RICHARD DAY - A GOOD MAN IN AFRICA

Obituary in the Manchester Guardian Newspaper, 26 July 1996.

Richard Day, who has died of a brain tumour aged 48, was a pioneer of the alternative trade movement, although he would have denied that what he was doing was anything so pretentious. On such a small scale, he said, it could not be seen as an alternative to the mainstream. For him, trading was one part of working with Third World farmers to strengthen their position in world markets. It was the partnership, in which the farmers' skills and the commercial skills of trading were married, that mattered.

Unfashionably in the 1970s and 1980s he believed that socialist and particularly cooperative organisations should be efficient as well as humane. Working in Africa for the fair trade organisations, Twin and Twin Trading, Day displayed a combination of skill, common sense and understanding.

He came from a Warwickshire farming family, which gave him a strong practical bent and some resistance to academic theory. After grammar school, he studied engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He then worked for Mather and Platt, a local engineering firm where he became an engineering union shop steward. He also became interested in Third World development and studied for water engineering qualifications, obtaining an MSc from Silsoe College.

His African experiences began when he worked as an irrigation engineer for the Mozambique government, shortly after its liberation from Portuguese colonial rule. He learned Portuguese and revealed a determination to test the organisation's skills, both in production and in marketing, against outside competition, with some success. Back in England, he was intimately involved in the founding of Twin and Twin Trading, which had Greater London Council funding for the first years of its operation. He became a development officer and then the director, but his influence on Twin's work was greater than any administrative position would indicate.

By carrying out water engineering consultancies in African countries, he established Twin's reputation for expertise. And by ensuring that Twin supplied appropriate equipment with technical back-up for its own and other aid projects in Mozambique, Senegal, Sahrawi and elsewhere, he gave Twin Trading a record of honest and efficient dealing. The London-based agencies providing relief in the Eritrean war said his advice was indispensable. His insistence on customised equipment for different situations was an innovation on a continent littered with abandoned, unsuitable equipment.

He worked with small-scale coffee farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and cocoa farmers in Ghana, producing for export. Not only did he establish commercially successful delivery systems, he also helped in the development of democratic village societies which took the marketing of their crops into their own hands. The success of KKL, the Ghanaian small farmers' company to which Day gave so much time, is a memorial to his work.

The basis of Richard Day's work was the creation of an "economy of trust" which could replace normal commercial practices of supervision and control. Failures were never an occasion for giving up and turning to another supplier, as most commercial firms would do, but for learning the lessons and working together to turn failure into success. This was no airy-fairy dream but a severely practical task, to which he brought his experience and innovative capacities.

In the last four years, he took an Open University course which led to an MBA, with distinctions, and which he regarded as an essential part of his work. All his MBA studies related to problems raised by his activities and so did the Manchester University development studies course on to which he subsequently enrolled.

Day would think his work had failed if the organisations he worked with could not survive without him. Yet all who knew him will miss his knowledge, wisdom, humour and comradeship. He leaves behind a partner and a much-loved son, Thomas.

Michael Barratt Brown

Richard Day, engineer and development expert, born April 23, 1948; died July 22, 1996.