The key to reducing hunger and poverty across Africa rests within Africans themselves. If rural communities can be supported to run their farms as small businesses, or develop off-farm businesses, their futures will be ensured.
When we think of entrepreneurs, we don't normally think of poor African farmers, but that's exactly what we have found, right across our country programs.
Farmers who want to expand, to learn about new crops, to invest in their land, to irrigate, to identify new markets.
And off these farms, men and women who want to make, to buy, to sell, and to profit.
These men and women are Africa's future, because they are the key to sustainable livelihoods.
Organizing farmers into producer groups and co-operatives plays a key role this work.
Working at grassroots level with rural communities, Self Help Africa has encouraged and supported farmers to join together and work on land irrigation, production and distribution of better quality seed, and the cultivation of market-orientated crops.
Measures which build agricultural capacity have given farmers access to lucrative new markets for produce, have enabled rural households to diversify and scale up their production, and have allowed tens of thousands of rural producers to create profitable farming enterprises on small-scale holdings which had formerly been used only for subsistence farming activities.
In Zambia’s Western Province, for example, the Market Orientated Rural Enterprise (MORE) project has supported more than 2,500 farmers to organize into small commodity groups of between 20 and 50 members, so that they can start new farming activities – from vegetable, fruit and cereal production, to livestock rearing, fish farming and beekeeping.
Commodity group members set aside a portion of their land for the production of their specified ‘commodity’, and at harvest time they pool their produce for transportation and sale to hotels, agri-food processors and other markets identified by the MORE project.
In Ethiopia, our Agricultural Co-Operative Development Program (ACDP) is doing likewise with the production and sale of wheat, fruit and pulses, allowing hundreds of dairy producers to add value to their milk products, and supporting hundreds more seed potato producers to develop a supply network which has become one of the country’s largest.
ACDP has identified markets for the sale of brewing malt to national breweries and of durum wheat to pasta manufacturers.
Initiatives similar to Ethiopia’s ACDP and Zambia’s MORE are taking place across Self Help Africa’s program countries, as the organization of agriculture provides small-scale growers with new opportunities to expand, diversify and improve the profitability of their farming activities
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