Year: June 2014 – December 2017
Country/Area: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda
Client: International Fund on Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Description:
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
- attain a robust understanding of opportunities in the regional markets and
- use such understanding to improve small-scale producers’ and traders’ competitiveness in the national and regional market.
Project Achievements:
- 13,953 MT of produce valued at US$ 4,287,968 traded through structured trade arrangements or business linkages. Of the total volumes traded, 2,803 MT of produce, valued at US$828,607 was traded across borders.
- At least 5 projects are brokering establishment of new or enhanced business linkages.
- 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).
- All the 5 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 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.
- Established a web-based knowledge management portal for sharing experiences on business linkages. Between February 2017 to January 2018, a total of 12,413 visits and 74,151 hits were registered.
- 6 market characterization reports for potato, beans, maize, rice, animal feeds, green grams and sunflower end markets in EAC produced.