Founded by Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, Smallholders Farmers Rural Radio intends:
To reach rural poor farmers living in rural Nigeria with sustainable agricultural, environmental management skills and daily market information derived from internet sources and established networks in the local Igbo Language. Generate feedback from them with advancement through interactive radio mobile devices. Boosting their agricultural productivity and income.Watch Nnaemeka provide an overview of his organization here:
Founded by Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, Smallholders Farmers Rural Radio intends:
To reach rural poor farmers living in rural Nigeria with sustainable agricultural, environmental management skills and daily market information derived from internet sources and established networks in the local Igbo Language. Generate feedback from them with advancement through interactive radio mobile devices. Boosting their agricultural productivity and income.Watch Nnaemeka provide an overview of his organization here:
InvestingInAfrica reports on the proposed Ethiopian Commodities Exchange, a project headed by Eleni Gabre-Medhin, a TED Global speaker:
The market is an attempt to bring order and transparency to the agricultural sector, thus making it more efficient. Studies estimate that only a third of the grain produced by Ethiopian farmers makes it to market...The ECEX will electronically connect 10 different warehouses throughout the country, establish 20 remote trading sites, and 200 electronic information boards in various rural areas. It is hoped that these initiatives will level the playing field between producer and purchaser. Smallholders will know what their produce is actually worth on the market, thus preventing them from being taken advantage of. It should also allow them to make more efficient cropping decisions.
Innovation Africa reports:
Timely access to information and advice about how to manage plant health problems can make the difference between success and failure. Since 2003, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have introduced community-based plant health clinics as a way of providing this advice to small-scale farmers.Continuing:
Plant clinics have spread rapidly because they offer a cheap and practical alternative to more conventional approaches that can help only limited numbers of farmers. They operate in easily accessible public places and are widely used to identify the causes of plant health problems and to find solutions.
Community-based plant clinics have the potential to help farmers and contribute to making agriculture a successful business, especially in resource-poor countries where advisory services are often scarce, underfunded and beyond the reach of millions of smallholders. Plant clinics provide an opportunity to coordinate the efforts of extension, research, government regulation and input supply, to reach more people and to use existing resources more efficiently.More here
G. Pascal Zachary writes in Wilson Quaterly:
After decades of mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation, African farmers—still overwhelmingly smallholders working family-tilled plots of land—are awakening from a long slumber. Because farmers are the majority (about 60 percent) of all sub-Saharan Africans, farming holds the key to reducing poverty and helping to spread prosperity. Over the longer term, prosperous African farmers could become the backbone of a social and political transformation. They are the sort of canny and independent tillers of the land Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the foundation for American democracy. In a region where elites often seem more committed to enjoying the trappings of success abroad than creating success at home, farmers have a real stake in improving their turf. Life will still be hard for them, but in the years ahead they can be expected to demand better government policies and more effective services. As their incomes and aspirations rise, they could someday even form their own political parties, in much the way that farmers in the American Midwest and Western Europe did in the past.