Finding Better Solutions Inside the Food Value Chain in the African Continent
How do we find better solutions to the complex problems inside the food value chain in the African continent?
The Food Value Chain is complex. The African markets with its challenges doesn't make it any simpler. And it seems difficult for participants in the value chain to cooperate successfully; beginning with recognising the most pressing issues and finding suitable partners to help in solving them.
We created the “Food Value Chain Collaboration” event to bring together food value chain operators mainly in Kenya and openly explore the collaboration options in the sector. Production, processing, research and marketing all mainly play in their own silos. Remode wants to bring these people together and encourage everyone to find better solutions to their existing problems.
The event was a success; people shared their challenges and met with others who could possibly help them in creating the needed solutions.
This is the first step. In a complex environment like the food value chain in Kenya, if the food value chain operators are not able to communicate openly about their current challenges… then they cannot be solved or the solution will come about very slowly.
Some paraphrased thoughts and quotes from the session below:
Andrew Egala, Scaling up Nutrition: “Information is needed for small scale farmers. Assisting the farmers is extremely important; many farmers are now getting out of farming, because it is not financially sustainable for them. They need our help. This is not rocket science.”
Ndegwa Maina, Innofood Africa: “The challenge for big corporations that want to manufacture food is that they need to discuss directly with the farmers. This is because small farmers are not yet able to aggregate their crops. The challenge is this aggregation process, and Innofood wants to solve this problem. Behind the aggregation process is consistency. In Kenyan tea production, this has been solved by the cooperatives that exist there. And they’ve reached international markets.”
Enid Kwamboka, Nyamira North Women Sacco: “Lack of consistency is a challenge in scaling up our production. Value addition is needed, but if we cannot consistently produce good quality crops for the processing company, then the collaboration is very challenging. We are looking forward to solving this issue, and we would love to learn more from Innofood and your research to help us do it.”
The event was created in collaboration with FIDA International, International Solidarity Foundation of Finland, FINGO and University of Helsinki / Innofood Project. Thank you to all partners and participants for the great conversation.
We are now exploring what the next steps are. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.
The Food Value Chain Collaboration is also featured as one of our key Remode projects. You can read more about them here.