Improving market access for smallholder farmers with SaapCRM
More than 70% percent of the population in Kenya and Africa at large depend on agriculture for their livelihood. They consist of small scale subsistence farmers who lack real time data to markets due to the highly decentralized agricultural markets that are controlled by a network of middlemen. The middlemen buy their produce at very low prices hence discouraging the farmers from scaling their farming or employing technology to plant better crop.
Quite a number of organisations have tried to solve this problem by initiating various projects like; sending farmers weather information, coming up with applications that try to link farmers to the market directly, subsidising seeds and fertilizer but something still seems a miss. This projects end up dying without clear data to their demise.
One argument for their demise has been lack of clear tracking tool to understand the economic and social data on the transactions between the farmers, consumers/market and other follower farmers who are connected to the whole cycle.
To fix this this, organisations on top of initiating projects need to deploy a tracking and monitoring tool like SaapCRM to collect the diverse data from the farmers and their usage of the seeds and weather information, how they interact with the market given direct market access platforms, and how third parties interact with them. This can enable project managers connect the dots and make necessary changes in real time. Subsequently enabling this projects to empower farmers to have more bargaining power to have better prices for their produce- an incentive to scaling their farming
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