What you need to know about agriculture projects?

Agcenture is launching a new segment on topics covering sustainable agriculture projects. As a preeminent consulting firm in the area, we will share our best practices, learning and experiences working in Kenya.

We are an advisory firm offering business development services for business services for development partners funding, executing or partnering urban gardening projects, community farming projects and other initiatives to improve food security in the region.

You will learn about the best practices, case studies and modern methods that transform agriculture value chains, improve food and nutrition security, health, employment, income or gender empowerment programs. In our experiences, a sustainable farming project has one of the following goals or outcomes.

• Increase livestock productivity or crop farm yields.
• Promote farmers access to markets or linkages.
• Build resilience and adaptation to climate change risks
• Transform from subsistence farming to commercial farming practices.

What is sustainability in agriculture projects

You can define sustainable change in farming as a transformation or a paradigm shift on food and agriculture market systems’ regulatory environment and supporting functions to achieve efficient, inclusive and highly specialized beneficial value chains. In other words;

• All the factors that are necessary to achieve beneficial transactions in exchange for agricultural goods and services between smallholder producers, their input suppliers and food traders in the local and regional food markets are efficient.
• These transactions are facilitated affordable and ample supporting functions such as infrastructure, support services and skills and technology.
• The regulatory environment has supportive formal and informal rules and norms that facilitate inclusive participation of both the public and private players across the value chains from producers to consumers.

To change the status quo to the new market state will require sound planning, financing and execution of different plans, projects and programs. It is tracked on continuous and scheduled monitoring evaluation and reporting of results. These three key areas; program management, monitoring and evaluation and financing will be the bulk of this blog segment.

what you need to know about agriculture projects

Which topics will you expect from agriculture projects blog? We are looking forward to empower you on starting and running and closing a farming project through the entire project life cycle. The various areas covered include;

• Women empowerment & gender inclusion.
• Tips on conducting market research, M&E, project appraisals such as data collection and donor funding
• Business advisory and Management Consulting ideas
• Grant and proposal writing
• Value Chain Mapping
• Business Capacity Building

Audience

Are you an international trade and development expert like a program manager or officer, Monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning assistant or project accountant etc in the agri-based development space? You are likely to benefit from this blog. Others are beneficiaries like farmers and investors in agriculture food systems like input suppliers, food processors, cooperatives and food traders.

Some articles to expect are on fundraising, grant management, budgeting. Others will focus on designing Result chains, drafting M&E manuals, tracking and reporting indicators, target results etc.

Project management ones will center on Mobilizing beneficiaries like farmers and traders into formal producer and trader groups, how to drafts interventions, strategies and plans etc.