Mah SIDIBEis Malian CBA, agent for seed sales and grain aggregation, from the village of Sénou, in the district of Dioïla, Koulikoro region.
She is playing the role of and CBA-agrodealer. Since 2018, she benefited from AGRA supportive trainings on Good Agronomic Practices related to new technologies.
The achievements of targeted crops production before versus after trainings are as follow :
NAIROBI, Mar 6 2021 (IPS) – The COVID-19 pandemic is arguably one of the biggest disruptors to modern day life as we know it. The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating; millions of people have lost their lives, tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty and nearly half of the global work force is at risk of losing their livelihoods. Africa is facing its first economic recession in 25 years due to the impact of the pandemic.
In a continent where agriculture accounts for 23% of the GDP and about 40% of the workforce is engaged in the sector, agriculture has not been spared from the worst impacts of the pandemic.
Border closures, trade restrictions and confinement measures have been preventing farmers from accessing inputs such as seeds and fertilizers, markets and agricultural workers from harvesting crops, thus disrupting domestic and international food supply chains and reducing access to healthy, safe and diverse diets.
Through all this, about 50% of the global population has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, women.
The pandemic has exacerbated existing structural economic, social, and technological inequalities that women face as they struggle to perform their multiple roles in society. These inequalities undermine women’s capacity to respond and recover from the disruptions that result from the pandemic. Women are a key pillar in the Africa’s food and agricultural systems.
They constitute 50% of the agricultural workforce and own one-third of the small and medium enterprises (SME’s) that produce, process and trade in agricultural products and services. The pandemic not only affected their livelihoods and agri business enterprises, but also increased women’s workloads, threatened their families’ wellbeing, and increase incidences of gender-based violence.
As we commemorate the International Women’s Day this year, we are acutely aware that as the narrative now shifts to building back better, we must ensure that women are at the center of short term and longer term recovery efforts to create a more equal and resilient society.
Over the course of my career as an agricultural economist and development practitioner and, I have seen the change that can be realized when women receive the support, they need during times such as these. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the power of interventions designed for and targeted to women in agriculture that can help protect their lives and livelihoods in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
African governments need to design and support such interventions. This means providing avenues for continued access to inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization and advisory services. It also means women accessing knowledge and skills to make best outcome of their labour inputs.
As economies open after months of lockdowns and restricted movement, access to financing, grants for those that closed due to pandemic and flexible loans for those that kept going albeit in a small way- is key for recovery. Accessing high value markets is an important factor, not only for recovery, but for higher incomes that help build financial resilience in women’s agri-enterprises.
During the pandemic, digital services have provided a crucial lifeline for businesses. Women business managers have used social media to market their products while accessing information on production, weather and agronomic advisories, finacing and accessing markets. Deploying digital capacity building at scale and increasing women entrepreneurs’ participation in the digital economy through digital finance, digital marketing and digital trade is key as we rebuild economies.
Initiatives such as VALUE4HER, a platform whose aim is to increase incomes and employment opportunities for women by linking women-led agribusinesses with competitive high value regional and global markets, and improving women business leader’s technical and managerial skills, with training on market dynamics are key to growing women-owned agribusinesses further.
Currently hosting over 750 users from 36 countries across the continent, the platform provides real-time access to relevant knowledge, market information, buyers, financiers, business development services, technical assistance, capabilities and social networks.
These services hosted under one roof provide a conducive ecosystem for female owned agribusinesses to access the tools they need to become profitable businesses.
Also key is providing tailored training and capacity building for women to respond, recover, and build resilience. With low literacy levels and limited networks, women’s access to relevant information and support mechanisms is curtailed.
Programs such as the African Resilience Investment Series for Women Executives (ARISE), which AGRA kicks off today in celebration of international women’s day- seeks to equip women-owned and women-led SMEs with the necessary tools and practical management skills, needed to recover from the impact of COVID-19 pandemic.
Across the globe, it has been inspiring to see prior investments in empowering women-led agribusiness begin to pay off—and that the measures have enabled women farmers to contribute to the fight against COVID-19. This could be the case for Africa too. Investing in women makes good business sense; it leads to increased incomes for women and boosts the wellbeing of their families, which means better lives for families, communities and society as a whole.
Sabdiyo Dido is the Head of Gender and Inclusiveness at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
Africa needs to take full advantage of its close-ties and cooperation with China, in terms of technology transfer, skills and policy development, to fully revolutionize its agricultural sector, according to an agricultural expert.
Andrew Cox, Chief of Staff and Strategy at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said there are many lessons the continent can draw from China in its bid to transform the sector and change the lives of its people.
“Because of China’s experience in transforming the entire country around agriculture, we want to see China’s experience, its knowledge, its investment, its technical expertise to come through everywhere,” Cox said.
The fact that the people who spearheaded the agricultural revolution in China are still alive and working, he added, was a crucial advantage for Africa to capitalize on.
Cox said China’s claim it has eliminated absolute poverty while encouraging industrialization and urbanization and still transforming its rural and agricultural sector is an “extraordinarily important” example worth following for Africa.
Promotion of agricultural and rural development, as well as poverty eradication in developing countries, especially in Africa, has always been a priority of China’s foreign aid.
“If China can do it for a billion-plus people, then, certainly, there are many lessons, practices, experiences which can apply to the African continent,” he said, noting that China and Africa had walked the same pathway in the same century.
AGRA, Cox said, is interested in escalating the partnership between China and Africa to make it relevant to millions of farmers rather than focusing on individual and small projects.
AGRA is part of a number of agricultural-based partnerships and projects involving China, including a highly successful venture in Mozambique which supports rice production. Cox said this was a prime example of applying Chinese knowledge and technology and adapting it to a situation in Africa.
“Using Chinese know-how combined with African partners made it possible to double the rice yields over a fairly short period of time and that is the kind of thing that we want to see,” Cox said.
Such results mean Mozambique could potentially tackle a rice shortfall it usually experiences of between an estimated 400,000 and 600,000 tonnes.
In 2018, a study by the UN revealed China’s agricultural foreign assistance projects have resulted in increased food production and income for smallholder farmers in Mozambique, as well as Guinea.
“African farmers want to see themselves transformed from subsistence agriculture to small and medium-sized farms, at the very least, and to see large-scale commercial initiatives starting to work better. It means giving African farmers access to the same opportunities and choices that farmers in China, the U.S. or Europe might have.”
“It (AGRA involvement in China-Africa partnerships) has been a very deep partnership with excellent results. We want to see it go big. We want to see Chinese knowledge and expertise applied on a wide scale across the continent.”
The growth of Africa’s agriculture also represents a win-win situation for both China and Africa as China, already Africa’s second-largest importer of agricultural products, continues to increase its agricultural imports from the continent.
A report from China’s Ministry of Commerce in January revealed Chinese imports of agricultural products from African countries expanded 4.4 percent year on year in the first 11 months of 2020, marking four consecutive years of positive growth.
Despite Africa’s food security coming under threat recently, particularly in the last year, Cox said the future of the continent’s agricultural sector, with China’s assistance, was not one doomed to repeated failures and crises.
“At AGRA, we are extremely optimistic that Africa’s agriculture can transform. It will not, probably, transform by itself and that is where these partnerships come in. The tremendous scale of the achievement of the Chinese experience shows that hundreds of millions of people can be taken out of poverty by getting the right kind of investments, policies and enabling environment for agriculture,” he said.
“This is what Africa needs, that is where the partnership is going.”
He, however, cautioned that such a transformation will take time and not happen in the space of a couple of years.
With China taking a leading role in preparing for the UN Food Systems Summit later this year, Cox believes an opportune moment to seriously review the workings of Africa’s food systems should be seized upon.
“That shared experience and partnership that we are seeing, including through AGRA, means Chinese support will be extremely helpful in preparing African governments to think about the kinds of food systems, the kinds of resilience that we need to see, especially in the face of climate change.”
Agriculture is the economic mainstay of the majority of households in Rwanda and makes a significant contribution to the Rwanda’s economy. It accounts for approximately 30% of the GDP and is the biggest employer.
In all development blueprints, agriculture is billed to play a significant role to the structural transformation of the economy, contributing to economic growth, exports, job creation, increased land and labour productivity.
However, the sector is still developing in most of all aspects including its seed system and product market. Yet, the national ambition is toshift agriculture from its current predominantly subsistence nature to a market-led sector.
The seed system and product market is one of those critical factors still developing for sustainability to support sector transformation that has to be private sector led as envisioned in The Strategic Plan for Agriculture Transformation 4 (PSTA 4).
Thanks to the fact that AGRA approach in Rwanda centers on investing technical and financial resources to create a functional and strong seedsystem in Rwanda and extension services to raise farmer awareness on use of improved seeds.
Founded in 2006, AGRA is a farmer-centered, Africanled, partnerships-driven institution that is working to transforming smallholder farming from a solitary struggle to survive to a business that thrives.
It aspires to modernize agriculture sector on the African continent by mainly making it market-driven and a data-based sector which will play an important role in the development of the countries on the continent, Rwanda inclusive.
This way, AGRA is committed to catalyze the economic development, wealth creation, hunger reduction and nutrition through inclusive agriculture transformation. And, its goals are aligned very well with Strategic Development Goals, Malabo Declaration, African Agenda 2063, and fall under Rwanda priorities to transform agriculture as stated in PSTA4.
As the world gradually adapts to a post-pandemic reality, policies will need to be developed and implemented to ensure that no one is left behind. Agriculture accounts for at least 23 per cent of Africa’s GDP, policies and investments that strengthen resilient farming systems will be pivotal to sustaining growth. Dr. Apollos Nwafor, Vice President for Policy and State Capability weighs in in a recent interview with CNBC.
AGRA has kicked off the celebrations of 2021 international women’s day by a series of in -country VALUE4HER networking and advocacy events. These events promote interactions among women companies, markets actors and other public and development actors for better understanding of needs and opportunities. The first in country event started in Kenya on March 2nd 2021.
“In the next four weeks, we are going to hold similar networking events in all our 11 focus countries where women entrepreneurs in agribusiness can interact and share experiences with their colleagues and other players in the industry under the banner VALUE4HER,” said Vanessa Adams, AGRA’s Vice President for Strategic Partnerships, and Chief of Party, PIATA.
VALUE4HER is a platform whose aim is to increase incomes and employment opportunities for women by linking women-led agribusinesses with competitive high value regional and global markets, and improving women business leader’s technical and managerial skills, with training on market dynamics, to grow their agribusinesses further.
“You cannot make a change single handedly,” said Adams. “You need networks, coalitions, partnerships and movements to make an impact,” she added.
Mary Onsongo, the Senior Project Management Specialist, Office of Economic Growth and Integration (OEGI) at the USAID said that the VALUE4HER was a great milestone and an important resource. “Through this network, we are making our voices heard,” she said noting that there are 779 women-led agribusinesses that are already registered on the platform.
“The Africa Continental Free Trade Area is expanding opportunities for all Africans, and as African women, we will not miss out on these opportunities to advance women empowerment,” said Onsongo.
She noted that USAID has been working with the government of Kenya and other countries around the world to develop the agriculture sector through the Feed the Future initiative. “We have worked with different organizations to improve food security and reduce malnutrition and clearly, women have always been the cornerstone of these efforts,” she said.
According to Sabdiyo Dido, the Head of Gender and Inclusiveness at AGRA, there is need to build a one-stop-shop for women entrepreneurs across the African continent. “We are hoping to create a movement around this to amplify the voice of women in agriculture and agribusiness so as to address constraints they face in terms of environmental perspective, gender, policy and legislative perspectives,” she said.
She noted that the meeting in Nairobi was the first step in an effort to bring the VALUE4HER platform to country levels, to local partners, financing institutions among other important players in the agribusiness sector.
Anne Nyaga, the Chief Administrative Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Cooperatives thanked AGRA for driving an initiative that seeks to amplify the efforts of women by bridging gaps that hinder them from becoming the people they are supposed to be. “We can’t achieve food and nutrition security, which is one of the pillars of the President’s Big 4 Agenda without addressing challenges that face women and mostly smallholder farmers in general,” she said. “These collective partnerships cannot be overemphasized.”
–END–
For more information, please contact: Ms. Sabdiyo Dido, Head of Gender and Inclusiveness, AGRA at sdido@agra.org
About
VALUE4HER
VALUE4Her is AGRA’s continental program aimed at assisting women grow their agribusinesses through access to markets, capital, skills and capacities and business information and intelligence services.
Established in 2006, AGRA is an African-led and Africa-based institution that puts smallholder farmers at the center of the continent’s growing economy by transforming agriculture from a solitary struggle to survive into farming as a business that thrives.
Together with our partners, we catalyse and sustain inclusive agriculture transformation to increase the incomes and improve food security for 30 million farming households in 11 African countries by 2021.
Martha Murugi Thuo is a Village Based Advisor/ Agro-dealer (VBA/VBAD) from Gathanje Village, Githunguri Sub County in Kiambu County, Kenya. Through AGRA supported program, she was recruited as a VBA in 2019, trained and given maize sample seeds for demonstrations. Through utilizing the knowledge acquired during the training, she has seen a remarkable change in her maize yields from 45kgs to 315kgs in a 0.125 acreage of land thus improving food security in her household. She has also started an agro-dealer shop where she serves farmers with her village and beyond by selling to them appropriate maize varieties for their area. Her average income from sale of surplus maize is KES 4,500 and the average proceeds from her agro-dealer shop is approximately KES 12,500 per season. She is looking forward to enlarging her shop and serving more farmers by selling to them appropriate inputs while constantly training them on GAPs.
Rosemary (58), based in Mzuzu, Northern Region of Malawi distributes fertilizers, seeds, chemicals and plans to add hardware stuff to her list. She started around 2010 with a capital of $700 (K500,000) which enabled her order an initial 10 bags of fertilizer. She had one employee only at the time and was involved full time in the day to day running of the business. She says now, she has more than 5 staff and everything runs smoothly even when away. Seed companies discovered the potential in Rose and gave advance supplies to her to sell on their behalf for the initial years. She was getting the seed supply at wholesale and retailing to farmers. She was later connected to AFAP (Maria Wanzala), an implementing partner funded by AGRA through the Agro Dealers Association of Malawi which she belongs to. In the process of working with AFAP, Rose was introduced to AGRA which has helped her appreciate the importance of working with an extension worker who she says she cannot do without now. She started going into the villages to organize groups in 2018 supported by the extension worker who is paid through part of the AGRA funding.
Some of the groups formed were women only and some mixed. The groups became so loyal to her and now there are about 24 of them which save towards purchase of inputs from her annually. Some of the VSLAs/Village Banks deposit money with her much ahead of the start of the agriculture season and the fertilizer gets delivered to them just before the season commences.
Fertilizer is a very important input prioritized by farmers in Malawi and those that are able to access this timely, get an assurance of adequate food production and extra for sale as long as rains fall reliably. Rose sold 1,000 fertilizer bags by the time she was visited in November 2020. By the end of the 2020/21 input distribution season, Rose has sold 1,000 MT (20,000 bags: 50% NPK, 50% Urea) against half of this (10,000 bags) that she sold previous season. She bought NPK fertilizer at a wholesale price of K18,500/50kg bag and Urea at K20,000/bag. She sold both NPK and Urea at K21,500/bag under the Affordable Inputs Program (AIP). This has translated into a total revenue of US$573,333.33 (MwK430m) and a profit of US$40,000 (K30m) for NPK fertilizer and US$20,000 (K15m) for Urea. T
otal profit for NPK and Urea fertilizer sales for 2020/21 season is US$60,000 (K45m). The doubling of her sales has been due to her being selected and trusted as one of the private distributors of this year’s government Affordable Inputs Program.
A few of the agro dealer hub owners supported by AGRA were selected under this program, demonstrating their growth. Rose also distributed 2,400 bags fertilizer donated by YARA under the Action Africa Agenda.
She has built a larger shop that can handle 2,000 – 3,000 bags, no longer renting as in the past. She has bought 3HA of land where she plans to build a large warehouse using profits from her fertilizer sales this season. She also bought a personal vehicle and plans to purchase a lorry to help in her input distribution. She has been hiring lorries to deliver to groups but will now cut on this, which is one of her largest costs. Rose has 30,000 customers currently with 17 shops spread across the 5 districts in Northern Malawi. 5 are permanent and 12 are seasonal.
Grace Yohana is an agrodealer in Maraban Rido community in Chikun Local Government Area, Kaduna State Nigeria. Through AGRA training and extension support she developed the skills and was linked to input suppliers in 2019. Utilizing those skills/support, she increased her revenue/income from N150,00 (USD 389) to N450,000 (USD1165) in 2020. Today, she boasts of multiple streams of income and better nutrition for the family from the poultry farm she invested in.
Agnes Kalibata has led the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2014
A child of refugee parents, she became a highly acclaimed agricultural scientist
She says female scientists must be hardworking and ‘do the hard stuff’
[NAIROBI] Agnes Kalibata, a Rwandan who grew up in Uganda with refugee parents, had an ambition to become a medical doctor or an engineer.
But as her father turned from teaching to farming to fund his children’s education, little did Kalibata know she would end up being an agricultural scientist.
Now, as president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) since 2014, Kalibata is helping to transform Africa’s agricultural sector through programmes designed to reach millions of smallholders.
In 2012 she won the Yara Food Prize – now the Africa Food Prize – in 2012, and in 2019 the US-based National Academy of Sciences awarded her the prestigious Public Welfare Medal “for her work to drive Africa’s agricultural transformation through modern science and effective policy, helping to lift more than a million Rwandans out of poverty”.
“Be prepared to work hard but also be prepared to do the hard stuff.”
Agnes Kalibata, AGRA president
Kalibata tells SciDev.Net that girls and young women in Africa who aspire to be scientists should be prepared not only to work hard but to do the “hard stuff”.
Tell us about your childhood
I grew up in Uganda to refugee parents. Even though my dad had been a teacher in Rwanda, the only thing he could do as a refugee in Uganda was to farm. He was determined to see that his children got better out of life than he did.
As I grew older, I developed a habit for reading, especially in my secondary school where I got to see a library for the first time. This helped me understand that there was a whole other world around me.
Building on my parents’ efforts, I got best student scholarship for secondary education from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) and later obtained a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study for a master’s at Makerere University in Uganda and then a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States.
How did your journey as a scientist and policymaker begin?
When I finished my first degree at Uganda’s Makarere University, I joined the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) at the Kawanda Agricultural Research Institute in Uganda as a research assistant. For my master’s, my work was focused on natural control of a major pest of bananas, a major staple crop in Uganda.
“We have built the African Green Revolution Forum into a continental platform that brings policymakers, scientists, farmers and business leaders together.”
Agnes Kalibata, AGRA president
This work continued into my doctorate. I worked on understanding the crop, the pest and biological control options. I traced the banana plant back to its area of origin. From Uganda to Indonesia, Tanzania, Thailand and Vietnam. By doing research on farmers’ plots in each of these countries, I was able to establish why the banana weevil was a pest in Uganda but not a pest in the area of its origin in South East Asia where it was under the control of natural enemies.
I cut my postdoctoral work [on banana bacteria wilt] short when I got an opportunity to go to Rwanda and lead a World Bank rural development project in the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources. That was the beginning of my shift from being a scientist to development work and later to policymaking.
How did you become Rwanda’s minister of agriculture and animal resources?
I held a few positions in Rwanda at the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources before I became a minister from 2008 to 2014.
When I was appointed to lead the agricultural ministry, I had a lot of support from the president and the government. This gave me an opportunity to combine and to apply the scientific and technical knowledge I had acquired to work with the whole of government and marshal partnerships that enabled us to move from a country where people went to bed hungry to a food self-sufficient nation in a period of five years.
Because of that, Rwanda is significantly food secure and was able to significantly reduce poverty. Farmers’ yields increased and poverty reduced by 12 per cent in the same period.
What are your achievements as president of AGRA?
AGRA was designed to help African farmers use scientific knowledge and technologies to improve their lives: increase access to improved varieties, access to soil fertility management and understanding the policy environment where agriculture can thrive and enhance access to markets.
Coming from government, I saw the opportunity to help AGRA understand how governments work and how they could be leveraged.
I am proud of how AGRA has worked with its partners to reduce duplication of resources under what we call the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation. This partnership aims to support country-owned plans and reduce fragmentation of donors on the ground, which is a long-standing problem that compromises the speed of delivery of development outcomes.
We have worked with the private sector and moved into new geographies where farmers never had access to yield improving technologies such as improved varieties, and the information on how best to manage these inputs. We have been building platforms for scale with the private sector that allow a whole new group of farmers to be reached by partnering with local governments and local private sector.
We have built the African Green Revolution Forum into a continental platform that brings policymakers, scientists, farmers and business leaders together, and profiles the agriculture sector and its importance on the African continent.
What other achievements have you had as a female scientist in Africa?
I sit on many boards where I bring not only the African perspective on development issues that impact agriculture on the continent. Whenever I can, I mentor young people. Personally, I take it as a responsibility to support young people – especially women — to help them understand that they have a huge place and an important role to play in the world.
Currently, I am also working as a special envoy of the UN secretary-general for the 2021 Food Systems Summit. This role is a huge responsibility but it is an opportunity to drive things I care about: ending hunger and poverty, ending malnutrition, and dealing with climate change.
What advice do you have for girls and young women aiming to become scientists in Africa?
I didn’t start out trying to be a scientist. But now, with all the innovations and technologies around us, girls have an opportunity to actually dream about being a scientist. I see it with my eight-year-old daughter. She has exposure to technology in a way that I didn’t have growing up. She dreams of designing all the way from makeup to aeroplanes!
Agriculture today is not about killing pests like I thought back then. It’s about solving big problems – especially around climate change – gene editing, big data and many more.
Girls and young women, you are entering into a male-heavy territory. You need to develop some thick skin. Be prepared to work hard but also be prepared to do the hard stuff. Find something you care about enough because it’s going to be necessary to keep you going.
