AGRA

When you move into gender people ask you what’s the business case, why does it matter? The truth is, for a long time gender equality has been viewed as just a human rights imperative, but latterly women’s contribution to the global economy has been under scrutiny. In 2015 the McKinsey Global Institute came out with a report that looked at what would happen if we started to close the gender gap and gave women the same opportunities as men. They used a ‘best in region’ scenario, where all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest improving country in their region. They found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025.

Nowhere is the gender gap more striking than in African agriculture. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) did some analysis that showed because women have lower access to land, seed, fertiliser and mechanisation: married women receive 2% of extension services and as head of households this figure rises to 5%. Just from closing these input gaps productivity in women’s fields could be increased by 20 to 30%. That would immediately lift 180 million people out of hunger.

So now there are numbers next to it, there is a compelling business case for female focussed programmes. But directing that focus is important. AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy aims to unlock farming as a business for women. In the run-up to World Women’s Day on 8 March I want to look at how that differs from how we do it for men.

The end goal is the same – lift people out of poverty and give them a better life – but the pathway to doing it for women and men can be very different. Because we live in a gendered society a woman faces a different set of challenges as she goes about her daily business: she may not have the same mobility, sometimes a woman might not even be able to leave her home without permission from a man; she has huge time constraints, performing as much as four to six hours of extra work every day cooking, cleaning and looking after the children; she doesn’t have access to assets, she doesn’t own the land that she farms, so she can’t get credit and she doesn’t want to invest in the land because she doesn’t own it – why add nutrients to the soil when it’s not her land and could be taken off her at any time? These are a whole different set of challenges often not faced by men.

Women account for about 5-10% of business owners in cash value chains, mainly their participation is limited to working in the fields and they are often absent when the family’s farming produce is sold. More female-owned land may counter this, but land ownership is a complex issue to tackle. Concentrating on agri-businesses, higher up the value chain, is one pathway to women’s empowerment; if the business is off farm we avoid many of the gendered barriers at the household level. We’re trying to impact 30 million farmers and it is resource intensive to change the gender dynamics of millions of households, but if we can build agribusinesses owned by women, who in turn buy from other woman, we are going to see the benefits and opportunities. For this reason, AGRA’s women in agriculture strategy focusses on off-farm agribusinesses, as well as farming, interventions.

Of course, many of AGRA’s non female-focussed projects benefit women. Ghana’s TROTRO Tractor is a powerful platform that connects smallholder farmers and tractor operators. A bit like a tractor Uber service, when a smallholder farmer needs to plough they can summon a local tractor owner to come and do the job. The farmer gets the mechanisation when needed and the tractor owner makes full use of their asset. The interesting thing about this programme is that in a country where rural female land ownership is rare, nearly 25% of TROTRO Tractor users are women – a significantly higher uptake than would be expected considering the gender gap not just in land ownership, but also mobile phone access.

Policy also needs to play a role; almost all policy dialogue is between men. So, it’s important to get women into apex organisations who can represent the voice of women. But for them to be able to do that they need to be taught how. You can’t just drag any women off the farm and put her in a policy dialogue, she needs coaching; taught how to be an advocate, how to use evidence-based lobbying, how to be persuasive, and the confidence to conduct policy dialogue. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you have her and she can say “I represent 500,000 women smallholder farmers”, or “I represent most of the women doing cross-border trade in East Africa”, then they’ll give her a seat at the table.

So back to the McKinsey report and closing the gender gap. Using their ‘best in region’ scenario the uplift in GDP for sub-Saharan Africa is $300 billion by 2025. If you still need a reason for women inclusive projects, it’s right there.

Amanda Satterly, is the Head of Gender at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

More than three quarters of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa prepare their fields using back-breaking, antiquated hand hoes. According to Josefa Sacko Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture at the African Union Commission (AUC) “eliminating hunger and malnutrition in Africa by 2025 will be no more than a mirage unless mechanisation is accorded utmost importance.” For women it is even more important: drudgery, the extra four to six hours a day she spends cooking, cleaning and looking after children, is the number one thing that stops her making money in agriculture and anything that saves her time that can be spent doing something more profitable –  processing, adding value, buying and selling – means more cash in the family pot.

As we near International Women’s Day on 8 March I looked at two AGRA-funded projects, both providing mechanisation to smallholder farmers, predominantly tractor hire to free up the time spent laboriously preparing the land by hand. Both projects aimed to attract men and women but did nothing to enhance their offer to women. Bearing in mind the low levels of female landownership both, attracted a disproportionate number of female users. What happened to their women users after that has turned out to be very different and teaches us plenty about how paying attention to gender pays dividends.

The first project helps farmers with a reasonable amount of land with finance to buy a tractor on condition they use it to help nearby smallholders. They are given a list of telephone numbers to call and offer their tractor service for a fee. So far 17 tractors have been financed in the project area, three of which belong to women; 17% of the total. In the first year an impressive 25% of users were also women, but despite a rise in overall numbers this dropped to 17% in the second year. That those two figures are the same is more than coincidence – I see it over and over again, where a programme reflects its staff. In this case women are falling away, and unless something is done will continue to do so, because it relies on owners calling users. Why? Because women hesitate to receive calls from unknown numbers, or if she answers and finds a man on the other end, she probably passes the phone to her husband. If a husband sees a number on his wife’s phone, calls it and a man answers, he beats her first and asks who it was second.

TROTRO Tractor in Ghana, like the first project, make tractors available to smallholders, but their business model is different. They aren’t involved in finance, instead they use a simple SMS and mobile money system that allows smallholder farmers to summon a tractor to their field a bit like Uber for tractors. They were surprised to see the first people to use the service were women, and quickly realised why. Culturally, when a tractor turned up in an area offering its services, it would first plough all the land belonging to men, and if it had time move on to any woman’s field. When a woman summons a TROTRO tractor, she has already paid for it using mobile money and knows that it will be her field that gets ploughed. Once TROTRO’s owners started factoring in gender to their decision making, many more opportunities presented themselves. They found that women tractor drivers were more careful and looked after the tractors better, so they have trained 60 female tractor operators, making the service even more attractive to women. The company now has four female members of staff and five male, including the three men who own it. One of the women is responsible for all monitoring and evaluation, another deals with administration and two work in the call centre. The company’s call centre receives and makes calls, they solve problems for farmers and tractor owners and can book a tractor for a smallholder if they can’t use an SMS. Although by having female call centre workers the service is more accessible to women, the owners made the decision for solid business reasons; they found that people found women easier to talk to and that they are polite and patient. They also use female voices in their local language radio advertising, another reason that the female use of the service stands at 30% and is rising. They already have over 2,000 women users and a shortage of tractors and are looking to expand into Zimbabwe and South Africa.

In the words of owner and founder Kamal Yakub “It’s a business for profit. But we started to see the social aspect of the business and now concentrate more on social enterprise, but not forgetting profit!” for it was profit that led them to pay attention to gender. In 2015 the McKinsey Global Institute looked at what would happen if we gave women the same opportunities as men. They used a ‘best in region’ scenario, where all countries match the rate of the fastest improver in their region. They found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025. In microcosm TROTRO Tractor and Kamal Yakub show us how.

Amanda Satterly, is the Head of Gender at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)

Africa’s agricultural prospects, by far, surpass any avenues of economic development that the continent holds; including mining and tourism.

Still, it has been quite a challenge for Africa to maintain enough farm production levels to sustain its food needs while leaving surpluses for export.

This is notwithstanding the fact that almost 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land lies in the continent, and that almost 70 percent of Africa’s population directly depends on agriculture for its upkeep.

One of the reasons for this disparity between potential and actual production, as confirmed by research, is the consistent inadequacy of input supplies to farmers. With an average fertilizer use of 18 Kg/ha, for example, farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa significantly lag behind their peers in Europe (59 Kg/ha). Consequently, Europe, on average, doubles the productivity of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thankfully, recent advocacy efforts, are starting to yield fruits with governments and other stakeholders in the agricultural industry now investing in farm input supply chains. In this regard, subsidy programmes have had a positive impact in the uptake of improved seeds, fertilizers and other farm innovations like irrigation and greenhouse technologies.

A synthesis report compiled by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), shows that recent efforts by the Kenyan government to distribute subsidized inputs (seeds and inorganic fertilizers) through the National Accelerated Agricultural Inputs Access Programme (NAAIAP) had substantial impacts on maize production and poverty through the effective targeting of resource-poor farmers.

Positive results continue to be recorded in Malawi, as well, with the government offering subsidies through private suppliers for imported and locally blended fertilizers based on demand.

In Tanzania, subsidy programs have reduced the distance travelled by farmers for agricultural inputs to about 2Km with most of the inputs being sourced from within maize and paddy production villages.

But, for most countries, subsidy programmes have proven an expensive affair, and one that cannot be productively sustained.

It is for this reason that private sector engagement holds the promise of long-term success in input supply management.

In Nigeria, about 40 percent of fertilizer and seed requirements are produced in the country. But to ensure that the highest number of farmers is reached, the Federal Government of Nigeria engages both public and private sectors in importation and distribution under its Growth Enhancement Support Scheme. This has led to the development of private distribution networks as a base for effective demand and payments, effectively facilitating rapid market expansion by private stakeholders and better access to inputs by the previously underserved farmers.

In Rwanda, the importation and distribution of fertilizers and improved seeds is a function of the private sector. However, subsidies are offered based on a framework contract with the government. An important feature of the subsidy system in Rwanda is the government’s complementary investment in post-harvest handling and storage, irrigation, mechanization and extension services. These efforts have facilitated substantial private sector growth in input distribution activities, ultimately allowing farmers across the country to progress from an unhealthy dependence on subsidies.

Better results, nevertheless, could be achieved through investments in finance. The systemic integration of financial institutions such as banks with subsidy programmes stands to improve access to finance, which still is a significant barrier for the private sector entry to the farm input market.

Ultimately, though, even with better access to farm inputs by farmers, farmer education on the proper usage of available resources remains the link to sustainable agricultural productivity. Training farmers on how to combine fertilizer and improved seeds with other farm technologies such as soil sampling and irrigation has been confirmed by past studies ^[1]to have the biggest influence on output.

That said, with most of these resources still being beyond the reach of Africa’s smallholder farmers, who produce almost three quarters of the food consumed in the continent, subsidies, in all their various forms, will continue to be important tools for delivering agriculture-led economic development for the continent.

-ENDS

^[1] Chancellor, T., Hanlin, R., Long, L., Dhlamini, N. and Yaye, A. (2013). Farmer education and training (FARM-ED): enhancing access to agricultural education in Africa. [online] Oasis.col.org. Available at: http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/1837 [Accessed 18 Feb. 2019]

Post-harvest losses are high in Mozambique, with smallholder farmers losing an average 30 percent of their production annually. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the bulk of crop loss occurs after harvest, before grains reach consumers

Forced to sell their produce at low prices soon after harvest to save their crop from insect and rodent damage owing to poor storage facilities, farmers are often food insecure and in debt.  Poor harvesting methods and storage facilities contribute to high crop losses and food waste in Africa.

But thanks to the adoption of smart post-harvest technologies, Mozambican soybean farmers are saving half the crop that would otherwise have been lost.

Fatima Mussa, from the Gurué District of Zambezia Province, north of Mozambique, no longer suffers the drudgery of winnowing her soybeans by hand after she acquired a threshing machine that sorts the grain efficiently and saves time.  The end product is clean and fetches her a higher income at the market.

Mussa is one of the 20 women that own threshing machine under the AGRA project funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC). To date, 32 threshers have been distributed in 12 locations in the Zambezi Province.

Launched in 2016, the Scaling-up Post-Harvest Management Innovations for Grain Legumes in Africa project is helping small holder farmers in Mozambique and Burkina Faso reduce post-harvest crop losses, a growing threat to food security.

Agriculture generates incomes for more than three million smallholder farmers in Mozambique who account for 95 percent of the country’s agricultural production. However, the lack of appropriate inputs, good agronomic practices, post-harvest and storage technologies means many farmers record low yields.

Cutting losses, increasing food security and income

Home to over 230 million people suffering from chronic malnutrition, about 30 percent of the grains produced in sub-Saharan Africa are lost due to inadequate post-harvest management, lack of structured markets, inadequate storage and limited processing capacity.

Innovative technologies such as the airtight Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags are reducing post-harvest agricultural losses that would otherwise occur between the farm and the consumer.

The US$2.1 million AGRA/IDRC project has supported applied research to bring effective, field-tested innovations for reducing post-harvest loss of soybeans and cowpeas to thousands of smallholder farmers in Mozambique and Burkina Faso.

The project targets the scale-up innovative post-harvest technologies to reduce food losses in soybeans and cowpeas – both high-calorie cash crops with a growing market and income opportunities for smallholder farmers, women and youth. Mechanized threshers have the capacity to process 1.5 MT of soybeans or pigeon peas per hour and can thresh maize four times faster. It takes seven days to thresh a hectare of soybeans (2 to 3 MT) manually, and only a day when the same quantity is processed mechanically.

Dr. Innocent Butare, Senior Program Specialist at IDRC, visited the project in Gurue District to monitor progress and to assess the effectiveness of threshers and PICS bags. Many smallholder commercial farmers in Gurue who cultivate between three and 73 hectares of land are also seed growers and agro-dealers.

Of the targeted 5,000 smallholder farmers expected to adopt the post-harvest technologies, by December 2018, only 33 percent had access to mechanized threshing services. The demand for mechanized threshing service is influenced by production levels.

Research by COWI, a development consulting company in charge of the research component of the project, shows that the availability of threshers and soybeans yields dictated farmers’ willingness to adopt mechanical threshing over the manual method in 2016. While in 2017, it was the affordability and yields, which dictated the farmers’ adoption of mechanized threshing.

The study found that using a mechanized thresher not only saved time, but  reduced the likelihood of harvest losses from shattering, rain and rotting.  Mechanized threshers enabled farmers to have time for other economic activities, ultimately improving their quality of life. Assessment of the profitability suggests that with a machine life-span of six years, the first year of operation was not profitable, but in the subsequent years profit margins increased between 35 percent and 76 percent.

Taking technologies to scale

The IDRC has recommended scaling-up the adoption of threshing machines for common beans and soya beans in Tanzania and Rwanda as well as in Mozambique and Malawi respectively.

The second phase of the project is to be expanded beyond the Gurué District. Plans are in the pipeline to manufacture threshing machines in Mozambique. Local manufacturing will reduce the cost of the machines, which can be modified to suit local conditions.

Zimbabwe Stock Exchange listed tech company, Cassava Smartech, an off shoot of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, has launched a tractor sharing service app modelled along ride hailing service Uber.

Cassava, which already has its ride sharing services app, Vaya, plans to make ploughing tractors available to farmers within minutes anywhere in Zimbabwe.

According to Cassava Smartech CEO Eddie Chibi, the company plans to register more than 10 000 tractors from the national fleet of more than 15 000 tractors. Tractor owners will be able to offer their tractors to other farmers using the Vaya Tractor App, once they finish tilling their own fields.

The cost of the service will be standardised.? Chibi said at least 10 000 tractors could plough and service 1.5 million small holder farmers if deployed efficiently.

The company will leverage its sister company Econet Wireless’s cell phone network, as well as satellite GPS systems, to deploy the tractors. They will know exactly where each tractor is located, and will be able to deploy them where and when they are needed.

“This is the age of the internet and shared economy. You don’t need to own a tractor. And there is no need to be phoning around, we know each tractor, and have tools that enable us to ensure the farmer and the tractor owner are able to transact,” said Chibi.

“The market opportunity for contract ploughing and mechanisation is over $500 million per annum. This is huge and we can transform agriculture and make it less laborious for all our farmers.

Originally published on Fin24

Leveraging big data, a CTA-led project has significantly increased crop yields and incomes for thousands of Ugandan smallholder farmers. The project, Market-led User-owned ICT4Ag-enabled Information Services (MUIIS), offers a bundle of highly targeted digital services to farmers including weather and agronomic information, as well as financial services including index-based insurance and loans.

A Rapid Crop Yield Assessment carried out by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in collaboration with the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) of Uganda, reveals that those farmers who subscribed to the bundle have realised a sizable increase in maize productivity up to 67%. Participating farmers also saw an average increase from US$ 520 per hectare for non-beneficiaries to US$ 800 per hectare for beneficiaries. An increase of 70%.

As part of the project over 250,000 farmers were digitally profiled to provide detailed information on everything from geographical location of their fields to crops grown, size of family and assets owned. The dataset obtained was leveraged to provide a kind of collateral to underpin a loan from the Rabobank Foundation. From these funds farmers can draw funds to support, for example, the purchase of seed and fertiliser.

“We saw that removing the barrier to access to finance would make available a whole range of innovations which could improve productivity and profit. By digitally profiling farmers, we had already gathered the sort of information financial institutions need when assessing creditworthiness”, said Dr. Benjamin Kwasi Addom, CTA Team Leader for ICT4Ag.

Mark Loos, project officer at Netherlands Space Office: “MUIIS developed bundled services to reduce risk for farmers as well as giving them access to finance. Having reached many farmers during the project, the next phase is about making the business model self-sustaining, so that many farmers may benefit from the services offered.”

To date, over 3,200 smallholder farmers have subscribed to the MUIIS service bundle. And, 628 farmer subscribers have recently been subject to the scheme’s largest insurance payout. Over 27 million Ugandan shillings (€6,400) is being paid out in compensation for drought destroyed crops.

A second phase of the project, transitioning it into a business, will be launched at a workshop at the Golf Course Hotel in Kampala, 13- 14 February 2019.

MUIIS was launched in September 2015 with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the G4AW programme executed by Netherlands Space Office. Other MUIIS partners are the EARS BV, eLEAF BV, aWhere Inc., AGRA, Mercy Corps, the Uganda Cooperative Alliance Ltd., Uganda National Farmers Federation, AIC and Ensibuuko Technologies.

Agriculture and environmental management are frequently at loggerheads. However, when agricultural projects are carefully designed, they contribute to enhancing environmental and social sustainability significantly improving food security and social wellbeing.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) recognises environmental and social risks as critical issues that require deliberate systems and organisational capacities to identify, manage and monitor in line with global best practice and applicable national and international legal requirements.

To this end, AGRA has committed to institutionalizing environmental and social considerations in our work and that of our partners and has developed and adopted an Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) to guide this process. The ESMS is equal to international best practice and follows the guidance of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) Performance Standards. It underpins our resolve to identify, reduce or avoid negative environmental and social impacts that may result from our work which will be part of our core business processes shaping the design of programmes to ensure and maximise positive environmental and social outcomes.

“AGRA is committed to improving the management of the environmental and social implications of all our investments. The Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) that we have developed and are now adopting will ensure that our work is designed to enable the smallholder farmers and businesses we work with to achieve the triple helix target of food security, inclusive economic growth and protecting the planet.” said Dr. Agnes Kalibata, AGRA President, in her message to AGRA staff and partners. 

AGRA’s ESMS guiding principles will ensure that all our investments:

• Avoid, reduce or limit negative environmental, social and climate impacts and improve the environmental and social benefits of its initiatives;
• Support the preservation and protection of biodiversity and sustainably manage natural resources;
• Avoid negative impacts on the living conditions, livelihoods and land tenure of communities;
• Ensure the health and safety at work of its own employees and require its subcontractors and partners to implement measures to protect the health and safety of their employees at work;
• Condemn forced labour and child labour, prohibit discrimination, prohibit and combat harassment and support the freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining of workers;
• Comply with all relevant environmental, social, health and safety as well as land acquisition policies, laws and regulations of the countries of intervention and international standards.

The ESMS is in line with our founding principles. As called for by our founding Chair, the late Kofi Annan, we work to deliver a ‘uniquely’ African agriculture transformation tailored to the needs and aspirations of the diverse continent recognizing the importance of sustainability. We distill lessons from Asia, Latin America and other regions to ensure that Africa’s green revolution does not cause ecological and social harm witnessed in earlier revolutions.

Our investments are, therefore, driven towards an inclusive agricultural transformation linking millions of small farms to agribusinesses, creating extended food systems and employment opportunities for millions including those that will transition from farming.

We work with our partners to provide technical assistance that is closely aligned with Africa’s unique farming conditions, dietary preferences, the vision of prosperity to develop an agriculture sector that is economically inclusive and environmentally sustainable.  We preserve the agrobiodiversity of the staple crops produced by African farmers which is wider than anywhere else in the world.

The development and implementation of our Environment and Social Management System received technical and financial support from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) Bank as part of a strategic partnership between the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and AGRA. We also acknowledge our other partners and the many African smallholder farmers that we consulted as we developed the system.

About AGRA

Established in 2006, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (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.

AGRA provides downstream delivery for the Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA) with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). For more information, visit www.agra.org, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube