When African agricultural economies limit themselves to raw commodities, they undervalue and underestimate their potential GDP. The revenue base cannot be meaningfully increased when commodities move a shorter route from the farmer to the trader. Value added tax (VAT) is generated through value that is
The failure of donor-funded programmes to transform African agriculture is resulting in more attention turning to the private sector as a potential source of better agricultural outcomes. Several multi-million dollar donor programmes have been launched with pomp and media saturation but the end has often
In a rapidly changing knowledge economy, it no longer makes sense to continue characterizing farmers in developing countries by the size of land on which they produce agricultural commodities. Informal agriculture markets provide various ways through which African farmers can be characterized beyond the smallholder,
Instead of putting all eggs in the export basket, African countries should leverage their broad natural resources base to produce products that cannot only satisfy domestic needs but lure foreign currency
That most African smallholder farmers can produce enough commodities for household consumption and surplus for the market is now beyond question. The majority of committed farmers have mastered the art of producing almost any commodity. What remains outside their control are market dynamics such as
In addition absence of appropriate information at the right time, lack of knowledge retention mechanisms is a big challenge for African farming and rural communities. Unfortunately most resources continue to be directed at the dissemination of ideas from policy makers and development actors. As a
Measuring the authentic impact of development interventions remains a big challenge for many development organizations and governments, mainly in developing countries. Terms like Value for Money (VfM) and Social Return on Investment (SROI) are being mentioned repeatedly as organizations try to ascertain the value of
Like all businesses, agribusinesses should be built around a product/service and a niche market. Ideally, more products and services spawn more business models with some models eventually becoming separate business units. When that happens, it becomes easy to assess the viability of each business model.
Almost all development interventions into Africa are framed into acronyms, eMKambo will not give examples because there are far too many acronyms to mention and you know what we mean. Although they are designed to make programmes easy to remember, most acronyms turn development interventions
[caption id="attachment_15493" align="aligncenter" width="772"] A vegetable farmer at Mbare market[/caption] While a supermarket chain can have a customer care department responsible for answering queries and harvesting feedback from diverse customers, informal agricultural markets in major African cities have different ways of gathering customer experience. They use
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