Overview:

REACTS was a 3 years (2014-2017) project funded by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) designed to support IFAD Funded Projects across EAC region to align their interventions, re-tool/skill project teams and service providers, and work with relevant trade facilitating agencies (non-traditional partners) in enabling business enterprises of at least 10,000 smallholder farmers that they work with, to respond effectively to regional food markets. This was to be achieved through supporting projects to (1) attain a robust understanding of opportunities in the regional markets and (2) use such understanding to improve small-scale producers’ and traders’ competitiveness in the national and regional market.

Project goal:

The project goal was to see “enhanced incomes and accelerated wealth creation for smallholder (women, men and youth) producers of food commodities, targeted by programs supported by IFAD and others in the EAC Region”.

The project purpose was to enable agricultural development projects in the EAC Region to align, build core skills, and work with relevant partners in enabling business enterprises of smallholder producers of food commodities/products to respond effectively to regional markets for food products.

What has been achieved:

1. 13,953MT of produce valued at US$ 4,287,968 traded through structured trade arrangements or business linkages. Of the total volumes traded, 2,803MT of produce, valued at US$828,607 was traded across borders.
2. At least5 projects are brokering establishment of new or enhanced business linkages.
3. Close to Nine (9) business consortia/ linkages (1 regional and 8 national) have been established integrating 33,982 SHFs (of which 9,578 SHFs are women).
4. All the5 collaborating IFAD funded projects (IFPs) are carrying out on-ward capacity building for their beneficiaries to respond to regional market opportunities. The trainers from IFPs (trained by REACTS), in turn trained 20,553 SHFs (of which over 6,000 SHFs are women).
5. 5 Projects have re-oriented their interventions by adopting REACTS innovations such as consortia approach, farmer business school, involved in cross learning events and embraced GIS technology.
6. 6 market information packages produced and shared with IFPs to increase their understanding of regional market opportunities.
7. US$ 430,751 was leveraged from; Public sector (IFAD funded projects and Kilimo Trust) and private sector(agribusinesses).
8. Established a web-based knowledge management portal for sharing experiences on business linkages- http://reacts.kilimotrust.org/. Between February 2017 to January 2018, a total of 12,413 visits and 74,151 hits were registered.

Contact Person:

Patrick Muganga - pmuganga@kilimotrust.org