AgDevCo

This article highlights the success of Taylor Winch Tanzania in delivering the Gender Action Learning System (GALS), a community-led empowerment methodology that aims to give smallholder producers – particularly women – greater control over their lives.

To mark 5 years of the SDU, AgDevCo is convening a series of celebratory virtual events between Wednesday 24th March and Friday 26th March 2021. 

AgDevCo’s Smallholder Development Unit (SDU) has been convening periodic virtual knowledge sharing sessions for its partner businesses, as we all work to understand the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for African agribusiness and their smallholder producers and customers. 

Our partners share how their smallholder farmer schemes have presented significant commercial opportunities.

This report summarises the findings from a qualitative impact assessment carried out with smallholder farmers to investigate the impact of GADC/SDU's VSLA programme. 

Radio offers significant opportunities to agribusinesses and other organisations to communicate with smallholder farmers. 

The Gulu Agricultural Development Company (GADC) in northern Uganda works with tens of thousands of smallholder farmers who produce organic cotton. Organic production is often challenged by the large numbers of pests which attack the crop, notably the African bollworm, aphids and various species of sucking bugs. 

The SDU operates alongside AgDevCo’s core activity of providing long-term debt and equity to SMEs.

With support from AgDevCo’s Smallholder Development Unit (SDU), the scheme aims to benefit over 4,000 farmers. Over the course of three years, household incomes are expected to increase by up to $200 per annum. This baseline survey indicates the poverty rate of Tropha households (37%) is still slightly higher than the national poverty rate (32%), and the poorest of the poor are more likely to be living in female-headed households.

In this blog post, Sandi Roberts explains three practical steps agribusinesses can take to help close the gender gap in smallholder outgrower schemes. 

The schemes featured represent a cross-section of value chains, from high-value horticulture (bananas) to commodity crops (maize and sugarcane), small livestock (broilers), and seed (flowers). Understanding the lessons of these schemes and why they have been successful will help to inform the design of new outgrower schemes, minimise mistakes, and ensure both companies and growers reap the benefits. 

AgDevCo, in collaboration with The MasterCard Foundation and UKAID, launched the Smallholder Development Unit (SDU) to work with rural agricultural enterprises to develop equitable outgrower schemes that will boost productivity and incomes for half a million smallholder farmers.