AGRA

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 2^nd 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.”

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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.  

Join the VALUE4HER digital platform – https://value4her.hivebrite.com/

About AGRA

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.

Speed read

• 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.

Originally published on SciDev.net

The World Bank biennial report for 2019 has ranked Kenya as the second best country in Africa for providing enabling environment for agribusiness.

During a virtual launch of the ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2019 report’ on February 23, 2021, Samjhana Thapa, a Senior Agriculture Economist at the World Bank said that Kenya has shown relative strengths on aspects related to securing water, trading food, registering machinery, and sustaining livestock.

“Kenya achieved the highest score observed in Sub-Saharan Africa in relation to those four aspects,” she said.

AGRA has been on the forefront in pushing for a micro reform approach to have policies and reforms passed within the shortest time possible.

“Usually policies take between 5 to 10 years to pass, but from what we have been doing, we have seen policies and reforms pass within an area of 3 to five years,” John Macharia, AGRA’s Country Manager told the virtual meeting during the launch.

The report, which was compiled as from 2019 after a global survey in 2018 found that by then, Kenya needed to improve on its regulatory framework on aspects related to protecting plant health, accessing finance, and registering fertilizers.

“In particular, Kenya’s score on the accessing finance indicator is restricted by the country’s lack of a specific regulatory framework to support the development of a warehouse receipt system. Similarly, Kenya’s score on the registering fertilizer indicator is restricted by the country’s lack of a requirement to register new fertilizer products,” reads part of the report.

However, Peter Munya, the Cabinet Secretary in charge of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Cooperatives noted that in the past two years preceding the survey, the government has intensified the fight against corruption, malpractice, and poor governance as part and parcel of creating an enabling agribusiness environment.

“The robust reforms in the Strategic Food Reserve Management and Warehouse Receipting Systems have been designed to improve efficiency and accountability, both in the use of the public resources and ensuring that farmers get a fair wage for their goods,” said CS Munya.

AGRA has been working directly with the national and county governments to improve the efficiency of the Warehouse Receipting Systems, the Electronic Voucher System for distributing farm inputs to smallholders especially those found in remote villages, Village Based Advisors model as part of innovative extension service provision that include distribution of farm inputs to smallholders, and mechanization of the smallholders among many other fronts.

In general, the EBA report presents indicators that measure laws, regulations and bureaucratic processes that affect agriculture in 101 countries. It covers eight scored indicators: supplying seed, registering fertilizer, securing water, registering machinery, sustaining livestock, protecting plant health, trading food and accessing finance.

According to the survey, Kenya’s scored 64.8 out of 100, which is higher than the average score observed globally (61.47), higher than the average score observed across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa2(40.69), and higher than the average score observed in lower-middle-income countries (50.58).

“On behalf of the Government, I wish to thank the World Bank for this timely report; and along with AGRA and the Agriculture Transformation Office who have also worked tirelessly to make this a reality,” said Munya.

African agribusiness Small and Medium Enterprises seeking to fundraise for their businesses can now go online and have access to a newly launched platform where they can find articulated requirements for accessing the funds.

“The SME Resource Bank, which is now a component of the AgriBusiness Deal Room, is a virtual repository of guiding materials that will help entrepreneurs to better prepare for and optimize their engagements with investors,” said Jennifer Baarns, the Head of Partnerships at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

The Agribusiness Deal Room is a matchmaking online platform under the Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), which convenes close to 4,000 stakeholders from the entire eco-system to facilitate partnerships and investments in African agriculture.

“We usually come across entrepreneurs with great ideas, but they are not investor ready,” said Elizabeth Wamai, an Investment Analyst from Exeo Capital – an international investment company in the Sub-Saharan Africa region that regularly engages in the Deal Room.

“It is really frustrating to see great potential opportunities fall through the cracks during the screening process because the entrepreneur did not have critical financial information such as audited accounts, business plan, and financial projections among others required to assess the credibility of the business and maybe its growth potential,” she told a virtual audience during the launch of the SME Resource Bank on 19 February 2021.

According to Dr Debisi Araba, the Managing Director for the AGRF, Africa has the potential to transform its agriculture sector to contribute a healthy percentage of economic growth on the continent. “However, there is a financial deficit in ushering in this reality,” he said.

“We have a deficit of over 100 billion dollars to ensure the flow of capital in the agricultural sector across the continent, and that is what we are trying to mobilise through the SME Resource Bank,” he told online participants during the launch.

“One of the things we want to do at the deal room is to reduce this scarcity of finance,” he said. “We are not seeing a proliferation of bankable agribusiness projects across the continent, so what we are trying to do is not just to increase the flow of capital but also improving the investment readiness to enhance agriculture finance.”

According to Yosuke Kotsuji, a Senior Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), there is need to encourage local and regional agribusiness trade if we have to build agricultural food systems resilience.

“Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic have taught us that we cannot always rely onglobal food supply,” he said.

The SME Resource Bank will contain fundraising materials such as comprehensive investment memos, robust financial models and market analysis information that will inform SMEs about the investment process and requirements and how to prepare for participation in the Agribusiness Deal Room.

The resource bank will be intensely used in the capacity building and Deal Room preparation of hundreds of SMEs and Business Development providers. It will be an evolving open-source depository that will be open to other contributors for its expansion.

You can access the resource bank here and watch the recording of the launch here.

Contributing partners to the Resource Bank include USAID, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, Prosper Africa, GiZ, IFC and CrossBoundary.

The Agribusiness Deal Room is delivered by a consortium of partners namely: AECF, AfDB, AGRA, Bonrezo, CASA, CrossBoundary Group, GAIN, Grow Africa, Generation Africa,  IDH,   IFC, IFAD, KPMG, Rockefeller Foundation, SAFIN, Tanager, Blair Institute for global change, USAID and the World Economic Forum. The Deal Room is hosted annually at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) which is hosted by AGRF partners and the Government of Rwanda.

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VALUE4HER digital platform is Africa’s first agribusiness intelligence platform aimed at facilitating growth and development of women owned agribusiness enterprises. The platform seeks to expand visibility for women’s businesses, expand their presence in markets where they trade, access new markets nationally, regionally and internationally, and to acquire the capital, business and technical partners and resources required to support their growing businesses. The platform has so far registered representation from 36 countries, with over 750 businesses registered.

TalkCorner is a virtual platform organized by the VALUE4HER programme to spotlight women’s agribusinesses, enable them to share their experiences and lessons and inspire other women to join agri-entrepreneurship journey and grow their businesses and secure more incomes. TalkCorner sessions aim to build the confidence and capacity of the woman speaker, profile her business and facilitate meaningful partnerships and mentorship.

This year’s first TalkCorner featured Dr. Agnes Fasehun, the Managing Director of SwanCape Ltd. SwanCape Ltd is a producer and distributor of premium quality vegetables, herbs and fish sold in major Nigerian supermarkets, restaurants and their farm shops.

Having been brought up in a farming family, Dr. Fasehun was taken aback when, armed with a veterinary medicine degree, prospective employers turned her down, declaring her unable to handle large animals like cattle

“Luckily I had served my national youth service stint at a financial institution and I found an alternative job with a bank,” says Dr. Fasehun as she narrates her journey in agribusiness.

But the banking sector was not where her passion was, she left the financial stability and predictability of the banking career to start her own agribusiness. 

Her interest in agriculture and food systems was nurtured by the realization that whenever she visited major supermarkets, a lot of vegetable items were imported, despite the fact that her country Nigeria was producing enough local vegetables.  She was determined that she would one day ensure local products could compete with imports.

She discussed the specific challenges she encountered along the way, including cash flow issues, identifying markets, appropriate staffing and developing competitiveness in product quality.

Through continuous training of staff, networking and working with her suppliers to maintain high standards, Dr. Fasehun has today managed to get her produce side by side with imported products on several major supermarkets in Nigeria.

Since she had already transitioned her business to digital commerce, the COVID-19 pandemic did not pose that much of a challenge to her business. The only barrier she faced was delivering goods to her customers due to the lock-down but she was able to overcome this with the government issued permits.

In a poll held among participants in the first virtual TalkCorner webinar, most participants cited financial support as the biggest barrier to entry and growth of women businesses. 

VALUE4HER aims to close the gender gap in agri-entrepreneurship and help women business owners to overcome the unique challenges that dissuade them from starting and growing businesses.

TalkCorner is a monthly webinar hosted by AGRAs VALUE4Her women’s agribusiness digital market, to spotlight successful women’s agribusinesses, to use their stories to inspire confidence in themselves and other women.

VALUE4Her is AGRAs continental program aimed at assisting women grow their agribusinesses through access to markets, capital, skills and capacities and business information and intelligence services.  

Join the VALUE4HER digital platform.

For more information please contact Ms. Sabdiyo Dido, Head of Gender and Inclusion, AGRA on sdido@agra.org

By Apollos Nwafor, Ph.D. – Vice-President, Policy & State Capability

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Africa was already grappling with serious food security challenges, driven by factors such as drought, flooding and a major invasion by desert locust swarms in the Horn of Africa.  The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2019 – before the COVID-19 pandemic – that half of the people in Africa were food insecure.

Early estimates indicate that as a result of COVID-19, Africa’s real GDP is shrinking by 3.4%, down by 7.3% from the growth projected before the outbreak of the pandemic, with smaller economies facing contraction of up to 7.8%.   

Commendably, most African governments implemented swift response measures such as cash transfers, tax breaks, and loans to businesses or subsidies on farm inputs.  However, the measures were short-term and some have already lapsed.  Yet the risks for the vulnerable persist and could get worse.

Policy makers must urgently identify priority areas to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on food systems and to build back better if the continent is to make headway in the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ending hunger, while leaving no one behind.

One objective is to boost food production and distribution.  Policies need to support private sector players in the agriculture sector through lower interest rates for facilities and policy predictability for trade in agriculture.

Policies need to support provision of financing incentives for SMEs in the agriculture sector and developing resilience for smallholder farmers.  Increasing government investment in the sector will drive financial institutions to increase their portfolio of lending to the sector, which currently lies at less than 1%.

Another priority should be fast-tracking of Digitalization for Agriculture (D4Ag) in Africa.  The global workforce is digitising faster than ever before. Post-COVID, automation will take an ever more central stage. The fast mobile phone penetration in Africa has potential for driving innovation and building a tech savvy workforce in the sector.

Africa needs to strengthen intra-regional agricultural trade.  Evidence suggests that regional trade agreements increase welfare by providing a rules-based trading system and trade liberalization. Officially commencing in January 2021, the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) can be used to consolidate and strengthen intra-regional agricultural trade in the continent.

Policy actions should aim at propelling Africa through technological leapfrogging to overcome existing challenges.

You can read the full report ‘Agricultural Policy Actions for Building Back Better: A COVID-19 Mitigation Supportive Mechanism’ here

For more information please contact Apollos Nwafor, Ph.D, Vice President – Policy and State Capability, AGRA on anwafor@agra.org

It is mango season in Kenya and in Murang’a County, in the Central part of the country, farmers are enjoying a bumper harvest, evident not just in the trees sagging under the weight of juicy mango’s but also by the number of farmers who have set up stalls along the busy highway to sell their produce.

The United Nations (UN) Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that Africa loses at least 4 billion dollars worth of its total food production to post harvest losses. Yet the solution would be as simple as getting farmers to process their produce, value addition, before sending it to the market. That is what one local government in Kenya is doing with mango’s, changing fortunes for farmers.

It is a familiar scene on major highways in Africa, the race to put food on the table. Like everywhere else, the fittest takes home the money. It is mango season in Kenya and in Murang’a County, in the Central part of the country, farmers are enjoying a bumper harvest, evident not just in the trees sagging under the weight of juicy mango’s but also by the number of farmers who have set up stalls along the busy highway to sell their produce.

But times are hard, that’s according to a Kenyan trader Sarah Njeri.

“The market is so bad, take for example yesterday, I did not sell anything, I had nothing to buy my baby milk.”

Their other marketing options are selling in bulk to bigger markets but they say that puts them at the mercy of middlemen who undercut them making their profit margins unsustainable.

So when the sun goes down, they begin to count their losses, the cycle repeats itself until the next season.

“The challenge that we have is that we planted these trees, tend for plants, but we don’t have a market, sometimes we leave here without selling anything, we have a lot of problems,” says another Kenyan trader Florence Wairimu.

The Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO), estimates that every year mango farmers in the country suffer between 40-45% post-harvest losses due to lack of markets, denying farmers their much deserved earnings. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Africa, at least 30% of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted along the supply chain every year.

“Some people made some calculations they are estimating the value of post-harvest losses to be the value of almost 4 billion us dollars. Per year and this is more than the food that we get from our other partners including the developing partners,  so imagine if we are able to contain post-harvest losses we could really add to our food security and nutrition,” explains AGRA’s Head of Markets in Kenya Dr. Ones Karuho.

Several kilometres from Murang’a county in Eastern Kenya, in Makueni county, the Kalamba fruit processing plant, an initiative of the local government, known in Kenya as the county government.

Governor Kivutha Kibwana says the plant, which started in 2017, could not have come at a better time.
“When we didn’t have the factory, one of the things that happened and hurt farmers was the fact that the prices were very low, especially when the mango’s are just about to get very ripe, you are told that the price is one shilling per mango therefore three shillings per kilo take it or leave it, if you refuse, then you will have to throw the mango’s away or feed them to dogs.”

The county is Kenya’s top mango producer, with a yearly harvest of 184,000 Metric tonnes, the mangoes have the potential to earn the county $500M.

The plant, according to Kibwana, cuts the middlemen and earns the farmers a decent living.

“The reason to introduce this plant was to be able to buy mango’s and to process them and to sell the pure and eventually the juice and this made the prices to go up, when a lose because of the fruitfully we began to have a problem of reaching the overseas markets.”

Currently, the plant only produces pulp but the county is also among the country’s top producers of tomatoes. It’s in the process of adding a line that will make tomato paste, as well as ready to make juices and bottled water.

Plans are at advanced stage to begin marketing in the European Union countries, following an ongoing campaign to eliminate fruit flies.

“When we began we were just thinking mangoes but over time, it is starting to tell us we have so much potential to deal with tomato, orange and bananas,” says Agriculture Minister in Makueni County Bob Kisyula.

Experts say, is crucial in spurring growth of grassroot economies in Africa, while at the same time ensuring food and nutrition security.

“When farmers or other agribusinesses add value to the commodities they are harvesting it creates other opportunities in the economy all of a sudden they impact other sectors like manufacturing, those who produce technology to process raw materials into finished products, it can also impact even the service industry, the packaging and everyone who is involved in that sector,” says Dr Ones Karuho.

Kibwana worries that agriculture will not be helping the people as much if marketing is not properly done.

“If you do not get marketing right and of course value addition marketing right, then it means that agriculture is not helping your people as much as it should and the rural populations continues to experience significant poverty,” says Kibwana.

Indeed, the success of the processing plant has seen the county open a milk processing plant, and the agriculture minister says work is on to add value to traditional crops. Challenges are, however, abound.

“We now have 4,000 drums of 200 kgs each of puree, well explaining that the fact last year was a really depressing year because of covid, many markets closed or shrunk, but we need a good market locally and internationally for the puree but also for the fresh fruit,” says Agriculture Minister from Makueni Bob Kisyula.

To get the fruits to the factory, the county government works with farmers organized in cooperatives.

“We are trying to teach our people that when you aggregate whatever you produce and then you sell it together, you are more competitive, you can negotiate better,” says Kibwana.

One of the marked differences we notice in this area, the smallholder farmers no longer line the highway in their numbers seeking a market for their produce and the few who are still selling to traders from other regions now earn up to tenfold what they previously earned.

Back at the factory, the machines continue to roll as the workers quicken their pace to meet the demand, while along the Nairobi- Nyeri highway the race to make ends meet continues, with the hope that a value addition intervention will save them this daily struggle.

Originally published on SABC News