Farm Founder Shares Story of Hope in the Congo
Educator visits Buena Vista University to share vision of ways in which agriculture can lend itself to security around the world.
Buena Vista University’s Institute for Agriculture joined BVU’s Ag Club and the Accounting and Business Association in hosting Morningside University Professor of Agribusiness Dr. Annie Kinwa-Muzinga on campus to share with students, faculty, staff, and members of the community information about agricultural developments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo).
“DR Congo is one of the richest countries in the world,” said Kinwa-Muzinga, who was born and raised there. “God has blessed us. And yet, you must ask yourself: ‘If God has blessed us so much, then why are 43 percent of our children malnourished? Why can we not do better than other countries?”
Answers are complicated in a country of 94.5 million people, a country that knows corruption, war, weak infrastructure, the pillaging of natural resources, and virtually no middle class. Ways ahead revolve around education and agriculture; topics that helped bring Kinwa-Muzinga to the U.S. decades ago.
“I was young and eager to take risks,” said Kinwa-Muzinga, who had a bachelor’s degree when she arrived in the U.S. “I came to this country in 1990 and I spoke French.” (She still speaks French, English, and three Congolese languages.)
She called her husband and told him she’d made a mistake by leaving home because of the unbearable cold she experienced in New York. He encouraged her to stay, become more educated, to grow with a vision of making this world better for her children and others.
During graduate school, she took an ag class and loved it. After earning her master’s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Now the mother of three and the grandmother of two, she’s been teaching agribusiness and business classes for two decades. One of her earliest undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville was Rich Crow, who serves as Director of BVU’s Institute for Agriculture.
“She’s an amazing teacher who always thinks first of the ways in which agriculture can solve security problems around the world,” Crow said.
To that end, Kinwa-Muzinga returned to the Congo in 2010 to research gender assessment in agriculture in DR Congo with the International Food Policy and Research Institute as a research consultant. While in the midst of interviewing at least 500 women, she came across a 12-year-old girl who was on the street at 10 p.m. She would learn that the girl, the daughter of a widow, had been forced into prostitution, a tragedy befalling thousands of widows and the women in their families.
Kinwa-Muzinga moved to act, acquiring 10 acres for 10 widows in 2013-14. She taught them about agriculture as they farmed by hand. The women grew in their independence. Soon, more widows joined the project, an effort that now serves 40 widows and 83 children, thanks to friends, former students, and members of New Hope Assembly of God of Platteville, Wis., who offer continual support.
“With those women and those children, we have the power to change lives,” she said. “I took baby steps with them on our ‘Hope Farm.’ Education is key. We must provide a way for women/young girls to attend school.”
While providing a means for each person to feed themselves and their families.
“I really enjoyed hearing about her background, and the risks she has taken,” said Peyton Schultz, a junior from Kiron who majors in accounting and business. “Dr. Kinwa-Muzinga did a great job explaining the minerals the country has and how we need those in our electronics, what we use every day is thanks to the Congo. I was dumbfounded hearing about how much potential the developing country has and how the corrupt government takes advantage of that.
“With Dr. Kinwa-Muzinga being a professor in ag economics, she made a point that I’ve learned in my courses here at BVU: Even though Congo has great farmland and can grow quality rice, it is going to be cheaper for the country to import it, and people will always go for the cheaper option,” Schultz concluded.
This kind of limited support for agriculture makes it difficult for a Congolese farmer to compete with a farmer in the U.S.
The challenge keeps Kinwa-Muzinga motivated to keep working with widows while raising awareness about her homeland and its rich soil, its potential for feeding and sustaining those who are there.
“These women (in DR Congo) are looking at me, at all of us,” she said. “That is my motivation as I am the vessel God has given them. Through Kivuvu (a word meaning “hope”) Farm, these women know they are not forgotten. It truly is a ‘Hope Farm.’”