Unlocking post-harvest value for Africa’s smallholder farmers

Problems with the food distribution system in Uganda threaten the food security of rural smallholder farmers, urban consumers and vulnerable communities. The food distribution structure and channels in Uganda are complex and inefficient so the farmers cannot grow. A lot of food rots and gets thrown away in the distribution process and the cost is borne by end consumers and producers.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), between 30~50% of crops harvested in Uganda are discarded in the distribution process each year. This raises the cost of food production, and the burden is passed on to the smallholder farmers. As a result, they have to sell crops at lower prices, which leads to lower incomes for smallholder farmers and food shortages for feeding their families. Urban consumers also find it difficult to obtain fresh and safe food. This is due to the massive food distribution delays. The cost of wasted food is passed on to end consumers and they pay high price points (often 200% on average) for food that’s hardly fresh from the retailers. Ironically, both producers and consumers are short of food. This issue can be seen in Uganda because there lacks a proper market infrastructure to support the urban population. For example, the cost of a banana in Kampala which has come from Rukungiri or Bushenyi (a distance of 300 Km from the CBD) is the same as the price of a banana in London, which has come from Guatemala. 

The agricultural supply chain, in Uganda and many African countries, is disconnected and disintegrated from farm to table. The mostly smallholder farmers suffer a significant gap in connectedness and infrastructure and as a result, lose over 1.3 billion tons of produce a year to post-harvest spoilage. Add climate change to this scenario and the problems multiply because food spoilage process is often quickly expedited. This process forces farmers to sell what they can – and at huge discounts- or risk their produce rotting, keeping them trapped in a poverty cycle.

While many organizations are targeting on-farm productivity, few are addressing the post-harvest challenges that keep farmers’ income down. According to FAO, the 30-50% (or 120-170 kg/year per capita) of food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa lost between production and consumption, is due to lack of storage facilities and low access to liquidity. Those challenges also force smallholders to sell immediately after harvest when market prices are lowest, even as intermediaries can resell their produce at huge margins later. 

Besides, according to UNHCR, Uganda is a ground for refugees from East Africa and the neighboring regions. However, food shortage becomes serious for refugee settlements because 160,000 refugees, who flee from the civil wars, come to Uganda every year. Humanitarian agencies spend extensive resources on imported food aid for refugees, but 40% does not reach the intended beneficiaries. This is due to an inefficient and uneven food distribution system of the ground teams.

To protect food security in Uganda, Nampya Farmers Market operates a mobile-enabled food banking, distribution and logistics platform that connects rural smallholder farmers with urban food retailers to help them become economically self-sufficient and provide fresh food to the urban dwellers. Farmers use their simple, basic and feature phones to advertise their ready-to-harvest crops on the platform and the food retailers can conveniently order them from the platform via mobile app or a USSD short code. Leaving behind the surplus harvest banked in the solar-powered micro-warehouses within the vicinity of farmers, Nampya then delivers the paid crops directly to the food stores, hotels and restaurants through its distribution network.

Smallholder farmers are the back bone of food production across Africa, providing up to 80% of the continent’s food supply. Yet these farmers struggle to fully capitalize on their yields and labor. With over 120kg of food lost per capita annually, lack of storage and transparent market linkages squander immense nutritional and economic potential.

Nampya Farmers Market is building a post-harvest chain platform that allows rural farmers to easily store, manage and monetize their produce. The platform comprises a mobile-enabled trading platform and farm gate solar-powered micro-ware houses placed at close proximity to the farm clusters/communities making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest. 

The solar storage allows farmers to safely store more of their harvest while our integrated mobile-enabled trading platform cuts out the exploitative middlemen, giving farmers a direct agency into selling to fair and national markets like food retailers.  

Besides successfully connecting rural tenant farmers with urban food retailers, Nampya Farmers Market also operates a food donation service connecting relief donors and vulnerable groups. Donors can easily donate food to vulnerable groups via Nampya platform. They can make the order, and then Nampya delivers the relief food to the donor, donor-agent or directly to the beneficiaries. In this way, it becomes sustainably cheaper for donors to source food relief from the region. 

Nampya Farmers Market primarily aims to serve rural smallholder farmers and the greengrocers.  However, we also serve hotels, restaurants, schools, hospitals and relief donors 

Our Value Proposition –

For farmers

Across the continent, farmers face a myriad of challenges from low access to capital, to poor market linkages, to weak infrastructure and logistics. Aggregation and efficiencies are also difficult to achieve since most farms are small: in Uganda, 38 million smallholder farmers till fewer than 2 hectares. Furthermore, farmers are facing dramatic climate change impacts and environmental conditions so yields are declining even as land being farmed increases.  

While many organizations are targeting on-farm productivity, few are addressing the post-harvest challenges that keep farmers’ income down. The 30-50% (120-170 kg/year per capita) of food produced and lost between production and consumption is due to lack of storage facilities and low access to liquidity. Those challenges also force smallholders to sell immediately after harvest when market prices are lowest, even as intermediaries can resell their produce at huge margins later. 

The warehouses, making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest, have made farmers to be price markers rather than price takers. They can decide when to sell, what to sell and at what price to sell. The farmers can also use the banked produce as collateral to secure credit from financiers.  Using our integrated USSD and tech-enabled trading platform eliminating middlemen, farmers are able to efficiently and transparently store and trade their produce. By solar cooling, safely storing, and selling at optimal prices, farmers using Nampya’s micro-warehouses have increased their incomes by up to 90% while avoiding storage losses.

For retailers

We provide traceable supplies that meet their specific quality specifications, offering them the convenience of doorstep delivery of better-quality and better-priced stock, helping them to save hours of sourcing time while making the logistics process efficient for them.  Besides that, they are assured of a reliable supply of high-quality fresh produce at lower than market rates on a constant basis. Thus, taking all this aggregated demand from food retailers and making supplies based on their need, Nampya Farmers Market can afford to replace all the informal markets.

For relief food donors and vulnerable communities

We provide an honest and exciting bridge between them. Local private and relief donors can sustainably and cheaply source relief food from Ugandan farmers. We can make food relief donation and delivery easy, transparent and safer during crises, and allows funders to reach thousands of vulnerable families in a record time.

At Nampya Farmers Market, we're on a mission of building a fair and profitable food system that's needed for everyone's future:

We're a team that deeply cares about bettering the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, attracting the youth for productive farm employment, reducing food wastage and encouraging healthy eating.  We’re a team that believes that all goods in our markets should be cheaper and easy for retailers to get and with better industry standards. Drawing on our experience in the logistics and supply chain space, we believe Nampya has developed a unique solution to address the inherent inefficiencies in the delivery of fresh produce in East Africa with a significant positive impact for both producers and consumers
Living on the continent where industrialization still needs time and the right policy environment to grow, we live with a firm belief that agriculture can be the source of growth that Africa needs. 
And we believe that every progress made in Africa will start from rural areas and only by meeting the needs of farmers can rural modernization be realized. Thus, Uganda's 30+ million farmers are not only a great potential but also a great responsibility of our enterprise. 
At the heart of our vision is the combination of technology and human efforts to comprehensively solve problems facing Sub-Saharan agriculture and smallholder-sourced produce, poor earnings for farmers, lack of steady market, difficulties meeting market driven standards and the inefficient logistics along the agricultural supply chain.

We align on our founders' ambitious vision in spreading solar storage to unlock more value for farmers across Uganda and beyond. The needs are urgent and the market potential is vast. We're backed by commitment to combating agrarian distress and food insecurity to spread solar storage and trading solutions that directly unlock prosperity for Africa’s small-scale food heroes.

From  the early traction across 7 solar micro-warehouses, Nampya Farmers Market has proven its model and is now poised to scale up significantly.

 So far we have successfully brought together 6,800 smallholder farmers from across 4 districts in Uganda, overseen the cultivation of 12,000 acres of land and has delivered 36,012 tons of commodities with 470 food retailers involved, while saving 10,280 tons of food from wastage (post-harvest losses). As a pilot, Nampya Farmers Market has also successfully distributed over 129 tons of relief food to about 4,516 people in cooperation with local politicians, a relief organization, mosques and churches. In total, Nampya caused an amount of $626,400 in terms of farmer additional income thanks to Nampya's farm-to-market disintermediation platform.

With only 22% utilization of Uganda’s 1.3 million metric tons of existing silo infrastructure, huge unmet demand exists for agricultural storage and supply chain solutions. $18 billion of investment is required to realize the country’s full domestic grain, fresh vegetables and fruits production potential.

The market size for climate-smart farmgate storage and trading platforms tailored to smallholders is truly vast in Uganda and continentally. Nampya Farmers Market aims to establish a network of over 190 and 310 micro-warehouses for grains and fresh products respectively nationwide by 2030 to meet this opportunity.

Small and growing businesses (SGBs) like Nampya Farmers' Market are global engines of shared prosperity: they drive growth, promote sustainability and support equity around the world. However, unlike many medium-sized companies, SGBs often lack access to financial and knowledge resources required for further growth.  

Dr. Cardwell (2015) presents that "growers whose scale of operation is too small to be able to produce SAFE FOOD, are too small to farm maize or any aflatoxin sensitive staples". So reversing PHL is essential for them so as to multiply the benefits of subsidized inputs and micro-finance. 

Farmers who reverse PHL can hold chiefs, traders, cultural advisers, Industry and ultimately Sub-Saharan Africa governments accountable so “natural resources can benefit the people in the communities that possess them in an inclusive manner, and then create value addition in sustainably managing natural resources including ensuring protection of ecosystems and minimizing environmental degradation” (Africa’s Adaptation Gap, 2015). 

The World Bank estimates that “Every 1 percent reduction in post-harvest loss (PHL) leads to $40 million in output gains, with farmers as key beneficiaries” (Mendoza, 2016). Most PHL estimates suggest it is appropriate to for example, invest ½ (value of PHL plus the value of missed marketing) in proper storage so the other ½ net benefit continues long after AID support ends. 

Entrepreneurial youth who reverse PHL during harvesting and drying normally have: a rural job of producing food for growers; then business plans that defragment aggregation, storage, processing and marketing services; regional expertise to "share the risk among other actors and allow borrowers to benefit from higher lending on better terms"; and finally the acumen needed to develop policies that manage ecosystem services which bear the cost of production optimally.

Nampya Farmers Market is building a post-harvest chain platform that allows rural farmers to easily store, manage and monetize their produce. As our plug and play platform grows and generates trust, we plan to expand beyond Uganda to larger regions of East Africa and other agricultural regions around the world. If selected into the MIT Solve programme, I will come out with an effective solution to help further cement Nampya Farmers Market as a leader in empowering Africa’s smallholders with bundled climate-smart infrastructure and market linkages.

Aligning on our ambitious mission, we're optimistic the MIT Solve community will energize us in spreading solar storage to unlock more value for farmers across Uganda and beyond. The needs are urgent and the market potential is vast. We cant help to be backed while spreading solar storage and trading solutions that directly unlock prosperity for Africa’s small-scale food heroes.

Nampya Farmers Market takes an innovative big-picture approach by bundling three interconnected solutions - solar warehousing, pricing transparency, and embedded lending options. It’s this combination that can holistically tackle root causes trapping smallholder farmers in cycles of poverty.

Many farmers lack access to any storage infrastructure, forcing distressed sales immediately after harvest when market prices tank. Private facilities are often only accessible to large commercial farms. Nampya Farmers Market’s distributed solar storage units overcome these challenges to minimize post-harvest losses for smallholders specifically.

However, building climate-resilient storage infrastructure alone is not enough. Smallholders also need more visibility and bargaining power in commodities markets. Our integrated USSD and tech-enabled trading platform cuts out the exploitative middlemen, giving farmers more direct agency in selling to fair national markets.

The third and final piece of the puzzle will be access to finance. With storage units preserving harvest quality over days/weeks and months, Nampya Farmers Market plans to link receipts to unlock credit so farmers can invest in inputs to increase yields.

This complete view addressing infrastructure, transparency, and finance holistically makes Nampya Farmers Market’s model so innovative. As pioneers bundling physical and digital tools uniquely tailored for smallholders’ needs, Nampya Farmers Market is cementing an innovative business model linking underserved farmers to formal markets and finance.

On the side of market, according to the UN Environment Programme, 500 million small farms provide up to 80% of food consumed in the developing world. However, they receive a very little share of the value generated by their production. Instead, most if it is captured by intermediaries in the supply chain between them and final consumer. These last years have seen an increasing demand from consumers for fresh and ethical products. Thus, there’s a very huge opportunity for developing transparent and fair distribution models which can put back farmers’ livelihoods at the centre of the equation. Cutting out intermediaries and enabling a more direct access to market for smallholder farmers can directly increase economic security for rural communities to assure food production for local and global markets. This is exactly what Nampya is doing by connecting smallholder farmers to markets they could never attain on their own. In the process, we cut out several middle men and redistribute this value to the consumer and the producer. 

And by providing logistics to link farmers to retailers and relief donors, combined with immediate digital payments to farmers upon pickup or delivery of their produce, ensuring produce meets buyer specifications and providing the buyers with the ability to trace the source of the crops they are purchasing, Nampya Farmers Market provides a reliable route to the food market using the internet as the vehicle instead of a passing truck. This has enabled rural farmers, relief food donors and food retailers to build confidence in the food market, gaining the ability to plan ahead and invest in improved production and more robust trades.

Nampya Farmers Market is poised to drive a massive positive impact on incomes, resilience, and food security across Africa’s predominant but underserved smallholder farmers. 

Across the continent, farmers face a myriad of challenges from low access to capital, to poor market linkages, to weak infrastructure and logistics. Aggregation and efficiencies are also difficult to achieve since most farms are small: in Uganda, 38 million smallholder farmers till fewer than 2 hectares each. Furthermore, farmers are facing dramatic climate change impacts and environmental conditions so yields are declining even as land being farmed increases.  

While many organizations are targeting on-farm productivity, few are addressing the post-harvest challenges that keep farmers’ income down. The 30-50% (or 120-170 kg/year per capita) of food produced and lost in Uganda  between production and consumption is due to lack of storage facilities and low access to liquidity. Those challenges also force smallholders to sell immediately after harvest when market prices are lowest, even as intermediaries can resell their produce at huge margins later. 

Nampya is providing the infrastructure for farmers to store their produce, connect them to markets, improve access to credit and secure better prices. The company is building and leasing solar powered micro-warehouses at close proximity to the farm clusters/communities making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest. Using our integrated USSD and tech-enabled trading platform, farmers are able to efficiently and transparently store and trade their produce. By solar cooling, safely storing, and selling at optimal prices, farmers using Nampya’s micro-warehouses have increased incomes by up to 90% while avoiding storage losses.

To-date, Nampya Farmers Market means that when inputs are to be compared to gross harvest and net yield, it should be easier to determine what ecosystem services have returned to, for example investment in research or extension and support. We're providing a transparent and traceable indicator of net yield to help design, monitor and evaluate incentives for optimal production that decouple economic growth from environmental degradation.

As we rapidly scale up storage units across Central Uganda and beyond, we can exponentially increase impact. Just reaching 1% of Ugandan smallholders would impact 380,000 livelihoods directly. With robust measurement frameworks in place, quantified income improvements and post-harvest loss reduction for each additional farmer will clearly showcase Nampya's value chain approach lifting smallholders out of cycles of poverty.

The way of Nampya Farmers Market is pointing at:

1. Opportunity - Unlocking the potential of farmers to be part of the globalization and commercialization of the food system
2. Mobility - Creating smarter and more productive movement of food
3. Sustainability – Letting the population to live in balance with our planet

With our business model, Nampya wants to create the following positive impacts for Uganda: First of all, Nampya Farmers Market wants to tackle the issue of poverty. While many smallholder farmers are paid less than $1 a day, Nampya’s objective is to increase it to $4 a day for 1 million smallholder farmers by 2040. In addition, the company stands up for gender equality, decent work and economic growth with our business. Furthermore, we want to encourage life on land by giving farmers ownership of their land.

As the food retailers can avail of our door-step delivery of high quality, locally grown and fully traceable stock, Nampya then translates in a collective purchasing power to farmers across the country-allowing them access to stable markets at better rates while minimizing post-harvest losses through the use of efficient logistics and wide spread farm gate micro-warehouses. 

We now aim to establish a network of over 190 grain and 310 fresh micro-warehouses nationwide by 2030, map more priority crop value chains and zones countrywide, broker win-win partnerships with off-takers, input providers, and finance channels, enhance technological capabilities to track Loss and optimize trade, and quantify the impact on farmers to showcase the value chain approach.

We can monitor and measure progress towards our goal and objectives, through field surveys and in-person conversations regarding the following major indicators :

1- Increased income for farmers and retail food vendors as well

2- Reduced food waste

3. Quantity of land farmed

4. Number of farmers engaged 

5- Number of vulnerable populations served. 

6. Increase in yields/harvests

Nampya Farmers Market builds IOT solar-powered micro-warehouses at close proximity to the farm clusters/communities making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest. 

With our USSD and tech-enabled trading platform, farmers are able to efficiently and transparently store and trade their produce. 

The buyers can use USSD or a mobile App to conveniently order from our platform. Facilitated by mobile money solutions for payment of their orders, the platform enables food retailers and relief donors to use a simple interface to place an order for stock a day in advance. Upon purchase, the retailers or relief beneficiaries can reliably receive their order to their doorstep directly from the farm gate within 24 hours at a low cost and with better quality compared to what informal markets can provide.

In the back-end, the platform (marketplace) is able to collect & analyze order data, using predictive algorithms to optimally manage both farmer harvests and orders based on what customers are demanding.

The main problem facing the farmers is futures. That is, farmers do not know the value of their produce prior to selling it. And during peak harvests, farmers tend to rush to sell their crops at huge discounts in fear of their products to rot.  Nampya intends to use solar and mobile technologies to fix this, stabilizing supply and demand to make prices more predictable. Farmers can send SMS messages to alert Nampya of their produce ready for harvest/sale while the staff in the field make bookings on the produce with the retailers. The vendors can order the foods they need from the platform and then Nampya does all the match making and logistics to deliver the food where its needed while safely storing and insuring the farmers' surplus harvest in solar-powered farmgate storage units. In this, Nampya is building an organized farmers’ market with less chances of fluctuating prices.

On the market side of things, food vendors face a problem with liquidity which leads to food inflation. Add other market bottlenecks, the price of food stuff will keep rising. This can be solved by an oversupply, where the vendor will not at any one time lack the necessary foodstuffs to sell to their market. However, the greengrocers do not have enough cash for risk capital and so Nampya solves this by first ensuring a constant supply of the necessary vegetables and secondly offering trade credit to the customers. Our average client orders their goods three times a week. So, we give most of them a 48-hour line of credit until the next delivery. This not only allows them to sell more but also helps them deal with liquidity issues.

Full time staff : 22

Part time : 0

Contractors : 0

Established on 2nd November 2018 with a goal of reducing the fragmentation in the produce market and to help organize and shorten the food supply chain so that livelihoods of smallholder farmers can get back to the center of the food equation, while the urban dwellers can affordably access quality, safe and fresh food, Nampya Farmers Market has existed for now 5 years. I, my co-founder and other senior members have worked full time at Nampya Farmers Market for 4 full years

Nampya Farmers Market is an equal opportunity and merit-based social enterprise that's so much devoted to gender mainstreaming. Through formal procedures of recruitment does Nampya gets staffed. 

For diversity and inclusiveness, Nampya Farmers Market proudly employs what we call "Innovation Tuesday". This is every Tuesday of the week and we convene a general staff meeting to preview the preceding week and to set agenda for the current week. 

In these meetings, everyone  comes with something new that can be implemented for Nampya Farmers Market to remain the enterprise most admired for its people, partnership and performance. This sees all team members take Nampya Farmers Market into their hands to keep it flying with innovations. 

We also maintain communication channels like WhatsApp groups where information, suggestions, advice,etc flows efficiently across the team.

At Nampya Farmers Market we appreciate performance. Employees who demonstrate perseverance and excellence are richly rewarded. Nothing is taken lightly as we encourage our people to “work happily and live seriously”

Recruitment Process

We have a tool to help us when planning to hire new team members. It helps us to develop a job profile and guides us to set up an efficient recruitment process.

At Nampya Farmers Market, it is key to engage the right people to ensure the successful growth of our enterprise. Recruiting new team members who fit into our team and are aligned with our enterprise objectives, can be a daunting and time intensive task. Talented and motivated team members are hard to find, yet they are a key resource. This tool helps us to examine which experience and skills we are looking for, what our enterprise has to offer to its employees and how to set up an efficient recruitment process.

Quality Management

When growing our enterprise, it is not only important to think about our growth objectives but also about reaching these objectives effectively and efficiently. We have a tool applied when setting up or adjusting new processes or operational procedures. A fully functional quality assurance system cannot be put into place overnight - it needs to be given time and due consideration. This tool thus is revisited regularly.

Quality job creation

We have a tool that serves us in assessing the current quality of employment in Nampya Farmers Market. A quality job is often the key to social and economic advancement. It ensures the wellbeing and satisfaction of employees. The tool is applied when our organization is in the process of transformational change - in times when we restructure roles and responsibilities, or when we are planning to hire new staff.

Quality employment (or decent jobs) can be defined very broadly as a core company value that ensures the wellbeing of employees. Decent jobs lead to high productivity rates, better performance and higher employee retention. This tool guides us to define how our enterprise can create quality jobs.

Nampya Farmers Market builds and leases solar powered micro-warehouses at close proximity to the farm clusters/communities making it cheap and easily accessible to smallholder farmers to store and insure their harvest.

From the warehouses, Nampya provides movement of agricultural produce to the doorstep of clients at a mark-up on every delivery made. Nampya simultaneously onboards farmers and retailers to facilitate trade through a USSD and tech-enabled trading platform. Taking all this aggregated demand from retailers and making supplies based on their needs, Nampya Farmers Market can successfully replace the informal wholesale food markets. We achieve this through our mobile-enabled food supply platform that allows food vendors to meet and connect with farmers directly.

Nampya Farmers Market employs a traditional distribution strategy where trucks and road transport are used to establish daily routes to customers, delivering directly to their shops.

We will continue to leverage this channel to score a significant success employing a mix of conventional marketing strategies including driving product uptake by giving products on 48-hour credit lines to major/key clients who are scored using our platform algorithm linked to order volume and weekly turnover.

 For expansion, we will still focus on direct distribution leveraging our platform and country sales staff using penetration, frequency and weighted sales growth strategies.

Over the last year, the team at Nampya Farmers Market has taken a closer look on the values and actions of Nampya Farmers Market. Our business model has been taken under investigation and some pain points have been identified. Below is the amplified strategic plan to grow Nampya Farmers Market to get financially stable:

• Market Development

Nampya Farmers Market looks toward increasing the number of retailers. We are in a race to get to as many as 4000 retailers with the full goods basket by 2030. We also wish to keep our current retailers happy. To keep up with the growing demand, we’re looking to reduce time taken for stock to reach customers by improving on the efficiency of our delivery and logistics management so that we can deliver on time and with less waste as we look to onboard 6 new sales and 12 supply routes. 

We also need to install more farmgate micro-warehouses. This increased storage (cold warehouse) will allow us to diversify product lines and move more produce from more smallholders farther afield as we make timely deliveries of high-quality, locally grown and fully traceable stock available to a growing number of independent green grocers, hotels, restaurants, schools and hospitals. The logistics desired is cold in nature and will help us to reduce waste during transit from the farm gate to the market. 

• Improve on our efficiency in logistics and delivery management

As the logistics form the basis of Nampya Farmers Market, it is crucial to find a way how to improve the supply chain. After evaluating the relevance, feasibility and complexity of diverse ideas, the focus is narrowed down to drivers. The lack of sufficient numbers of drivers is challenging for us. On the other hand, the currently hired trucks’ bad condition depicts an obstacle. These are partly responsible for the late deliveries as well as food deterioration in quality during transit. In order to solve these two problems, an application is needed to ease the transportation process from order to delivery.

And as we look to employ the use of more cold storage to help store perishables for longer periods of time, the logistics application is overwhelmingly seen as an improvement of our business model. The drivers will no longer complain of receiving late or untimely driving tasks from us. Both Nampya and the drivers will be able to plan ahead. Moreover, the consequence would then be the implementation of longer routes. More drivers mean more capacities, and also finding drivers in further distances. As Nampya plans to extend its routes in Uganda, alongside aspirations to scale to Tanzania and Rwanda in the near future, the app shall be beneficial in realizing this idea.