East Africa - Scoping missions & assessments

Agriterra is a network organization of Dutch agri-employers' organizations and companies. It has a vision that farmers' associations and cooperatives can have a positive influence on development through speeding up the process, and ensuring a more equal distribution of income and an enhancement of democratic decision making and relations. This vision has become almost undisputed, the mechanisms are understood, and the mission derived from it, the strengthening of farmers' organizations, is the only logical one. The approaches (advocacy, entrepreneurship and bankable co-ops) have brought an excellent focus onto the work of Agriterra. This has been achieved over two decades in which the strategy of Agriterra was to obtain funds for farmers' organizations through inclusion in official development cooperation. In this way, Agriterra has been able to fulfil its mission. Agriterra's new strategy, that runs from 2015 - 2018 takes advantage of challenges in the business environment, builds on the strengths of Agriterra's past performance and addresses the weaknesses that emerged from an internal analysis. Agriterra's focus is no longer on capturing funds to grant to farmers' organizations. Instead, it focuses on transfer of knowledge by offering them the hands-on expertise needed to take advantage of the funds available from different sources, and to produce financial strategies that underpin their priorities for action in favour of members' interests. Expertise that is sourced from a vast network of agribusiness and farmers' organisations in the Netherlands and abroad. The adjusted strategy of Agriterra required to take a close view on the quality of the current client portfolio. For this reason screening of all clients took place and as a result it was decided that more than 50% of the clients needed to be phased out, leaving a rather limited group of clients that did meet the conditions for future support. Next to Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Peru, Tanzania and Indonesia Agriterra is also preparing local presence in Zambia, Burundi, Rwanda, DRC, Nepal, Vietnam, China and Bolivia. These countries have been selected as program countries for Agriterra for the coming years. 80% of resources (financial and human) will be targeting farmer organisations and cooperatives in these countries. T The underlying project aims to facilitate scoping missions as well as missions for company or organisation assessment to East Africa in order to build up a client portfolio of producer organisations and cooperatives with sound development potential and that are in demand of the services Agriterra is able to render