Our Work
We design, implement, and manage short- and long-term development projects in sub-Saharan Africa. An important aspect of our work is to assess the impact of our interventions, identifying exit strategies that ensure sustainability of interventions initiated during project implementation.
Areas of Expertise
Our areas of expertise and technical focus include private sector led agribusiness development, regional agricultural trade; climate smart agriculture; climate finance and agricultural research & analysis.
Market Systems Development (MSD):
Our philosophy is that “permanent market actors” within the private and public sectors determine the sustainability of project interventions after the funding ends. In this vein, using an MSD lens ensures that we work with relevant private and public sector actors to facilitate systemic change during the funding period of projects, to ensure that these activities continue after the projects end.
Agribusiness Development:
Key to improving the livelihoods of farmers is increasing not only production, but more importantly, productivity. Our work starts on farm, through post-harvest and marketing. Our interventions are “demand led” ensuring that we support activities that align with prevailing market dynamics.
Climate Change:
Sub-Saharan African countries face growing challenges to optimal agricultural production from climate change related fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, drought incidence and extreme weather events. In the absence of proactive intervention, crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa are set to decline. In this context, a wide range of conservation agriculture, climate smart agriculture and climate finance programmes are being implemented in the region and we support the design and implementation of such initiatives.
Agricultural trade:
Africa faces recurrent challenges and low volumes of regional trade. An approach to regional trade facilitation based on improving competitiveness and working with the private sector aligns well with our MSD lens and is effective at unblocking bottlenecks to increased regional agricultural trade. Interventions focused on policy harmonization, trade facilitation and integration require private-public partnerships if they are to be successful and sustainable and we aim to achieve such partnerships in our work.
Research & Analysis:
Our work is rooted in detailed research and understating of agricultural value chains. Using the market systems development lens, we assist our development partners to better understand their sectors of operation through rigorous research and analysis.