AgroBIG contributes to development that enables agriculture to provide decent sustainable livelihood to people in rural Amhara regional state.
The Programme aims at adding value at various levels of selected agricultural value chains to increase incomes and create jobs for farming households and other actors, with an emphasis on women and youth.
AgroBIG has two interlinked output areas:
- Output I: Value chain actors’ access to finance and financial services is improved and sustainability of their enterprises and business initiatives is strengthened.
- Output II: Capacities of value chain actors are strengthened to improve their capability to seize market opportunities in a profitable and sustainable way.
The Programme also addresses three cross-cutting objectives: environmental sustainability, gender equality and reduction of inequalities through inclusion of vulnerable groups.
Output I: Enhancing access to finance
AgroBIG offers financial services to assist producers, buyers and processors develop their businesses.
The purpose of the loans is to enable expanding and establishing business activities in order to strengthen the financial solidity and solvency of cooperatives as well as sustainability of enterprises of women and youth, and groups of women and youth.
Output II: Support to Capacity Building
AgroBIG supports learning, innovation and new approaches in the selected commodity value chains through training, multi-stakeholder market forums and exhibitions, and through financing studies, assessments or action research that benefit a large number of value chain actors.
The support is targeted at farmers, cooperatives, cooperative union leaders and members, traders, suppliers, buyers and processors along agricultural value chains. Woreda and institutional staff coordinating AgroBIG, researchers and TVET experts perform most of the training.
Essential parts of the capacity building component include:
- Delivery of season-long advisory programmes modelled on the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach, where new crop varieties and environmentally-friendly agricultural production practices are tested on-farm, and results compared to those yielded by more traditional methods.
- Training on sustainable and climate smart farming practices, and emphasizing the responsible and safe use of agrochemicals.
- Facilitation of market linkages, enabling the targeted actors identify the specific market demands and respective supply potential, and to get acquainted with each other and thereby build mutual trust.
- Addressing new business concepts and ways of linking markets with suppliers, e.g. contract farming.