ENTERPRISE AND AGRIBUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Agriculture sustains 40-60% of livelihoods in Africa and 60-70% of the population in Africa reside in rural areas practicing subsistence agriculture. With agriculture employing more than 65 per cent of Africa’s labour force, development of sustainable agriculture enterprises becomes imperative in; creation of employment for the continent’s ballooning youthful population, meeting the increasing food requirements and overall poverty reduction. LEAD provides catalytic leverage for commercialisation of micro and medium-sized agricultural enterprises. LEAD assists agro entrepreneurs in refining their business ideas, through direct and indirect help in feasibility studies, markets analysis, financial and economic analysis. Support is also given to enterprises in ensuring that comprehensive business planning is undertaken and implementation of the same done. LEAD has embraced the value chain approach in assisting smallholder farmers participate in high value formal markets. Our choice of value chains is anchored on sustainability, growth potential, inclusivity and economic reward.
Over the years LEAD has continued guided by underlying philosophy that ‘for businesses to make Money, they should be Managed for the Market’ consequently intervention efforts have targeted these Ms. LEAD provides tailor-made capacity development to agribusiness small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in areas of; business systems development, corporate governance, business planning, marketing planning and financial management and reporting.
LEAD continues to play a pivotal role in enhancing access to finance by small scale farmers and other micro organisations. Immense work is also done in building capacity of micro associations in managing revolving loan funds (RLF) and other internal saving high loan recovery rates. Playing an ‘honest broker’ role, LEAD has been successful in bringing delicate issues of value chain governance to the fore in a bid to ensure fair relationships between small scale farmers and private sector actors. Provision of market information has been one of LEAD’s arch roles in market linkages serving both producer groups and buyers.
LEAD makes extensive use of producer groups employing participatory approaches in planning, implementation and monitoring of enterprises. These efforts have resulted in coherent and adaptive groups that achieve their own development results while maintaining healthy and profitable relations with other market players and stakeholders.