Talk to 100 foundations and government offices about their solution to hunger and poverty in Africa, and you’ll find hundreds of programs that send people out to the villages to train the farmers. These programs are pushing on a rope.
Africa Eats pulls on the rope. Specifically, we invest in supply chain companies that buy from smallholder farmers. When you buy from the farmers, they then have an incentive to grow more food, they have an incentive to grow food of higher quality, and they have more income to spend on better inputs, better systems, and more equipment.
This isn’t rocket science. This the same methods that ended subsistence farming, extreme poverty, and widespread hunger in the United States and Europe back in the 19th Century.
This doesn’t mean farmers don’t need more training. All of the Africa Eats investees send experts to the farms to train their farmers. The difference between their work and the work of the NGOs and governments is in the outcomes, not the lessons. Our companies send trainers because it lowers their costs to have each farmer increase productivity rather than having to recruit, sign up, and deal with a new farmer.
The bizi training reaches tens of thousands of farmers each year, hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in total.
