About

Hagush [ha-goo-sh]

Derived from the Tigrinya word hagos (ሓጎስ) meaning "happiness".

Hello World

Hagush is supporting small family farms across Sub-Saharan Africa. We are not your typical aid organization running a program for farmers; we are an enterprise building a repeatable engine to end extreme poverty — and we intend to go all out on the bet we're making. We won't be big and self-perpetuating. We are small, sharp, and determined to make a sizable dent in the issue at hand.

At Hagush, we have a bit of an obsession with figuring out what actually works.

The questions that motivate us stem from a glaring contradiction in modern international development: Why don't we invest in the single most effective lever for broad-based poverty reduction at scale, and instead tinker with solutions at the edges — leaving people just a little better off, a little less destitute, while transformational change remains stubbornly out of reach?

700 million people still live in extreme poverty, despite the fact that we have known, for decades, precisely what it takes to change that.

Is this inertia inevitable? No.
Are we doomed to ever more incremental progress? Also no.
Can we finally bet on what actually works? We absolutely will.

We created Hagush to build on what has worked in the past — and to be different from everything that hasn't. We want Hagush to be:

Effective

We bet on the single most effective lever for broad-based poverty reduction at scale: family farm-led development. Grassroots industrial policy is our starting point. We don't run ad hoc programs or single-point interventions and hope they add up to progress somewhere down the line; we start with the structural playbook that drove the fastest poverty reductions in human history.

Transformational, Not Incremental

We aim to close the yield and income gap African farmers face. It's been done before, and we can do it again. We are not here to graduate someone from $2.00 to $2.50 a day while funding lasts; we are determined to put farm families on a path to lasting prosperity.

Ultimately Redundant

We exist to solve a problem, build lasting local systems, and get out of the way. Our success isn't measured by how large our footprint becomes — it's measured by how fast we make ourselves obsolete.