymoron as it is difficult to be successful in business without learning and constantly acquiring new skills.

Creditworthiness is our ability to honor our commitments. A highly creditworthy individual will usually not default on loans. Values and ethical ways of doing business is important for such an individual. Creditworthiness is an essential attribute for doing business. However, a highly creditworthy individual may not be a successful entrepreneur as he may not be having leadership qualities. It is quite possible that without being creditworthy one may succeed in business for a short while however to succeed for a long time it is absolutely essential that a person has to be creditworthy. In Africa the loan default percentage is over 50%. That means that the loans are going to wrong people who somehow find ways and means not to honor their commitment. Of course, in many cases there could be natural reasons like flooding, famine etc. that wipes out any profit and makes them defaulters. But more critically we have observed a major limitation of the financial institutions in deciding whom to offer loans. The diligence process is often very linear and goes on predictable lines. The poor small holder farmers have no collateral and they fall off the bucket. The intention to pay, the commitment to honor obligations are innate to human beings and can not be understood by the liner processes. It is here that we are able, by deploying our tool, to predict with accuracy of over 90% about who will pay back and who will not. Such an analysis is very helpful for the financial institutions to make their decisions. The analysis that we offer is not impressionistic but quantitative and based on a carefully designed tool.

We measure resilience by using another scale named as Resilience Excellence Index (RXI). A bit of rationale for developing the scale is as follows:

When we developed the Business Excellence Index ( BXI) and Creditworthiness Excellence Index (CXI) scale our focus was to identify entrepreneurs and their creditworthiness. The thought process was that via this tool we can identify potential entrepreneurs from small holder farmer groups and identify their psychological frame to repay the loans. In addition we could also find out who among the sample are easily trainable. In developing the scale, the understanding was that the overall environment is normal. 

However, the Pandemic has changed these assumptions dramatically. Complete uncertainty about the future coupled with several restrictions over supply chain, movements in groups etc. have put tremendous strain on everyone more so on the poor farmers as any lack the social support network. The entrepreneurs need resilience and coping skills in abundance in them. Resilience is non cognitive in nature. Many have it in them and likewise many do not. Those who have it are better prepared to face the reality. Those who don’t have can be taught through counselling.

The RXI measures resilience via a paper pencil (also web based) multiple choice questionnaire that takes around 15 minutes and develops the risk profile and appetite of the subject on the following dimensions:

-Financial

-Ethical

-Health & safety adherence protocols

-Social

-General lifestyle

A highly trainable and resilient farmer has greater chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur (Champion). However, by correctly diagnosing through the administration of CXI/BXI/RXI we can prepare a road map for the rest to increase these attributes and make them succeed in their enterprise.

Interpretation:

As mentioned earlier through the administration of the mPowerU &RXI tool we measure entrepreneurship, trainability, creditworthiness and resilience. The analysis is denoted using color bands. The Green band represents Champions who are rated as good on all the four dimensions. The yellow band denotes Masters who are yet not there but can be considered for training and they do possess potential to grow. The red band denotes rookies in whom we need to invest significant effort to develop them into successful entrepreneurs involving time and money. The organisation needs to take a call on such identified rookies. While on both entrepreneurship and trainability we find people with moderate ability with resilience we find on high and low resilience.

With this color bands we can get the following combinations.

-High in Entrepreneurship, High on Creditworthiness, High in Trainability, High in Resilience (HEHCHTHR) Champions

-Moderate in Entrepreneurship, High on Creditworthiness, Moderate in Trainability High in Resilience (MEHCMTHR) Masters

-High on Entrepreneurship, Low on Creditworthiness, Low on Trainability Low on Resilience (HELCLTLR) Rookies

-Low on Entrepreneurship, Low on Creditworthiness High on Trainability, Low on Resilence (HTLCLELR) Rookies

-Low on Entrepreneurship, Low on Creditworthiness Moderate on Trainability, High on Resilence (LELCMTHR) Rookies

-Low on Entrepreneurship, Low on Creditworthiness, Low on Trainability, Low on Resilence (LTLCLELR) Rookies

To conclude it is our strong belief and experience that all human resources are trainable. It is our teaching ability more than their learning ability that is critical for success. A sound business plan coupled with carefully crafted training inputs can transform a rookie to a master and a master to a champion.