In Nigeria, about 51.3million tons of food goes to waste every year worth $29m, meanwhile there are about 12.9million hungry people across the country according to FAO 2016 statistics while we import foods worth N1.9trn/annum at the detriment of national job security. Reference: http://www.fao.org/nigeria/fao-in-nigeria/nigeria-at-a-glance/en/.
At the moment, Africa is stuck right at the bottom of global value chains. We only produce and export commodities that have very little value but depend so much on finished or value-added products for our consumption. This is why Africa is always seriously affected whenever there is a price fall in the commodity market. For instance, when the prices of cocoa beans fell, Ghana and Ivory Coast lost over $1 billion each just in a swoop. But what if they were processing these cocoa beans into chocolate and its derivatives? Obviously, they wouldn’t be so affected by the commodity price crash. Whereas the price of coffee beans keeps plummeting, the price of coffee drinks at Starbucks keeps increasing. However, this is obviously not any good news for Africa. We can’t keep remaining at the bottom of global value chains. We must move right to the top. To do that, we will need to build cottage industries.
My initiative adopted a radical approach to solving these deficiencies by;
1. Training, grooming of cottage processors and also providing inclusive model to support smallholder farmers and the cottage processors for effective food production, processing and packaging by linking them with accredited processing facilities where they can process, package and acquire required licensing to enable them reach wider market
Providing digital inclusion through our e-commerce website (http://farmgate.com.ng) to enable farmers and processors access larger market and also investments from consumer’s savings through our e-wallet scheme
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