JM So­cial Icons

    Farm­ers, fast food joints find for­tunes in Soko sham­bani

    Over 1953 pota­toes farm­ers in Narok and 17 ho­tels in Nairobi are a happy lot even though they have never met thanks to a mo­bile plat­form that en­sures timely de­liv­ery of high qual­ity pota­toes to hoteliers in Nairobi while pay­ing the farm­ers more than double the farm gate price.

    The wae­ather in Narok is fa­vour­able for year round plant­ing of pota­toes with an in­di­vidual farmer har­vest­ing up to 45 sacks per acre­age. “I star­ted potato farm­ing in year 2000. The dif­fer­ence is that now we have a ready mar­ket and don’t suf­fer like be­fore. We used to sale a sack of pota­toes for Sh1500 but now we sell Sh4700 dir­ectly to the buyer and don’t have to wait for days to re­ceive pay­ment,” said farmer James Radama.

    SOKOSHAM­BANI helps small-scale potato farm­ers ac­cess in­tel­li­gence on mar­ket prices, ac­cess mi­cro-fin­ance in­sti­tu­tions; order qual­ity seeds and other in­puts, ac­cess train­ing ma­ter­i­als and, com­mu­nic­ate dir­ectly with buy­ers from fast food res­taur­ants. SOKOSHAM­BANI’s strength is in its util­iz­a­tion of the use of the mo­bile com­mu­nic­a­tion plat­form in the coun­try. There are 1,953 potato farm­ers from Narok and 17 ho­tels in Nairobi using the mo­bile-based plat­form link­ing the more than 150 kilo­met­ers between them.

    “These two make a great team, build­ing a great fu­ture for me,” said James smil­ing proudly as he held his mo­bile phone in one hand and pota­toes in the other.
    Pota­toes are Kenya’s second staple food after maize and a cru­cial crop in­volving nearly 800,000 farm­ers. The huge dis­crep­ancy between what farm­ers earn and the value of their pro­duce at the mar­ket level is due to the many play­ers in the potato mar­ket­ing chain, chiefly middle­men who earn more than farm­ers.

    To en­able small-scale farm­ers’ ac­cess the high-yield seeds and their re­quis­ite in­puts SOKOSHAM­BANI, with sup­port from USAID-fun­ded Fin­an­cial In­clu­sion for Rural Mi­croen­ter­prises (FIRM) pro­ject, de­ploys the use of mi­cro-fin­ance in­sti­tu­tions and banks to fin­ance farm­ers. The U.S. Global Hun­ger and Food Se­cur­ity Ini­ti­at­ive, known as Feed the Fu­ture, is help­ing to in­cub­ate and scale up in­nov­a­tions to help con­nect farm­ers to mar­kets and to the in­form­a­tion they need to grow more nu­tri­tious food. In part­ner­ship with the Gov­ern­ment of Kenya and private sec­tor coun­ter­parts, FIRM sup­ports the goals of Feed the Fu­ture by design­ing and en­abling the ad­op­tion of sus­tain­able fin­an­cial ser­vices mod­els that pro­mote ag­ri­cul­ture-led eco­nomic growth, im­prove live­li­hoods, and con­trib­ute to over­com­ing food in­sec­ur­ity. “We are grate­ful to USAID for the loan guar­an­tees they are provid­ing. This has en­abled us to part­ner with banks like Faulu who are will­ing to give farm­ers loans; this would not have happened without USAID’s sup­port,” said Stephen Kimiri, the de­veloper of SOKOSHAM­BANI.

    Narok’s potato farm­ers now boast of im­proved live­li­hoods through in­nov­at­ive mar­ket-driven solu­tions. John Bon­ana boasts of hav­ing enough money to pur­chase foods to sup­ple­ment his fam­ily’s nu­tri­tion. Like other farm­ers, John has in­ves­ted his sav­ings in in­come gen­er­at­ing activ­it­ies and in­tends to pur­chase more acre­age to in­crease his potato pro­duc­tion. Narok farm­ers’ suc­cess through ad­opt­ing new in­nov­a­tions is not just a life trans­form­ing ex­per­i­ence for them but a na­tional model for se­cur­ing the coun­try’s food se­cur­ity. And for Kenya, it’s look­ing brighter every year.

    Com­ments (0)

    RSS
      At­tach im­ages by drag­ging & drop­ping or by se­lect­ing them.
      The max­imum file size for up­loads is 10MB. Only gif,jpg,png files are al­lowed.
       
      The max­imum num­ber of 3 al­lowed files to up­load has been reached. If you want to up­load more files you have to de­lete one of the ex­ist­ing up­loaded files first.
      The max­imum num­ber of 3 al­lowed files to up­load has been reached. If you want to up­load more files you have to de­lete one of the ex­ist­ing up­loaded files first.
      Post­ing as

      Com­ments powered by CCom­ment

      Ed­itor's Pick

      All News

      Powered by mod LCA
      Farm­Biz Africa © 2020