African Countries face problems related to accelerating growth and boosting prosperity. Poverty among smallholder farmers have been a difficult problem to solve. Lack of finance to invest in their farms, in access to information on smart production practices and lack of a reliable market has impeded the economic development of rural areas . The highly fragmented system encourage smallholders to work with brokers to get to the market leading to flactuating, nontransparent and exploitative prices.
We provide smallholder fresh produce farmers with inputs on credit, train them on the Good Agricultural Practices and purchase produce at harvest for resale to the high value urban markets thereby ensuring efficient supply of safe and quality fresh produce to the urban consumers and creating a sustainable market for the smallholder farmers devoid of middlemen.Vegetable vendors in most African urban centers have problems accessing fresh produce as they have to travel every morning to the open air markets to buy whatever they find from the brokers in the market at inflated prices.This inefficient supply chain arrangement provide low income and little incentive for growers , fresh produce vendors and consumers.
We improve the level of organization of growers , creating economies of scale to enable them supply the urban markets with quality traceable fresh produce. We do this by organizing the farmers into farmer groups of between 5 and 30, we train them on our business model and the crops we promote and enlist those who are interested into our program.We then provide them with inputs, trainings on credit and purchase produce at harvest and add value by cleaning, sorting and grading and supply to the vendors in the urban markets.
Vendors on the other hand order for fresh produce from us and we supply them at their place of business thereby saving them time and resources they use to source the produce from middlemen in the open air markets.
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