Central Africa: Farmers Benefit from Capacity Building Skills

By Henry Neondo

“I did not know how to organize and manage my farm. I did not know the amount of resources I spent on the farm including labour and when I sold my produce, I did not know if I was making a profit or a loss,” says farmer Felicien Ndayisenga of Gitega in Burundi, one of the many beneficiaries of a business plan training co-organized by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (TSBF-CIAT) and the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Burundi (ISABU) in Burundi.

Now he says he views farming as a business venture and plans for all activities and resources required. He religiously keeps records of his production expenses including his own labour and that of his family – inputs that are traditionally not regarded as costs by most farmers. He is also now able to better assess what the buyers want, negotiate for fairer prices for his crops, and properly determine his profit margins.

Most small scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, who make up a majority of the population and of the poor, lack proper business and marketing skills. Therefore, they are not able to maximize the benefits of their investments and remain poor despite all their hard work. 

To address this, the Consortium for Improved Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) has been training smallholder farmers to enhance their business and marketing skills to enable them to better manage their farm enterprises and engage with markets to improve their livelihoods.

The training covers a broad spectrum of activities, from basic farm management principles such as farm record keeping and analyzing the profitability of the farm enterprise to identifying good markets and laying out a business plan.

According to one of the lead trainers, Emily Ouma, an agricultural economist with IITA, business skill training is very important because it enables farmers to identify lucrative markets,  plan their resources, and fine tune their production according to the demands of the market.

“With the training, these farmers will be able to determine for themselves if they are making profit or not. If they are not, then they will be able to shift strategies. If they are, then they would be able to plan better to increase their profits even more, for example, through value addition such as sorting, grading, processing, and storing their produce, and selling when supply is low and demand is high,” she says.

Another facilitator, Eliud Birachi, an agribusiness specialist with of TSBF-CIAT, adds that most smallholder farmers neither keep records nor plan their production, harvesting and sales according to market demand. “Usually they first grow the crops then look for markets,” he says, “It should be the other way around.”

“This often leads to a glut in the market and the farmers are forced to sell their produce at markedly lower prices than their production costs. Obviously this results in huge losses for them,” he said.

Organizers of the project follow a training-of-trainers approach. Here, staff of government agencies and NGOs are trained and they pass on the knowledge to the farmers as facilitators. So far the project has trained 107 facilitators from Rwanda, DRC and Burundi who come from a diverse group comprised of farmers’ associations, church groups, Eglise Presbytérienne au Rwanda, and local and international NGOs such as Plateform Diobass, Confederation des Associations des Producteurs Agricoles pour le Développement, Agakura Youth Agricultural Project, World Vision, Concern Worldwide Burundi, and Louvain Development and Vredeseilanden-DRC, among others. These facilitators have, in turn, trained over 400 smallholder farmers in the three countries.

The most recent training was conducted in Bujumbura , Burundi from 23 to 27 May 2011 involving more than 20 partners coming from Burundi , Rwanda , and DRC. They conducted participatory market research to assess farmer-buyer negotiation skills and to evaluate consumer preferences for different agricultural produce. At the end of the training each participants developed business plans for the farmer groups they work with.

The CIALCA project brings together various partners and donors to improve farm level productivity through Integrated Soil Fertility Management and Integrated Pest and Disease Management. Sustainable farm level productivity requires improved commercialization which can be achieved by enhancing farmers’ access to input and profitable output markets. One way to realize this is by building farmers’ entrepreneurial skills.