The 100-Day goals
Five teams each set their own goal. The one that carried the story was Clean Milking: increase sales of grade A milk from a base of 600 gallons a day among small and medium producers in the León municipality. Others covered certified seed availability, demand-driven service contracts in the dry region of El Sauce, and two animal-feed trials, QPM and Marango.
The results
Three of the five teams completed their 100-day goals.
Clean Milking tripled grade A production, from 600 to 1,600 gallons a day. The dairy exporter agreed to buy the additional milk, new quality-checking procedures were adopted including centrifuge testing, and the cooperative took a loan to build a pasteurising facility.
The dry region team signed 180 service contracts with quality checks, exceeding both its co-financing target and its goal for women producers.
The seed exchange team reached 73% of seeds available in outlets by the target date.
QPM and Marango did not meet their goals. What they generated was momentum: on the strength of the QPM demonstration, 30,000 acres were set to be planted the following year.
Who did the work
Cross-institutional teams, most including representatives of the farmers they were meant to serve. Two Nicaraguan nationals, René Escoto and Margarita Argüello, worked as local capacity coaches, funded by the project through the World Bank and the Swiss Development Agency, leaning on modest weekly phone support from outside consultants. Two sector leaders, Noel Pallais and Julio Solórzano, drove the discipline, tag-teaming at progress reviews after starting the effort wary of each other. The work was championed within the Bank’s LCSES unit by Elsie Garfield, supported by Nadim Matta of Schaffer.
How they did it
The teams reached past their own institutions for what they needed. The Clean Milking team brought the country’s main milk exporter onto the team, and its engineers went out to the cooperatives to advise on process changes. The pig-feed team went to prison-run farms to demonstrate the feed’s nutritional value.
The harder change was inside the room. At the first workshop, 30 institutional representatives used the opening session to air their frustrations with each other and with the Bank, and dismissed the 100-day idea as a band-aid. The unspoken mood was “what’s the Bank up to now?” By the second workshop, with Bank staff deliberately minimal, teams had built their own goals and turned up with, in one participant’s words, a passion to pursue the goal their team had developed.
One member of the Clean Milking team, the son of a cattle rancher, described doubling the milk his cooperative sold, gaining a cash margin above what the family needed, and borrowing 100,000 córdobas against pasture land to build the pasteurising facility. A timber producer in his sixties said it was the first time in fifty years he had been asked what technical help he needed rather than told what to do.
What continues
At the wrap-up, the leadership group chose two initiatives to scale, and deliberately not by copying the original solutions into new regions. Instead they would challenge teams in new areas to build their own answers, with the first teams’ solutions offered as ideas rather than mandates. Four new themes were launched, including reintroducing sweet potato, a regional staple for centuries before rice imports displaced it, over Piccioni’s own doubt that it was feasible in 100 days.
