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COMACO Operating Plan
5.4 COMACO Operating Plan, Building a Vision for Conservation
We are now 5 years into COMACO and we continue to grow markets for the rural poor living across Luangwa Valley’s vast landscape. For many of these people, livelihood choices remain limited and are often destructive to their natural resources. The last count is over 40,000 families who have become COMACO producers. From the very beginning our focus was to offer low-income, food insecure families a better future with skills and markets that would align their lives around the benefits of caring for soils and trees and giving space to wildlife. Some, no doubt, thought we were crazy to suggest such a vision for a commercial enterprise. After all, companies are supposed to maximize profits. One does not have to look far to see the ravages across Africa where such motives strip the soils of their nutrients and leave land barren of trees, and yet benign neglect by leaving poverty in the hands of the poor can often lead to the same end result.
The road taken by COMACO is a hard one because its mission is social and environmental, though its own survival depends on competing with brands whose motives are largely for profit. It takes a special team of people to face such an uphill challenge and remain driven to prove COMACO can stand on its own and be called one of Zambia’s really great companies – “Good for Zambia and good for Zambians”….. perhaps one day, “Good for Africa.” COMACO is fortunate because it has such a team of dedicated staff.
The COMACO challenge of success is far greater than simply putting a nicely labeled It’s Wild! product on a retail shelf. COMACO begins with helping poor, unskilled farmers grow a surplus of crops that can also be eaten to ensure food security, and then be able to move these raw commodities up a value chain that rewards farmers with a reliable income and even a cash bonus if he or she complies with conservation guidelines. Moreover, it is an approach that needs large production volumes to cover operating and overhead costs and this means having operations in multiple locations, adding to the logistical challenges that COMACO faces. Today, COMACO operates manufacturing hubs at three different locations and will open an additional three in 2010, covering a total of 8 different districts
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Grappling with these challenges, COMACO has become more disciplined and pragmatic, where careful planning is essential for achieving a rural landscape safe from needless poverty, hunger, disease, and destruction of their natural resources. An important part of this planning is to also attain commercial sustainability over the next several years in order to demonstrate itself as a viable solution for protecting ecologically important and fragile landscapes. COMACO’s management met in December and convened an extraordinary meeting to plan out the necessary tasks to achieve three critical goals over the next six to seven months for realizing COMACO’s vision:
- Product sales to exceed K5.4 billion during the second half-year fiscal period,
- Geographical reach of COMACO to extend to six fully operational CTCs (Chama, Lundazi, Mfuwe, Nyimba, Chinsali, and Serenje), and
- Commodity production, farmer base, and buying efficiency to improve to allow COMACO to reach over 6000 tons of commodities for the 2010 business year.
The operating plan that emerged became known as the 5.4 Operating Plan, and the team is galvanized like never before to see it happen and succeed. From an idea, to practice, to real growth and demonstration of results, Zambia is seeing something really special develop for its people: a way that a company can help markets, farmers and conservation work together to achieve a better future.