Reducing poverty at home and away

Alumnus Rodd Myers

 

Rodd Myers has worked on poverty reduction programs around the world, and he's currently in Indonesia.

By Jen Allford

When Rodd Myers, BA’98, walked onto his hometown campus at the University of Calgary in 1994, he was starting a journey that would lead him to study in Kenya, Florida and London, and work in 17 other places around the world.

“Starting off in general studies, I had no idea of what major I wanted. It had been a long time since I had a hobby,” he recalls with a smile. Myers really enjoyed first year sociology and anthropology and went looking for a way to put that knowledge into action. That’s when he found a community development major at Daystar University in Kenya.

“The course catalogue was not online at either U of C or Daystar,” Myers says. “So I remember cutting out the course descriptions from both catalogues and pasting them onto a sheet of paper to show how the credits could be transferred.”

He spent two semesters studying in Kenya. “I took 12 courses and got credit for nine.” Myers was more than happy with that, and with the “amazing” experience in Africa.

“Talking about community development in a small class where most students grew up in villages added a very practical dimension to my studies,” he says. Not to mention the regular field trips to nearby development projects and the strolls through the savannah when he wanted a break from his studies.

Back in Calgary, Myers started volunteering for an immigrant aid agency and enrolled in development studies at U of C. He immersed himself in courses on development, gender equality, sociology for development, race relations and African studies. Working on special projects and his undergraduate honours thesis with Professor Einsiedel "challenged my views on development" says Myers. 

One particular class ignited a passion and changed the course of his life: Ecology and Human Affairs. “The professor was incredible and even though I had avoided biology in high school–I hadn’t taken biology since the seventh grade actually–I found myself fascinated at the interaction between humans and our environment.” Thus began Myers’s devotion to sustainable agriculture.

An internship at the research farm of Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO) in Florida came next, followed by an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development at the Imperial College of the University of London.

His work with the Canadian Co-operative Association (CCA) and private consulting has taken Myers to 17 other countries. “I have worked on projects in Guatemala helping thousands of smallholder farm families triple their income by working together in a co-operative that now processes high-value vegetables and exports to Costco.”

He’s also helped develop food security projects in Northern Ghana and Uganda and is currently leading a project in Aceh, Indonesia, an area devastated by the 2004 tsunami and a 30-year conflict.

“There are almost 3,000 farmers who have been learning how to trust each other and improve production since the tsunami,” says Myers. “We have designed a project that will enable them to access markets and compete with corporations through value upgrading and processing.”

While he’s travelled around the world, Myers has also worked to improve communities at home in Calgary. He worked with immigrant aid agencies and Momentum, an economic development agency, developing financial literacy programmes for low income communities.

In international development, he says, you’re always the outsider. “Change in communities always needs animators from within. Rich or poor. North or South. It doesn’t matter,” he says. “If a community is receptive, an outsider can be useful in animating development, but the only sustainable way is for communities to take ownership of that process.” Sometimes, he says, that can be challenging in foreign countries because communities can become too dependent well-resourced NGOs.

Once his work in Indonesia wraps up, Myers wants to move from managing development projects to providing technical assistance and explore a model of sustainable livelihood development and environmental conservation called ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor and Forest-Based Poverty Alleviation” He starts his doctoral work in September in the UK.

While Myers knows hundreds of millions live with scarcity, “to make a small impact in communities in Canada, Latin America, Asia and Africa has great value and I am happy that the U of C laid the foundation for that.”

For more information about Rodd Myers, please click here.