Emiliano Mroue

Emiliano Mroue is a social entrepreneur and founder of WARC, an organization that provides smallholder farmers with integrated services and environmentally sustainable practices to help them grow more food, earn higher income, and regenerate agricultural land and soil. His corporate background and passion for social entrepreneurship led him to establish WARC and make a positive impact in the lives of farming families.

I believe that the theme of impact is about reducing human suffering and supporting the thriving of nature. For me, these are the two core elements. In terms of reducing suffering, I think that addressing poverty and hunger are key. The two projects I mentioned earlier focus on these issues: the agriculture project in West Africa addresses hunger and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid, while the internet connectivity project aims to provide equal opportunities for older people who are poor. As for nature, we believe that agriculture has a massive environmental footprint and we need to do better. This applies not only to big companies that harm the environment, but also to smallholder farmers who need to protect their soil and environment.

— Emiliano Mroue

Interview transcript

Before we get started, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the field?

Sure. So, I'm originally from Argentina. I grew up there and studied there. Then, I moved to Europe for a corporate career job in a big multinational. It was a suit and tie type of job, but I was looking to do something else with my life. At some point, I went almost by chance to Sierra Leone in West Africa and fell in love with the country. I don't have a very smart resolve, but I just went back to Germany with my job and took a one-way flight to Sierra Leone. I started up my first social enterprise, which is called Work Africa. It works with smallholder farmers to support them in increasing their incomes and adopting sustainable farming practices. It is a for-profit company with a strong social focus. That was in 2011. Back then, I did not know what social enterprises were, but I did it because I thought it made sense to do something that is financially sustainable and has a social impact at its core. A few years down the line, I learned that it is actually a social enterprise. As such, we attract impact capital with that company, which is still operating now. It's growing and expanding. We raised different types of investments of impact capital, basically. We raised money from some of the well-known impact investors such as Acumen. We raised different instruments, including equity, debt, convertibles, and grant money from governments such as USAP, FCO, and the US. Another company is operating in two countries in West Africa, supporting 10,000 farmers, and we have around 200 employees. I was the CEO until last year. Meanwhile, I started up a second social enterprise, which is called Free Will. That's how I got to meet Luis Javier and his team. It's focused on internet connectivity for the rural poor in Latin America, not in Africa. So, I'm back in Latin America and based in Colombia now. This is a company that looks to make money but has a social goal at its core, which is to narrow the productivity level. That's more or less my background. I actually studied economics. I'm a CFA charterholder, also in finance. So, yeah, learning about telco and agriculture on the side as well.

It's amazing to hear about all the different projects you've worked on and how you moved into the space industry. This leads me to my next question: what does creating impact mean to you?

I believe that the theme of impact is about reducing human suffering and supporting the thriving of nature. For me, these are the two core elements. In terms of reducing suffering, I think that addressing poverty and hunger are key. The two projects I mentioned earlier focus on these issues: the agriculture project in West Africa addresses hunger and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid, while the internet connectivity project aims to provide equal opportunities for older people who are poor. As for nature, we believe that agriculture has a massive environmental footprint and we need to do better. This applies not only to big companies that harm the environment, but also to smallholder farmers who need to protect their soil and environment.

Of course, the concept of impact can mean different things to different people. Some may see it as being important for human development, beyond just reducing suffering. There is value in that as well.

It's important to involve local communities and collaborate with different parties to create a multiplier effect and make a larger impact. Can you provide an example of a project where you were able to do this successfully? What made this project fascinating or memorable for you, and what did it mean to you?

Now, I believe that local communities always need to be involved. Naturally, the degree of involvement also depends on the type of project. For example, when we work with smallholder farmers in West Africa, there is strong involvement from the local communities. This is because farming is something they have been doing for generations, and we are just suggesting a few changes to their practices in order to improve them. We are trying to bridge the local and indigenous expertise with technologies and expertise from other sources, and make it available to everyone. However, I think that more than anything, the communities need to determine their priorities and what they want for themselves. They are fully empowered entities and outsiders sometimes forget that. We think we know it all and impose solutions that might not align with the community's goals. Therefore, interactions are very important. It is gratifying and fascinating to see when there is a good correlation between what we are trying to achieve and what the community is trying to achieve. Magic happens when the dreams of both sides are aligned.

Great to hear! Let me share my screen with you. I need your help to map out all the collaborators in the ecosystem. I would like you to walk me through an example of a project you've worked on. It could be the current internet connectivity project or a former project. It would be helpful if you could discuss the people you collaborated with, their roles, and the challenges you faced during the collaboration.

Okay, sure. Let's focus on the one that may be more mature. It's been 10 years. Well, I think there are local communities. We collaborated with the local committees, and within the local communities, there are very different levels now. So, I think I will also look at disaggregating how the local communities function. This is also relevant to understand how they make decisions now. Typically, there is one leader, the former leader of the community, who is called the parliament chief, depending on the country. This person usually has almost total power over his or her community, typically his community. Below him, there are other specific leaders, such as a youth leader, a women's group leader, and elder leaders. Each of these has an influence on different groups. It's important to understand how these dynamics work if we are truly trying to distil what the local community is. Maybe going back to a higher level, definitively, government is an important piece. Civil society, meaning mostly NGOs or even multilaterals like UN organizations, plays an important role. Investors are not the only ones involved, but the whole finance system is operating there. For example, there are many times microfinance institutions that are local banks or community banks that are very important in that context. Community banks are typically very small banks that are in villages. For example, there are also saving groups that are very popular in rural Africa. They are called social sponsoring groups. Another important role is played by donors, mostly donors, in order to provide blended capital or technical assistance, depending on the context. Universities and research institutions are also sources of knowledge and talent, especially for the agricultural part of that.

Let’s identify the different responsibilities of each collaborator.

In terms of finances, investors and donors would likely be responsible for providing funding, while promoters would be responsible for promoting the project.

Sorry, you know, one thing, because I've done, is putting us as the social enterprise or the company or whatever, as one of the players, but maybe we need to add that they are not so private. Yeah, social. Yeah. Yeah. Because then, for example, fundraising is something that both civil society societies and social enterprises do. So obviously, it's different for different resources, but both fundraise. I think that strategy also goes into the same people. I would vote for policy rather than strategy for government. Maybe start off with strategy, not for the government.

Then I think, yeah, it's about finding opportunities. I think this applies to all universities because if they fail to do so, they are missing out on generating knowledge and providing students with the same opportunities. I believe it's clear that 31 is actively seeking opportunities.

What other project management is typically done by either governments, civic societies, or social enterprises, I would say mostly depends on society, civil society. But yeah, tracking progress.

Tracking progress is mostly done by a few organizations, such as civic societies, social enterprises, and governments. However, universities may be missing from this equation, as they could conduct research on the topic.

Do you think they are monitoring progress? Or are they tracking different metrics? Do you believe that they are monitoring similar progress?

Oh no, clearly they look at and track different things in different ways, sometimes in the same sphere, in the sense that we are all somehow guided by the 17 SDGs. But each of us tracks that in a different way. So, logically, the government tracks progress according to their policy, while civic societies or other organizations track progress according to what their donors are asking for. Social enterprises track progress according to a combination of what they can do and their theory of change. They may follow different indicators depending on several variables, such as the SRI or their own indicators, or they may follow the SDGs. I think that's really valuable. What's important is how they follow SSRIs, right? Yes.

Okay, that's helpful to know. When it comes to promotion, which group or players do you think took on that role the most?

I think promotion is something that civic societies, social enterprises, and investors do a lot, each in their own way. Sometimes the government is also involved in promotion, as they try to attract other people to invest or engage in other activities. So, they have agencies to attract investments and other related activities. I would say that the government also engages in promotion.

And then the last two, which are finances and reporting.

Sure. You can skip both social enterprises and civic societies because if they do participate, it is likely through an MFI (microfinance institution) or similar entity. Therefore, it is okay to focus solely on social enterprises. That approach is working.

What about reporting? How do you differentiate between reporting and tracking progress? Is there a difference in your opinion?

Yeah, I mean, tracking is the action of following certain metrics, whatever they may be, and reporting is the act of translating that into a document for a third party. So tracking can be for internal or external purposes, and reporting can also be for internal or external purposes. I think that basically reporting is the result of tracking. Without tracking, there could be reporting, but it's not as effective. So I really want that reporting. I mean, investors, social enterprises, universities, and the government, in my opinion.

Okay. When it comes to collaboration, which part do you find most challenging based on your experience?

I think there are many challenges. One is the coordination of all these very different stakeholders, each of whom has very different thermal incentive mechanisms and their own agenda. While their overall objective might be similar, it's not necessarily the same at a granular level. Each stakeholder has their own agenda, which is hard to coordinate. Social enterprises tend to be leaner and faster, but they need to interact with government bureaucracies or the UN, which oversee them due to the amount of resources they manage and the accountability they have for their funds. This can lead to clashes in terms of speed and efficiency of execution. With investors, there is sometimes a challenge in understanding the local context and translating it, especially for foreign investors. Interacting with local communities can be tough due to cultural differences and different expectations. Local communities might expect more than what is realistic, and this disappointment can be challenging in execution. These are just a few challenges; I could talk for hours about them.

Yeah, I recall, like, one of the earlier comments you had was about alignment. So, in your view, how can we get all these different people with different agendas aligned to do something together and collaborate?

I think the main challenge, in addition to realignment, is the way each of these organizations operates. Now, because we are a social enterprise, we can make a decision on Monday morning and be executing on Monday afternoon. That same decision might take one month at an NGO, six months in the UN, or two years in government. So, that disparity, that asymmetry in the decision-making process, makes it very hard, even if we don't have the same objective. I think that maybe it's about placing a lot more emphasis on the executional level and assigning responsibility to different parties in that sense. If it's a matter of execution and going fast, social enterprises can use external capital, and maybe government and donors can help with the risks or the costs of doing this, or scale it up with different types of financial instruments. However, when NGOs or governments focus on implementation, with a very different set of incentives, things start getting more challenging. So, I think it's a matter of optimizing who does what, taking into consideration our general goal, which I think is the easy part. I don't think that's the toughest part. I think it's a lot more complicated on the coordination and execution than on agreeing that we need to produce more food, eat better, more sustainably protect the soil. We all agree on those elements. But, going to the ground and actually doing it is the tough thing in my opinion.

Looking at the map, I realized that there's a part missing, which is the private sector. How do you see the private sector playing a part in this ecosystem?

Oh, precisely. I mean, the private sector is, in my opinion, a creator of innovation and knowledge execution. So I think that the private sector plays a very important role. I believe that the private sector depends a lot more on our stakeholders than what we typically want to accept. So we do depend a lot more on the government, social enterprises, and the private sector in general. Therefore, I think that the private sector depends a lot on government or existing structures and knowledge in order to be able to execute. What the private sector brings to the table is the speed of execution and the generation of ideas and innovations. In my opinion, those are the two main things that the private sector brings to the table.

Can you share how the collaboration in the farming project works?

I am sorry, my Wi-Fi dropped, so I connected from my phone. I apologize for that. So, yeah, I was saying that in certain niches, constantly. So, where were we? For us, it was focusing on the farmers and what we wanted to achieve in terms of impact. We knew it very clearly: we wanted to control our practices and reduce poverty or increase our incomes. So, it was very clear. Then, it was finding out who is aligned with these objectives and trying to pull resources and knowledge to execute on this mission. First, we would go to a place, a community, or a village, interact with the local communities, see if they would be interested in what we wanted to do, and if yes, this is a community in which we will execute whatever we're trying to do. That's on the execution front, and then on the other side, we will try to figure out who is willing to finance this and support this, from where we could pull knowledge, which is typically from research institutes, local, regional, and international, where we could pull money, either from impact investors or dollars, and what is it that the government was looking for more than anything, to be able to get what we wanted. So, not necessarily direct support, but more than anything, to be left alone to do what we wanted to. In some cases, we did interact with NGOs or different multilateral or UN agencies, for very specific things. In some cases, we did execute some of these projects together with an NGO. But in some other cases, we would ask them to help us in one specific element of whatever we were executing. We are believers that some private sectors have the right set of incentives to execute properly and fast, but we are also quite aware that when the challenge is big, there have to be different parties involved. We were always very open to playing with other stakeholders in this sense.

And then we sort of wrangled with the details to see who was aligned with our objectives. We looked at it from a financial perspective and tried to figure out where we could pull resources to execute on this. So we went to donors and investors and created a social enterprise. We believe we can execute these plans fairly well and maintain financial sustainability, but we also recognize the risks involved. That's why we went to donors to learn how to reduce the cost of capital or the risk of the capital. We also made sure that we were aligned with the government or any other entities that could help us achieve our goals. In some cases, we executed specific plans with NGOs or the city's civil society in general. In terms of impact, we are currently supporting more than 10,000 farmers, helping them increase their incomes significantly, and in some cases, up to three times their original income. This generates millions of dollars worth of social return on investment. At the same time, we are helping farmers adopt better cultural practices to protect the soil, reduce their carbon footprint, and produce more from the same piece of land. Otherwise, they would destroy it.

Great, thank you so much. I'm a little bit conscious of your time, so I'll ask my last question. If you had a magic wand, how would you use it to create positive impacts and improve collaboration between people? Additionally, how would you apply it to improve governance models?

It's tough to say because I think that success is basically a matter of many, many small things working together. So, if I have to choose only one thing, for me, the most important thing is to ensure that everyone is authentic in pursuing their goals. In other words, to eliminate corruption and hidden agendas, so that if we say we are going to work for A, we are all aligned in working for A and that's the only thing that matters. I believe that authenticity in objectives will make societies a lot more coherent. For instance, if you are living in Copenhagen, you have a society that is very authentic with what they want to achieve, and it's a functioning society. There are a lot fewer hidden moves around us.

What would help people to be more authentic in this context?

But I think it's also related, maybe, to the level of fulfillment that an individual and society have. In a way, the least developed societies have more need for themselves, and each individual is trying to maximize their own well-being and secure it for themselves and their families. I'm oversimplifying, obviously, and this is much deeper. I'm not an expert on this, but from my observations in less developed societies, people need to maximize their own well-being. The higher we are, the more we look beyond ourselves and our families, and the more we look at our communities, provinces, countries, and the world, the higher the level of authenticity we will achieve. It's not a coincidence that the ones who look more into the world are the ones that have fewer basic needs. If your family is hungry, that's the only thing you will care about, and that's logical. This is also true at a societal level.

Great! Thank you so much for your time. It was helpful to hear you map out all the different players for us. It was also interesting to learn how many different groups play overlapping roles, such as project management, tracking progress, and reporting. Do you have any questions for us?

I'm happy to help pay any fee if you need it down the line. So I'm out to try, and if you need me, yeah, I will be looking forward to reading what you guys come up with. That's why I think that Luis Javier and his team are going to keep in touch.

For sure. We would love to stay in touch with you for any follow-up questions that might arise. We will also keep you informed about the progress of the research and share its outcome with you. Thank you so much for your time today, and we apologize for any technical issues

Okay, that's helpful to know. Can you help us understand the interrelationship between all these entities? For example, can you give us a project that you have worked on that involves all these different groups?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot, but it depends on the level of involvement of each party in the different projects I'm involved in. I'm comparing two projects, and the government is always involved, either passively or actively. There are policies that regulate the industry, and there may be incentives or obligations that are typically dictated by the government. So logically, the government can play a passive role, or it can promote X, Y, and Z activities, and we are a much more active player in the execution of that project. In my experience, the government has typically been more passive, guiding foreign policy or setting general objectives for other organizations to focus on. What we're meant to do also has a strong influence on how civic society and donors spend money. Typically, the government will influence donors on how to spend money, and then donors will put that money into civic society. Social enterprises are more independent because they do not depend on donors but investors. Investors influence what social enterprises do because if we want to raise money, we need to adjust to what investors are focusing on. The government also influences universities, particularly the research element. In the sense that universities or research institutes may or may not be part of the university, good research can feed into government policy.

And then, local communities will influence and be influenced by my civil societies, social enterprises, and government. So, I think I would draw a double-way arrow, indicating that both influence each other. I would also add Ormand here, as they are constituents of the government and the government also influences local communities. As for investors, if we consider foreign investors, I would say that they are not influenced by local policy as much. So, I think they are a little bit like in their own box with their own objectives, and they are more influenced by other global factors.

And, you know, if whatever is happening locally aligns with what they are looking for, then they come in. If not, they just go to the next place. That's it.

And when the UN or NGOs work, they influence local communities. They have a bit of power, but I think that's okay.